I have experienced an unexpected revelation: Ikea is good for my mental health. An American psychologist recently described its stores as a “map of relationship nightmares”. The ultimate test is when purchases are put together at home, says Dr Ramani Durvasula, who asks couples in counselling to assemble Ikea furniture and report back to her. There is Liatorp, a particularly labyrinthine wall unit. It’s “the divorcemaker”.
So it wasn’t looking good that a week’s holiday at home featured an epic to-do list of objects requiring self-assembly. A child’s swing and Ikea garden chairs and table came together nicely, but then a bookcase from an online retailer proved tricky, and I missed my deadline bolting together a Homebase barbecue, which meant the children had to be fed from the oven. Meltdown, complete with an Allen key hurled into oblivion, came on Friday, when a box from John Lewis containing a seesaw claiming to be “easy to assemble” actually consisted of a brain-exploding puzzle of 80 bars, bolts, screws and washers of infinitesimally different sizes. My therapeutic solution, like Durvasula’s, was an innovative one. No communing with nature or renouncing hollow consumerism: no, I calmed down by assembling an Ikea chest of drawers.
This holiday taught me that flatpacks produced by anyone other than Ikea tend to be awkward and unintuitive. In contrast, Ikea’s much-maligned products are the godlike geniuses of the self-assembly universe: simple, logical and virtually impossible to fit together the wrong way round. After serene progress bringing the Tarva into being, I felt once again fully qualified for modern life, my family bonds as happily tight as a cam lock nut and screw system. Perhaps I should become a Tasker, one of those freelance chore-doers who specialise in flatpack self-assembly.
Fly like an eagle
I rose at 4am twice this spring and quietly canoed all day on the Norfolk Broads in a futile attempt to see otters. You can guess what happened when I hired a noisy motorboat at 4pm on Sunday to take our children on to the river for a couple of hours. One hundred yards of chugging down a busy urban waterway and “otter!” shouted our friend Laura, and we passed within two metres of a happy-looking beast. It doesn’t bode well for an exciting work trip to Mull this week to look for white-tailed eagles. I’ve never seen one before and two recent tweets have caught my eye: someone mistook one of the 7ft-wingspan birds for a plane, they are so enormous. Someone else photographed one circling over Blakeney Point not far from my home in Norfolk. Perhaps I could’ve hitched a lift on its back – hobbit-like – to Mull. The in-flight Wi-Fi would be cheaper than that offered by the reprivatised Virgin East Coast.
Politicians in the frame
The most visible feature of the election in rural Norfolk are the enormous Ukip signs in local squires’ fields – and the fate that has befallen them. The poster form of Michael Baker, Ukip’s candidate for North Norfolk, has been pushed over, cut out and adorned with Hitler moustaches. The party now plans to deploy “spy cameras” to protect its ads from vandalism. I was four in 1979 (long before the landed gentry created The People’s Army) and remember huge Conservative posters where the Ukip ones now stand. Back then, having misunderstood my mum’s explanation of that election, I became terrified the looming poll meant I would have to swap parents. With this in mind, I’ve not dared talk politics to my toddlers: I don’t want them fretting they will have a man with a Hitler moustache for a dad come 8 May.
