Ikea Belfast Customer of the Fortnight

I've moved. Again. This summer I had the joy of moving home to my parents for a month. And they had the absolute delight of me living with them again. It's hard to know who was more thrilled. Me having a freakout at their eating noises (shut up, it's a brain disorder, don't mock the afflicted!), or them because I am so bright and sunshiny in the morning.

After my birthday, Mum and I went to London for the Anniversary Games. It's not the point of this post, so maybe I'll blog about it in, say, October. Then home for a few days before Castlewellan. Straight after Castlewellan was Moving Day. As I hadn't even moved stuff from the hall when I moved home at the end of June, I definitely didn't see the point of moving stuff when I came from Castlewellan. What?! My parents love me, ergo they love having my crap clutter up every square centimetre of the hall because it reminds them of me. I don't see the problem myself.

So Moving Day was more like Moving Fortnight. Well, it's hard work in my car! I'd work out what needed to go next, think it wasn't that much stuff, load the car all the while thinking what I could fill the extra space with and bam, the car was full.

And then came the trips to Ikea. It starts off so inspirational! The Warehouse of Dreams! You dream big dreams of how you're going to organise the space, you measure, you check, you colour match. You go back to the store, you head straight to the Market Hall and warehouse with your trolley. You double back because you forgot something. You head to the check out, you have fun with the little scanner barcode reader. You use your own 40p Frakta blue bag, because you're a pro and you have one, which you brought with you because you're that organised. You load up the car. You relearn not to take the direct route to the car because your trolley cannot jump the curb on the other side.

At home you speed up the next trip by downloading the app. You measure, you check, you decide, you go back to the Warehouse of Illusions. You get annoyed at other customers with their slow dandering aspirational walk getting in your way. You get distracted by other things you 'need'. You forget things that weren't added to app's shopping list because you couldn't quite remember how to spell 'Snarkeldöff' correctly. You can't be bothered to go double back on yourself, because let's face it, you know you're going to be back tomorrow or the day after, getting other things and making returns for things that didn't quite fit/work/match like you'd hoped.

You start to recognise workers and have the awkward do-I-say-hi-because-he-served-me-last-trip moment. You start to get a complex about how much you've been here recently and maybe he thinks you're stalking him. You have to decide whether you put your head down, busy in the Ikeaing moment or give a shrug of 'I should just move here, eh?'. You fall between two stools (or two Frostas, if you will) and end up giving a very determined shrug while power walking with a trolley through the table lamps. You feign interest in a massive floor lamp simply because you can hide behind it to get some distance between you and him.

You get to the right warehouse location using the app, but the stock information tells you it can't update stock numbers because there's no signal in the Warehouse of Disillusionment. You don't care, you're here: they either have it or they don't. You didn't realise there was a rush on Smarchetts since you left the house. You look hopefully in adjacent locations, but damn this Swedish efficiency, of course there are no more Smarchetts. You start to think through your other plans for the week and when you can possibly come back when they get Smarchett back in. You leave, having driven out for a handful of small items that really weren't urgent at all. You try to tell yourself it's good that you have the storage boxes without the storage solution they're designed to be used with.

You get the picture, right? In fact, you probably have it in a Ribba frame too. How can a place with so much bright sunny yellow turn so grey so quickly? I have plans for no new trips to Ikea this week. Except I might return that massive photo frame that's adding so much to living room, leaning up against the wall, wrapped up in its cellophane.

Or I might not. 90 days return policy, see.

Well, you sometimes don't know when you're going to be headed that way.