Some Assembly Required

Those were the days, of course, these days are rubbish in comparison. Everyone knows that. Back then the world seemed a much more straightforward place, and for the less-straightforward the instructions were printed in English, not English machine-translated from the original into a form of pigeon Latvian, then farmed out to someone who learnt English from badly-subtitled reruns of The Teletubbies on his local TV station, to then be converted into a near approximation of a language almost totally unrelated to the language we know, love and sometimes spell correctly.

As for the illustrations that accompany the text, these too seem adapted from an original instruction manual that showed step-by-step instructions on how to apply marmite to the stomach of a rather recalcitrant hippopotamus whilst simultaneously practicing some of the more arcane movements from an earlier more primitive form of Morris dancing that involved a great deal of undue personal intimacy with a leek.

Then there are the screws and other fittings, the most vital of which, of course can only be told apart by minute and painstaking forensic investigation using a strong magnifying glass under sharply-focused floodlights from a Premiership football ground. These screws must be used to fit together the wood-effect pre-masticated cardboard-like panels which although they look, sound and smell identical, are all subtly different, up to and including the final piece that is from some other kit entirely, and – therefore - involves a return to the retail barn that sold you the item.

Upon arrival at the retail barn, after a three-day trek across a car park the size of several African states glued together, when you present the superfluous item to the help desk, there is much general bewilderment as every single employee there is invited along to gawp at the extraneous item for what seems to be close to a decade each, before the most junior minion is sent to scurry down to the very bowels of the emporium, there to filch a necessary replacement from some other appropriate kit, that will undoubtedly be sold to some other unfortunate in the near future.

Then when you are safely back home and the item is supposedly finished, but looking nothing like the item you saw illustrated in the catalogue. Instead of the pristine item of furniture you had hoped to now possess, your unit looks as though it has been through a savage earthquake, a flood and – quite possibly - a raging inferno, and seems to teeter between the states of being an item of furniture, or being a pile of miscellaneous pieces of wood-substitute, without ever quite becoming either.

Consequently, you solemnly vow, resting your bloodied hand on a stack of instruction leaflets, never ever to visits the hellish place ever again.

That is until six months later, when the new catalogue falls through the door and you hear the wife utter those dread words:

‘Oooh, now that looks nice!’