Putting together Ikea furniture proves a struggle for Jim Duffy, who laments his short attention span and lack of practical skills

At the ripe old age of just over 50 – well, 12 months over 50 – I’ve realised how totally useless I am. Having spent years developing my brain, learning new stuff and having a go at different things, I have just realised that despite all this energy and effort, I still cannot build Ikea furniture. And it’s causing me angst...

As Ikea, a global phenomenon and enigma at the same time, opens its first store in India, I still cannot get my head around its magnificently profitable business model. Why am I expected to queue, pay, collect, transport and then build the sodding stuff, only to find during the building process that I am inept? Me and probably half the adult population. I’m being careful here not be gender specific as one of my best friends, “Wee Gaylsey”, is a dab hand when it comes to erecting Ikea jigsaw furniture. Why, after all my years of “getting smarter” and gaining more insight into life and domestic tasks, can I not manage to successfully build Ikea wardrobes and couches?

Firstly, I need someone to blame, so I’m going to blame the education system. Yes, that’s always a good start when we realise that we have a lost generation. My generation were sold the myth that education, exams and post-nominals were a pre-requisite for getting on and getting better and moving up the ladder of success. For me, that was a degree in sociology through the Open University. To be fair, I did get a first and my primary subjects included semiology, contextual post-modernism and language. Yes, there’s not much I don’t know about the semantics, syntactics and pragmatics of applied, contextual English. And how useless is that! Especially when the Ikea instructions come in the form of little diagrams that require constant interpretation and checking. So much for sociology at the OU then. I should have done a course in bricklaying which, as my grandad was a bricklayer, could actually have been more meaningful and fun. And a lot more relevant to Ikea.

Secondly, as a product of the “hurry up” generation, where things do not move fast enough and careers are so slow, my attention to detail is poor. As I have learned to graze on my news feeds, blogs and websites, I have shortened my attention span to seconds and minutes. This has been multiplied by a factor of 100 as the digital age has really kicked in. Now, I swipe left and right and up and down incessantly as I juggle this story and that picture and this celebrity and that politician.

In short, I now have the attention span of a bluebottle. And this does not bode well when a 58-page set of instructions pops out from the miles of cardboard that cocoon an Ikea sofa.

Yes, 58 pages of instructions and I’ve lost the plot after Page 5.

Next, probably like all of us who have a sedentary lifestyle with a garage that just about holds old bits and bobs and not a car, and perhaps a garden hut that houses the lawn mower and trimmer, I have nowhere appropriate to build my Ikea furniture. Joiners and carpenters have benches and proper cutting tables. All I and, I guess, you have is the kitchen floor with a rug on it. And this causes all sorts of pain. Notably, that I have to get down on my knees, which are sore from running half-marathons over the years (another waste of time – a good walk would have done). Add to this the need to bend over to get leverage over the weird Ikea screws and I’m almost practising yoga just to get one side of the wardrobe aligned. After 30 minutes of this, my