Next week I am moving out. Warm, fuzzy Norwich calls me back for at least one more year, and so I am gathering my belongings and headin’ out East. This means I can finally escape from the tyrannically benign regime of my parents (how DARE they cook all my meals and give me lifts everywhere) and be my own man again. The next blog post will therefore be written in the smoking crater that was once my new living room, surrounded by a fallout of empty takeaways and bottle caps.
The best thing about moving into a completely new place, even better than the possibility you’ll move in next to a sex-starved thirty something millionaire businesswomen, is flatpack furniture. Yes, the humble flatpack provides the most complete satisfaction a man without missing hands can enjoy.
Unpacking flat pack furniture (or ‘flacking’ to the more experienced) is a manly art, right up there with urban warfare and driving a digger. It combines some of them most masculine activities from start to finish:
1. Driving to get the furniture. While driving itself can be viewed as a masculine enterprise (especially if you lean into the corners and make nneeeooow noises), it is the furniture store itself that provides a rarely visited environment for manly skills. Aside from the expected heavy lifting you may also be placed in charge of a large and unwieldy trolley, giving you the opportunity to powerslide a grossly overloaded vehicle through the populated intersections between aisles. Again, nneeeooow noises can be deployed for maximum drama.
2. Driving back with the furniture. Driving again, but this time, driving under adverse conditions. On the United Nations scale of Invention and Improvisation Under Adverse Conditions, fitting 50 square meters of wooden and metal surfaces into a 2 square meter Peugeot rates just under repairing your tank under concentrated artillery fire. Your friends or significant other, now jammed into the passenger footwell under 30 kilos of mdf, will surely agree, as will the policeman who pulls you over for having 2 meters of metal piping sticking out of your open boot, secured with a single frayed bungee cord. “Yes sir, extremely original use of folding down the seats. You’re practically in the A-Team.”
3. Assembly. You are the mighty creator! From chaos, you have made order, stopping only for a cup if tea every fifteen minutes and that brief period when you realised you’d put the first bit together backwards! The assembling of flatpack furniture gives the illusion of concentrated mental and physical effort, whereas all you are really doing is re-assembling an object that someone else has designed and then deconstructed in the simplest way. The instructions on furniture from IKEA are simple enough not to require words; instead they rely on the same visual code used by Lego, with an androgynous jelly-baby man standing by looking purposeful. You’re basically putting together a giant Lego kit, except hopefully it won’t smash to pieces if you put any weight on it.
4. Unnecessary tool deployment. OK, so technically all it needs is the Allen key that was provided in the box. Still, it’s better to be prepared, which fully justifies you lugging every power tool you own round to you mum’s, just in case. And if it needs a screwdriver, why not use an electric one? It’s a timesaver, not just an excuse to hold something that looks a bit like a laser gun and makes exciting noises when you squeeze the trigger.
5. Acceptance of thanks. Some people do not enjoy the construction of flatpack furniture. These poor, uninitiated souls are normally female, and must NEVER be allowed to do so, lest they discover its joys and realise there is absolutely no skill to it, and that there was really no need to invite you over and make you all those sandwiches. In the meantime you can simply accept their thanks with noble composure, and a look that quietly says ‘financial compensation would normally be expected for the type of service I have just provided, but I have let it slide because I am that sort of man.’
Flatpack furniture is much maligned as being lower quality than your standard, pre-assembled stuff. But I put together an extendable dining table and chairs last week and let me tell you, whoever designed that table was a tupping genius. Despite involving sliding parts and pivots in the actual build, it was so easy to assemble that even your common or garden ignoramus like myself could put it together. And as I sat on my new chairs, contemplating how hideous the sofa in my new living room is, I felt the stirrings of pride warming my buttocks. And I’ve still got a coffee table to go. All is right with the world.
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