Everything in IKEA is terrifying

Today, we woke up to the referendum results. 52% of us said we should leave; 48% said we should stay; so we’re leaving, because that’s exactly how democracy is meant to work. I was one of the 48%, so it’s safe to say this isn’t the very greatest day of my life so far. So I thought I’d go to IKEA, because I’m basically quite shallow and looking at stuff with funny names and buying things I never knew I wanted makes me feel better about the world.

Unfortunately, everything they are selling today is horrific. Some examples:

This heap of dead rabbits:

Bright eyes, burning like fire

This vat of slaughtered piglets:

Somehow rendered worse by the perspex sides

This bin full of rats:

EWWWW

This child-sized cabin-bed (with integral night-time boogeyman):

This headless armless dummy dressed in a blue strait-jacket that wants to sell you an apron:

This surgical experiment combining a frilly blue fish with a human eyeball:

The closer you get, the worse it becomes

This giant-sized photo of a leather vagina:

This man who regrets his robotic hands:

This woman being eaten by her own skirt:

Finally, this psychotic bookcase coming to crush the other bookcase while the lamp and sofa look on helplessly:

But hey, the Swedish word for “biscuit” still appears to be “kaka”! So that’s still fun.

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Conversations with my cats: Door

MY HOUSE, INT, DAY. I AM IN THE LIVING-ROOM, GETTING SOME WORK DONE. OUTSIDE, THE SUN IS SHINING.

Stripeycat: I need you to open the door.

Me: The door’s already open.

Stripeycat: No, the other door. I need you to open the other door.

Me: You want me to open the front door?

Stripeycat: I do.

Me: Even though the back door is already open?

Stripeycat: That’s right.

Me: And you know that the front door and the back door both open onto the garden?

Stripeycat: Yaas.

Me: So you’re going out of the front door. Not the open back door. Or the open downstairs window. But the front door. Which is closed. So you need me to open it.

Stripeycat: Your point being?

Me: No point really. Just checking. There you go.

Stripeycat: ‘kaythanksbye, I’ll bring you back a dead mouse!

Me: No thanks, I really don’t want a –

STRIPEYCAT LEAPS ACROSS GARDEN AND IMMEDIATELY RETURNS TO HOUSE THROUGH OPEN BACK DOOR

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A Terrible Moment Of Self-Indulgence

This is the most poncey, self-indulgent, fuck-your-Noguchi-coffee-table hipster-crap thing I have ever done. AND YET I DO NOT CARE, because it makes me happy, damn it, and it was my birthday yesterday and I felt like I was allowed.

My favourite bit of my birthday was the books I got (Crafting With Cat Hair by Kaori Tsutaya from my husband, and The Wastewater Plant by Dodge Winston from my brother). My second favourite bit of my birthday was installing our new bookshelf / tchotchke-display area, and filling the best, most visible shelf with the following items:

To the left, books representing the writers and artists whose work has influenced me the most, plus a little model of a beach hut from my mum.

To the right, my author copies of my books, plus a seashell and an antique perfume bottle.

And in the centre, my beautiful retro typewriter (which, come to think of it, I still need to pay my friend for). This beautiful retro typewriter closely resembles the typewriter (at the time not beautiful and retro, but simply what there was) that I wrote my first novel on, when I was fifteen. The text on the paper is the first sentence of my first published novel, The Summer We All Ran Away.

No, I didn’t actually write “The Summer We All Ran Away” on a beautiful retro typewriter. I used a laptop like everyone else. Yes, I am aware this makes the whole thing even more pretentious than it was before. And I am not in the least little bit sorry. In fact I am rather proud of myself.

Furthermore, in a few weeks I will compound my ponceyness by adding my author copies of The Beach Hut, and switching up the first sentence on the typewriter. I can’t be 100% sure, but I don’t think I’ll be sorry then either.

What can I say? Sometimes you just have to do this stuff, in the full knowledge that you’re being ridiculous. But then you blog about it in a vaguely self-deprecating manner that you imagine gets you off the hook for doing these things. So that makes it okay. Maybe.

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