My gaze travels leisurely over the light, airy bedroom. Crisp cotton linens in country white and blue adorn a vast wooden bed, and an old-fashioned writing bureau waits invitingly next to the french doors. I peek through the curtains and see a bright, enticing porch nestled in greenery.
I am reading the IKEA catalogue.*
Every night before I go to sleep, I reach furtively under my bedside table and take out this Jezebel, this evil temptress of catalogues. How it taunts me with its minimalist living and ample storage solutions!
I suspect I am not the only person in Perth who does this.
IKEA are selling a dream, whose attraction is directly proportionate to its unattainability.
This makes it perfect for bedtime reading. Like Sports Illustrated** or FHM for women.
With rents and interest rates rising skyward, the dream of owning property and living in a large private space slips further out of our grasps.
One day we will end up cohabiting in large bio-domes with communal dining halls, eating proto-stew cultured in a lab, and I will have to live out my nightmare of sharing a bathroom. It will be like I, Robot, the book, and not I, Robot, the movie (which bears as much resemblance to the book as I do to Tyra Banks). This will be fantastic for the planet, but pretty degrading to morale, I would imagine.
Oh yes, IKEA provides solutions for small spaces too, but I look upon those loft beds and hanging shelves with a skeptical eye. The women in those photographs seem to have only two shirts and three pairs of shoes, which leads me to conclude that their happy smiles are a sham.
This suspicion deepens further whenever I come upon pictures of the robot-like children that are scattered throughout the pages, like garnish on a stew.
Children are not smiling, happy cherubs with swishy clean hair, quietly playing with colouring books at the kitchen table. They are crying, drooling hobgoblins with perpetual dried snot on their faces. I have a brother who is eight years younger than me, and I remember the snot and drool years well.
I know that the IKEA catalogue is just leading me on. I know that when I arrive at the store (provided I can find parking), the lustrous credenza will turn out to be a flimsy mish-mash of particleboard and veneer.
IKEA furniture should not be viewed in the harsh light of day. It is no Cinderella.
But the catalogue is a work of art. Night after night, it calls to me, a siren with sharp edges and 283 pages. In between brushing my teeth and saying my prayers, I lie in bed, propped up on my elbow, transfixed by its glossy pages and whispered promises.
I forgive you, IKEA. Without dreams, we might as well be robots.
* The title of this post was going to be, "IKEA-not resist", but that would have given the game away too early. Being a literary giant is a lot more difficult than I thought it would be.
** Apparently bikini modelling is a legitimate sport. This year’s Olympics should be quite a treat.