Britain Today

Wie leben eigentlich andere so? Es gibt ganz verschiedene Wege, das herauszufinden – und unser Kolumnist findet sie alle unterhaltsam.

Colin Beaven takes a humorous look at Britain and the Brits

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In normal times, it’s one of life’s pleasures to be nosy. And if you’re a plumber, like a friend of ours who’s been working in a rather posh holiday home, you have an unfair advantage. You automatically get to see homes that don’t belong to you. The owners of this holiday home even showed him around their main home when he went there to hand them his bill. Needless to say, it was even posher.

Posher still is the house in London where another friend of ours, an electrician, has been working. He usually has pictures on his phone to record what he’s done. Not this time. “They’re the sort of people who might kill you if you took photos,” he explained.

That does sound extreme, even for London. What if you’re naturally nosy but don’t earn your living from home improvements? Even if you try working for Deliveroo, you get to see little more than the coat hooks in people’s hallways.

The answer might be to visit IKEA. I doubt it supplied much to the homes that our friends have been working in, but it does supply almost everyone else. So, why knock on doors when you can just take a trip to everyone’s favourite Swedish playground?

I say “playground” in case the thought of IKEA makes anyone nervous. Once you’re inside, it is, after all, hard to find your way out. Just when you think you’re nearing the exit, you find yourself back where you started. But that’s not unlike a game of Snakes and Ladders.

Then again, with so much Scandi noir on TV and bestseller lists, you might still feel uneasy. Could an innocent afternoon’s Nordic shopping turn into a scene from the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Think of it as three-dimensional Cluedo. In its original format, which has done so much to help British families on rainy Sunday afternoons since it was invented by a man from Birmingham back in the 1940s, this board game offers the murder suspect a classic choice of locations and weapons: did Professor Plum kill his victim in the study with a candlestick, or in the billiard room with a revolver?

A Scandi noir version based at IKEA might update this to a Billy bookcase in the living room or an artificial cactus in the market area. And the purpose of the game? To identify the murderer before Wallander beats you to it.

A really fun game to play at IKEA would be Snap! In the original card game, which can get very loud, the cards are placed face down in piles. When the two players turn over the same sort of card — two sixes, two queens and so on — they both shout “snap”. The one who shouts it first wins all the cards that have been turned over.

Players could cut out pictures from IKEA catalogues of products they already own. I’m sure there would be cries of “snap” as soon as they began turning over the pictures.

Silly games played in shops aren’t as much fun as being nosy in people’s houses, but they’re probably less dangerous, especially if you’re tempted to use the camera on your phone to take the occasional snap.