Ikea Amnesia

Spot the obvious errors in the following sentence:

“We went to Ikea on Saturday”.

OK, so if this was a GCSE English paper you might come a cropper trying to unearth any grammatical faux pas. However, if you live in England and have ever graced this palace of doom with your presence, you should immediately be able to spot three alarm-bell ringing hum dingers.

1 WE
You might not necessarily have spotted that first one to be fair but it wasn’t a trick question, I promise. The ‘we’ refers to the hubby, and the two kids, plus myself. Therein lies the error. NEVER, EVER take children to Ikea. We shall live to regret that decision and the memory of it shall be etched in my brain somewhere just below childbirth and tooth extraction.

2 IKEA
You’ll kick yourself if you didn’t get this one. We all know the horrors that await just inside those revolving doors. From the absence of pencils to the absence of everything you went in to buy.

3 SATURDAY
I know, I know, we only have ourselves to blame….


Anyway, it seems the God of cheap tat was not looking down on us favourably that particular day. The Omens were clear for all to see but we stupidly ignored them.

It began with Jess retching just as we pulled into the car park. Hubby performed an admirable emergency stop but unfortunately not in time to whisk her from the car before she’d unburdened her stomach of the last couple of meals all over her and the car seat. I haven’t bothered bringing a change of clothes out for her since she was a baby so all we could muster was a 3-6 month size t-shirt that was lying around in the boot of the car. She’s three. Needless to say, it was a little on the uncomfortable side.

We then spent an hour trying to find the piece of furniture that we’d come for. Having finally located said item, I traipsed the kids up to the café while hubby went to collect it (no off-the-shelf pick-up for this item; it had to be paid for, ordered and collected separately, all at different desks). It was going rather well until he called to say that, having waited 20 minutes for the thing to arrive, he was told that they only had the doors – cue more queuing for a refund.

There is nothing on this earth that could have persuaded me to go back the following week to collect the remaining parts so we then had to choose the next least offensive item in the catalogue that was the right size.

I swore under my breath, while Jess continued to chew her way through her fish and chips. The man on the next table was also eating fish and chips, except he’d obviously ordered two portions of the kids’ meal. I can only assume it worked out cheaper than an adult meal. Him and the missus sat in front of their little pink florescent plastic plates, moaning about the queue and the staff and I made a silent promise to never return to Ikea…until the next move.