Ikea men of the world unite - you have nothing to lose but your screws. A mantra for abandoned men, lost men, ignored men - especially for men of a certain age, trying to make sense of scattered pieces on a floor - making a flat-pack into a piece of furniture means loss of libido, temper and frittered finger nails.
Replaced by racist thoughts and blind fury. But, bravely on. I say, chaps, push the boulder up the hill, get down one more time that you got up and you, too, could be an Ikea-man. And if you cannot manage it, well, as the slogan says, you get to keep the label.
There is no comfort in that other slogan, the one about women are doing it for themselves. On the great dykes of resistance, they balk at making flat packs stand upright. Men of a certain age, then, must be born again as Ikea-men or be put out to grass.
Such whinging is occasioned by realising how much of apartment furniture is nowadays flat-pack. Especially those pieces you admired in Habitat or Dunnes - bookshelves, decorative side-tables in Bali wood you think will enhance your ideal decor. You don't notice how the subtle store lighting and cunningly dispensed scent of apple blossom opiates on your imagination. You think rent, you think "happy tenant" when the truck delivers it. Ah, no actually, the sales assistant tells you with the practised calm of someone who repeats this bad news daily. This is a flat-pack, she says. As in packed flat, in a flat box, with a flat page of instructions. Put in the boot, take away and become a man.
Habitat says "self-assembly" which sounds grander and more realistic, as "flat-pack" implies that it might actually stand up of its own accord when delivered to your door. Those large DIY warehouses in the outer ring roads, favoured by the great earning proletariat, who used to be called working-class, have no such inhibition, blandly promoting "flat-pack", knowing that any plumber who earned two villas in Alicante can transform the contents of a cardboard box into a polished cocktail bar and two receptacles for wide screen televisions.
Giving three-dimensional life to a crude diagram on cheap paper means believing the diagram is not a fantasy of the graphic artist. How they must love making these drawings, these obscure men in faraway Asian warehouses, who spell 'middle section" as "mittle". I visualise them going home in the evening, coo-ing across to each other on their bicycles as they turn by "The Min Pagoda of a Hundred Rooms", which took a thousand men 50 years to build.
"Yo, I left good yoke in koffee table, put no hole in the leg, put hole in drawing instead!" "Oh Good, Ho, that teach them, first world Yankee, capitalist consumers. Ho, ho, ho - Ho Chi Min, good yoke, ho." Such thoughts are entirely wrong and I apologise for them but I am an Ikea-survivor, at cost to my mental stability. Flat-packs are not for the naive, who believes a friend's story: he who met a worker from the factory on holiday who told him they deliberately left out a piece, to get you back to the shop and then buy something else.
Not for self-doubters - who could not survive the Ikea-training exercise, spread-eagled on the floor, legs and arms akimbo, not blinking, as they stare at a jumble of Bali wood, screws, holes, keys. Truly a job for men of iron will, as I now am. It helps to have a stubborn desire to put the correct screws into hospitable holes, making the unscrewable infinitely screwable. Then tighten them properly. The key, to which, I have learned, is the half-turn of the screw. Not the full turn, which is over-tightening, after which there is no way of starting again, short of sawing the lot up for firewood. The half-turn of the screw is the key, your only man and you can take that as a mantra for life, love and happiness in all things this side of the Great Wall of China.
I know, because I managed, after some wrong turns, to put the right screw in the right hole. And I made the whole lot stand up. If it wobbled I did not notice, I am not in denial. I have become an Ikea-man and proud of it. Where is that bear you want me to wrestle with? My nimble genes will go onto the next generation.
As will yours, too, my son, just keep taking the tablets. And stay away from department stores.
