….and yellow. Past a Ship Called Ambition, flatpack salvation is on offer

As ever, this audioletter is available for you to read quietly to yourself, or as a show with music (playlist at the end, below), either 7-8 pm Fridays on 60 North Radio or streaming on Mixcloud always, by clicking on this link. In which case, you have to listen to me reading it. Aloud.

The cruise ship named, ironically, Ambition, brought to Glasgow to house Ukrainian refugees, hulks over the King George V dock as we approach our church of choice for this Monday evening. It draws us in, the car park approaches carefully calculated so you never feel too distant from the great blue cathedral with its yellow highlights. We are here to worship at one of the many altars originating in rural Sweden with a man called Ingvar Kamprad. We are here to buy a bed and mattress, though we will emerge with much else: picture frames, plants, glasses, pillows, rugs, a sink, the inevitable tealights. We will be replete with meatballs and unlimited coffee refills. We wil be saved. Have saved. Spent.

IKEA – the name comes from personal initials: Ingvar Kamprad, Elmtaryd, his family farm, and the nearby town of Agunnaryd. It is glorious. It is seductive. It is a money making machine. It is a retail Gospel Hall, providing essentials and fripperies with style and offering, it must be said good value and quality. And the wielding of  weird screwdrivers and slippery miniature wrenches is no longer compulsory after a visit, not to mention the hernias and twisted backs caused by lifting those flatpacks in and out of too-small cars, dangerously overloaded and wobbled home: for £27 a pop, they will come and build. They will deliver. But you know they don’t really want to. Suffering is part of the redemptive deal here.

They are waiting for you, the stewards and deacons, as you enter and the smell of salmon, coffee and roasted meat hits you, the incense of eventual deliverance. The restaurant is lurking like a promise of grace. Smells and perfumes are carefully deployed here as you process along the pilgrimage route towards eventual salvation at the tills. Do. Not Deviate, lest you end in hell, or the staff punishment room.

 On the first floor, having ascended a broad staircase towards deliverance and sanctification, are the showrooms. This could be your life. These could be your lives, these rooms so artfully designed, just rumpled enough to be convincing. The fake stove, glowing and providing that smell of something like wood smoke. The kitchens pine fresh and Scandic, the bathrooms measured and subtly clean-reeking. The bedrooms linen fresh and the mattresses lined up for you to bounce on, like a Transcendental Meditator pretending to fly. 

And music too, of course, gentle, soothing but not entirely emolient. I found myself wondering if I knew the guitarist behind that complex George Benson-ish solo, and who they were, the musicians in this faceless worship band.

Gone are the little notepads and pencils of yore. You use your smartphone to photograph the code of what you will pick up later in the halls of cardboard downstairs. You speak to the ‘co-workers’ who are occasionally summoned by a loudspeaker system of the highest fidelity. You have decided. You have chosen to give yourself to Ingvar. You will be saved.  Time for meatballs.

I love the IKEA restaurant. I have breakfasted, lunched, dined there. I would happily do all three in a single, day, day after day. The food is good, plentiful, cheap. In the end I shared some meatballs with Susan and went for the salmon and potato cake. With extra chips. Swedish apple cake to follow and (choose the filter!) loads of coffee. All for less than a Big Mac meal.

I could call it communion with the spirit of Ingvar Kamprad, but that would be a metaphor too much and unpleasant too, given the IKEA founder’s fascist leanings when young. Anyway, we are still on the first floor. Now it is time to descend into the bowels of the kirk. The crypt. It won’t be easy or pleasant. But first, there is the wander through portable stuff you can actually buy: the rugs, glasses, pillows, picture frames, plants and appalling art. And the tealights. Of course we need the tealights. Fill that yellow bag right up. Better get a trolley. Thank you, Ingvar. Bless your roving Nazi spirit.

And then we are in the warehouses, scanning smartphones, searching for aisles and location numbers. That mattress, so comfy upstairs in its pine fresh context, is bluntly rolled into a plastic tube like a body in the Sopranos. The bed frame, a ‘Slattum’ king-size, is just about manouevrable onto a trolley. It is time for the collection, the offering. Time to pay.

The co-workers in their ‘Hej!’ sweatshirts cluster smilingly. We are whisked through the huge checkouts, our cards ransacked, all our sins forgiven. A new life beckons. No delivery until Wednesday, which is too late. I buy maybe my tenth IKEA toolkit, knowing the hammer and screwdriver will definitely be needed for the ‘Billy’ shelving unit I decided on at the last minute. The co workers flock to help us load the car. It is truly amazing what you can get into a Toyota Rav 4.

And we leave, departing the car park, fed physically, depleted fiscally and with a new life of comfortable sleeping ahead of us. 

When we get to the flat, we realise the Slattum bed is too heavy for us to carry up the stairs safely (four stents, two heartattacks, all that stuff). IKEA may be a religion but it’s not worth dying for. So we leave everything in the car for next morning, when we will have to dismantle the entire flatpacked bed and carry its components up the stairs bit by bit. It takes four hours to do that and put everything together.

Afterwards, we defrost some of the meatballs we bought from the IKEA deli and have them for lunch. But it’s not the same. We’ll have to go back. Maybe on Sunday. Maybe eternally.

Listen to the above read by me, with the music below inserted, 7-8pm on 60 North Radio or streaming now on Mixcloud by clicking here.

Bridget St John — Suzanne

Hamish Hawk — Bridget St John

Nick Drake — Black Eyed Dog

Bill Fay — The Healing Day

The Roches — Runs in the Family

Bruce Cockburn — All the Diamonds

Richard and Linda Thompson — Dimming of the Day/Dargai

Kate and Anna McGarrigle — Swimming Song

Fotheringay — The Sea

Randy Newman — I Think It’s Going to Rain Today

Judee Sill — There’s a Rugged Road

Paul Brady — Arthur McBride

Vashti Bunyan — Diamond Day

Dave Rawlings Machine — Bells of Harlem

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