The labyrinth
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In the mid-1980s, a film was released starting Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie. It was called Labyrinth. In it, Jennifer Connelly's character had to find her way through a massive labyrinth, ruled over by David Bowie's character, in order to rescue her younger brother. The labyrinth was inhabited by all manner of weird and wonderful creatures predominantly from the creature workshop of the late, great Jim Henson. As a child I loved this movie and wished more than anything that I could try my luck in that labyrinth. Recently I've sort of got my wish.
Buying a new house comes with a variety of additional expenses none of us thought about as children when we imagined what it would be like when we were grown up. Chief among these things is furniture. Houses are brilliant if you want to hide from the weather, but if you want somewhere to sit the floor can get a bit uncomfortable. Similarly, somebody who reads as many books or listens to as many CDs as me will soon find that you can only stack things so high before the laws of physics start to offer alternatives.
Furniture shops become a necessary evil. They tend to fall into two categories. Most are open plan or simply have aisles, much like a supermarket. These are easy to navigate but sometimes come with unhappy side effects: usually pushy sales people with extended warrantees, perhaps because they're not confident that the products they're selling are good enough for you to buy it one. The other kind is IKEA.
The IKEA in Coventry is huge. It's a multi-storey building. The top few floors consist of a massive showroom and market hall. It doesn't have aisles. Everything branches off a single path that winds and weaves its way around each floor. It's so complicated they have to paint arrows on the pathway. Following the arrows will take you past virtually everything the store has to sell. It will also take you past your next birthday if you look at every item. What IKEA has in its favour is a lack of pushy sales people. I assume this is because they didn't follow the arrows.
I'm not new to IKEA. Having once lost an afternoon just browsing for ideas, I decided to browse for the bookshelves I wanted on the website before going. Doing this gives you a map that lets you bypass the showroom floors and head straight for the pickup section. The pickup section is just a series of massive aisles of goods with only item numbers to identify them. The idea is that you go round the showroom, make a note of the item numbers, then come down to the pickup section to get what you want. The website allows you to skip the showroom section and means you don't have to pack sandwiches.
As it turned out, they've changed the website. It still has all the same functionality as before, but they've made it a bit harder to use. Much like the store, it's difficult to find certain types of product without clicking through other ranges first. In the end, I wound up on one of the showroom floors anyway. Even moving a speed, it took a while to navigate through to the checkout, and any shortcuts seemed only to make me even more lost.
It turns out the labyrinth experience I'd wished for since I was a kid wasn't what I hoped it would be. When I was young, I imagined I'd get an adventure. Instead I got a bookshelf. And I didn't even get to meet David Bowie.