Cosmopolitan Hell

Now that I’m living the cosmopolitan life style I find its not so much fun. Clearly the wife and I are not fashionable enough to be living in such an environment – we look out of place set against the stark minimalist lines of our birch effect furniture. We need to have the angular body lines and good breeding of someone like Tara Palmer Tomkinson and Hugh Grant. It’s a sad fact but I’m afraid we clash with our furniture.


But that’s just not us is it. We made a mistake, sucked in by the Swedish design wizards who make all this stuff so available, so cheap, so life changingly, magnetically, headturningly full of wantability. I’m in marketing so I should have known the traps that lay ahead. I should have seen through the hype, I should have known! I may have to send my degrees back to my almer mater before I get court martialed by the sociology police.

The other thing about living in this minimalist hell is one needs to be really tidy. Anally tidy, not just your normal,’ O I’ll pick it up in a minute, tomorrow, sometimes this week (maybe the weekend if I feel up to it) tidy’. Tidy enough for a Freudian analyst to question you seriously about how your parent’s potty trained you.

I spent hours on Saturday and parts of Sunday using my furniture making skills assembling the flat packed jigsaw puzzles the Swedes call furniture. Amazingly it all went to plan without any major hiccups. We were lulled. The bookcases were attached to the wall, the seating assembled; the table took pride of place in the ‘eating area’; the fashionable knick knacks had been arrayed. We stepped back and gazed adoringly at our new lifestyle - soon we would be rich and famous.

That’s when we noticed it - the general untidiness of our lives. Where do you put all your stuff? Where does the ephemera of day to day living go? The bills, the tat picked up on holiday, the bits and pieces that you drag out of your pockets day after day after day, all the stuff you’ve nicked from work for example? You can put it on the table but then its untidy and immediately you’re living the life of a chav. Because one bit of stuff draws to it other bits of stuff. I bet Einstein had a theory about it, or it’s what he based his own theories on. That theory about equal and opposite attractions for example. Untidy stuff always attracts other untidy stuff – I bet they’ll find that in his long lost writings, stuffed in a book somewhere in Cambridge. Perhaps that’s why its lost, someone, probably his mum, had a tidy up. Come on admit it how much useful stuff has been lost after a tidy up?

Now we might have to move. It’s like living in one of Lawrence Llewellyn Bowens worst nightmares. We need to find somewhere more comfy, not the soulless birch desert we now inhabit having to move through the room like a herd of browsing cattle picking up each bit of litter, socks, coffee cups, pens, children etc as they make the place look untidy. Plus our three piece suite totally does not go. I’m sure the guys at DFS have already heard on the grapevine.

‘Calling all salesmen Calling all salesmen’

‘10/4 come back good buddy’

‘Fashion faux pas warning at No 25’
‘What’s that ducky?’

‘Brown Velour suite is clashing with new Ikea inspired minimalism’

‘O MY GOD!, I’ll send the leaflets immediately and contact Linda Barker – those poor poor people it must be hell!’


At least our bedroom is a haven of normality. I say normality, but after moving in at the end of November we are still living out of boxes and suitcases. Tonight the mirror fronted wardrobes are going up. Then it’ll be like living in a Fred Astaire movie in the 30’s all that glass (although methinks more like a Swedish Fred Astaire Movie, if you catch my drift). Then I’ll not be able to find my pants or socks. These things have so many storage options, I’ll have a senior moment and I’ll forget what I’m looking for. It’ll probably take me longer to get dressed in the morning, and then I’ll be late for work, get the sack and not be able to pay the mortgage and be homeless.

I blame it all on Ikea! Bastards!