Better forms of Retail Therapy

Have you ever tried to escape from an IKEA store? Say you’re in bedding when you suddenly get a call of nature. And I mean the bodily function type, not a desire to see a crimson sunset or a raging Alpine river. Well don’t do the obvious thing and follow the exit signs. In English exit means leave, depart, escape. In Swedish it clearly means something different. Like “follow me into a maze of intrigue and mystery, a parallel universe with no beginning and no end, a shifted paradigm of consciousness”. Or more likely it means “This way for the three hour tour of our shop and a smorgasbord of delight as we force you to walk past every piece of our shoddy Scandinavian produce while we bombard you with the hits of Boney M and Shalimar.”

For a store that prides itself on its shopping experience, it certainly knows how to piss off its customers. Why else would they erect store maps that happily state “You are here”, while pointing out that the exit is 10 feet away (if you could walk through walls) or two miles away if follow their yellow bricked road.

I would normally avoid places like IKEA like I would avoid the plague, but I was surfing on the exhilaration of having finally found a place to live. Rental apartments in Australia are unfurnished, a throwback I believe to the days of transportation when convicts were given a bare cell and told to make the best of it. My enthusiasm was short lived however, when I realized that I would have to spend the rest of the week doing something that I hate more than work. And that’s shop. Worst than that, I had to shop for furniture. Picking something from the shelf and walking to a counter is painful enough for me. But furniture shopping is on a whole new level of suffering.

To begin with you have to find an “outlet” which are generally found in soulless suburbs in the part of town normally frequented by hoody wearing teenagers and carpet showrooms. Once you get there (which is an epic in itself) you have to join the throngs of happy young couples eager to kit out their first homes and slimy middle aged landlords trying to find some plywood to fill the rat infested tenements they have just bought.

After 20 minutes of testing the springiness of mattresses and the curvature of sofa cushions, I lost the will to shop. After and hour I had lost the will to live. After two hours I lost the will for anybody else to live. Give me a high-powered rifle and I would have climbed upon one of their maple wooded king sized beds and take out as many of the bastards as possible before the flock mattress and eiderdown pillows gave way.

I eventually found the exit. It was cunningly hidden in the door section. Once free, I needed relaxation and luckily every shopping centre in Australia provides this. I’ve said before that Melbourne is the most Asian city I’ve been in (and that’s saying something considering I’ve been in lots of cities that are actually in Asia). Apart from the obvious benefits to the culinary industry that this brings, it also means that a Chinese massage shop can be found in every shrine to consumer capitalism.

I perused the menu on offer and plumped for the shoulder, neck and back option. It seemed the sensible choice until Jiang (the lucky assistant chosen to receive the pleasure of kneading my fatty bits) asked me to take off my trousers. The thought suddenly struck me that in Ireland we seek out qualified physios whenever we have a bad back. We usually do so on the recommendation of a doctor and wait two weeks for an appointment that falls at the most inconvenient point in the working week.

Whereas when we Paddies travel overseas, we are quite happy to drop our trousers behind a flimsy curtain in a suburban shopping centre while a Chinese bloke we’ve just met massages our buttocks. Trust is important at times like this and I can tell you its sorely tested when a masseur searches out the most delicate part of your body and then digs his finger, elbow or knee into your flesh until the pain resembles child-birth. And before the female readers of this blog protest I am inexperienced in this matter, can I point out that I went through it once and I am still haunted by the memory.

But in fairness to Jiang, he found the parts that other fingers have only dreamed of. So I left in a dizzy mood (which I believe has something to do with the release of toxins into the bloodstream) and at one with the world. Shopping seemed so insignificant at that point. So I went and watched some footy. Carlton almost won, which for them is a huge leap forward. It was that sort of day.