That’s evil Swedish genius: not only do they get us to do all the work, but we pay for the privilege too!

THE lampshade was the last thing that had to go into the car, but there literally wasn’t a spare cubic millimetre of space left for it. They say necessity is the mother of invention, so I was glad my actual mother was with us, because when we left the car park of IKEA in Wednesbury, just outside Birmingham, she was wearing the lampshade like a Chinese hat, and did so all the way to the ferry at Holyhead.

We had been on holiday with my sister in Surrey, and brought my parents along for the ride, but the real purpose of the trip, as always, was to go to IKEA.

It was 30 years this week since the home of flatpack, the mesmerising cavern of interior design ideas, opened its first store in the UK, in Warrington, of which more later.

In that time, I can’t tell you how many times a trip across the water involved at least three hours wandering the decorated ‘rooms’ in big box warehouses, and just how much we brought back over the years.

Psychologist

What that also meant, of course, was that I then spent many days, if not weeks, actually assembling the stuff. I suspect the most valuable employee in the entire IKEA operation is a psychologist, because it was quite a feat to trick us all into thinking that the company actually was doing us the favour by graciously allowing us to haul our own flatpacks from shelves in cavernous warehouses, pack our own cars (often there or four times before we got everything to fit), drive the stuff home ourselves, and then, with dowels and glue and fiddly Allen keys that would take the thumb off you if they flipped out of the screw head, assemble everything ourselves.

How many times was I so foolishly ambitious that even when the pesky diagram – oh, how I hate them – said this was a job for two people, I attempted it alone, only to have to call my brother for emergency assistance half way through?

How often did I slot MDF Piece A into MDF Piece C instead of MDF Piece B? And why, no matter how diligently I followed the pictogram instructions, did I so frequently end up with an assembled bookcase, but still one spare screw left over, the destination for which will remain a mystery until I draw my last breath?

The second part of this calculated headwrecking, though, is that they know you end up with an entirely bogus sense of achievement when it’s all over.

Just like a man who never usually cooks but who flame grills a few burgers on a barbecue once a year thinks he’s Jamie Oliver, successfully raising an assembled bookcase validates your machismo. You’ve followed a diagram, but you feel like Thomas Chippendale after he handcarved his first chair.

Cop on to yourself – all you’ve done is an adult jigsaw.

Somehow, I always muddled through. As I write this in my office at home, I’m siting on an IKEA swivel chair at an IKEA desk. To my right are Billy bookcases (all IKEA furniture has a name). In front of me are nine Benno CD towers that each hold 180 music discs or 90 DVDs.

Beside those, there’s an Expedit TV unit, split into squares – five vertical, five horizontal, and with the middle nine missing to accommodate a 42-inch television, the Sky box, and a Blu-ray player. Above my head, there’s a Husinge light fitting with five halogen bulbs, and underneath the desk, there’s a Lack table – everyone has one – that cost six quid, and on which the WiFi printer now sits.

Wardrobes

On top of the storage units are small IKEA boxes filled with photos, and larger ones filled with foreign plug adaptors, phone charging cables, and even old Palm organisers (remember those?) that never will see the light of day again. On the desk, my pen holder, my in/out trays, magazine racks and even the leather desk protector came from there, too.

In my bedroom, there’s a dark-brown Hemnes bed with a Hokkasen mattress (the most comfortable I’ve ever slept on), Hemnes wardrobes, Hemnes lockers, and a Hemnes chest of drawers.

On the lockers are two Alang bedside lamps, and fixed to the headboard are two Kvart spotlights on bendy steel cables that I can angle for maximum brightness when I’m reading a book in bed (or, at least, did before I got a Kindle).

The cabinets in the main bathroom and the en suite are IKEA, as is the freestand- ing linen cupboard in the spare bedroom. I suspect I haven’t lit a tealight in the last 25 years that didn’t also come from there.

In fact, looking at my stash right now, I probably have enough to see out the next ten hurricanes that might come our way.

So I’m a bit of an addict, but then I’m hardly alone. Long before IKEA arrived on these shores – first in Belfast ten years ago, and then in Dublin in 2009 – hundreds of thousands of us used to cross the Irish Sea to bring back flatpacks by the van load.

Indeed, when furnishing a new house in 1996, I used to take a morning ferry from Dún Laoghaire, drive the two hours to Warrington, pick up everything I needed, then make the trip in reverse, arriving home in time for a late dinner.

That wasn’t my first visit, though. In London, in 1991, I went to the Wembley store, and over the years also shopped at the branches in Croydon and Glasgow. On holidays, I’ve been to IKEAs in Tenerife and even Dubai, and a small city centre outlet in Manhattan that since has closed.

Paintwork

When I bought a holiday house in Normandy, we took a van to the IKEA in Paris Nord and kept missing the correct exit, only to find ourselves three times in rapid succession at the Delta footpath check-in at Charles de Gaulle Airport, a recurring mistake that turned the air as blue as IKEA’s exterior paintwork.

Given how much I have bought there – and I haven’t even bored you with all the flowerpots, storage jars, towel rails, loo roll holders, cutlery and kitchen utensils – it’s hardly a surprise that turnover at the company, in this century, has risen from €10.1billion worldwide in 2001 to €35.1billion last year, with Dublin alone accounting for €152.1million of the total.

That’s either a lot of furniture or we’re fonder of meatballs than I ever imagined.

Talking of which, I increasingly buy food there, too – lingonberry sauce, potato rosti, and Allemansträtten vegetable meatballs and Grönsakskana vegetable cakes I wolf down on the two or three days a week I try to avoid eating meat.

Over the years, though, my addiction has calmed, and when it came to buying a new dining room set a few weeks ago, I decided to go to a more traditional retailer, and bought the chairs in Harvey Norman.

So you can imagine my horror when, after picking them up, I opened the boxes and found out that they too had to be assembled.

And that, perhaps, is IKEA’s most dubious achievement. Where it led, others followed, diagram by diagram, Allen key by Allen key, and dowel by dowel. Now, why is that screw still on the floor?