Tales From The Retail Hinterland

Four weeks ago I was an IKEA virgin and now I’m a flatpack slut. There are only a dozen blue-and-yellow warehouses in the country one's a mile from where I live, on the site of Bristol Rovers old football ground.

Poor Rovers have been pitch-less for years now, playing wherever other teams will let them even if that team plays rugby rather than football and fans have to travel thirty miles to watch. I’d be more upset about this if I didn’t prefer shopping to football. I’ve seen Rovers play once and that was an away match. (The only tickets available on the gate were in the red end and we were wearing blue. You’ve never heard three people cheer so quietly.) By contrast, Saturday was my fourth visit to IKEA in as many weeks.

They didn’t have everything I wanted so I had a small strop and my girlfriend chastised me for being ridiculous. And rightly so. I think I had cabin fever. I know some shortcuts now but there’s one prescribed route through the gargantuan showroom - with arrows on the floor, no less. You’d better plan ahead if you want to get out to smoke or pee. The trade-off for cheap furniture is that you have to do more work than you’re accustomed to, like picking your own stuff in the warehouse. When they go out of stock you wish you were in a normal shop where someone would have told you that half an hour ago. But you can’t beat those prices!

Not wanting my home to look completely like a page from the IKEA catalogue, I’ve thrown in a few items from other catalogue stores. I asked about vases in NEXT and the manager gave his answers to Alice (for that is she). You know... because it's a girly subject. I was most surprised when she didn’t deck him there and then. Once, watching a World Cup match in an Oxford pub, an American tourist asked her if women had any interest in football. She cut him down to size rather effectively!

I had another overwhelmingly positive experience with amazon.co.uk. Who knew that all you had to do to achieve customer satisfaction in Britain was remove the human beings from the process? Want this delivered guaranteed by midday tomorrow? Order in the next 38 minutes and choose Express delivery. By the time I got to the checkout I decided it wasn’t worth the extra expense and chose regular post instead. It arrived the following morning anyway.

I love shopping. Alice says I'm due to leave the closet any day now.