Failed adventures in furniture

Something very important has happened to me in the past few months: I’ve bought a desk. A real, heavy, made-out-of-wood desk, with metal handles, that cannot be disassembled into a flatpack or picked up with the strength of one arm like every other piece of furniture I have ever bought. I paid a random internet furniture store an awful lot of money for it in a fit of fury and self-hatred after an Ikea visit. It has since become an object of huge metaphorical significance.

You see, I’ve always harboured a suspicion that I am, in several significant ways, not proper. I write about videogames for a living. My possessions, in descending order of volume, constitute books, games, plastic instruments and real instruments, and nothing of any practical use. I own one pair of shoes. Flicking through British TV channels provokes such a sudden, searing sense of cultural disconnect in me that I sabotaged my own aerial four years ago. I have no idea why anybody wants things like jobs or children or gardens or cushions from John Lewis.

This is why Ikea particularly gets to me. It’s a place specifically designed to sharpen my closest-held insecurities about my failures as a proper human being. It’s full of people whom I don’t understand and objects/advertisements designed to appeal to them. I invariably come out of Ikea in an abject, miserable state of existential crisis, aware that I neither own nor desire to own anything that adults are supposed to have.

That’s why I bought the desk. A desk! That’s not a book or a game or a pretend guitar! A desk is something that a real person might own. This desk was my key to proper life, my way out of the confusion and dislocation and creeping sense of impending doom that characterise young adulthood. Once I have a desk, I thought, everything else will fall into place. I’ll no longer be bothered by the compulsion to rip my life up by the roots and move it somewhere else every year. The thought of hoovering won’t make me want to run away to Rio and live with the drag queens. I will learn to stop after three pints, I will open a savings account, and the fear of boredom will no longer loom, shapeless but sharp-toothed, in my mind – because I will have a desk.

Immediately, of course, I turned to the internet for help. Shopping for desks is quite difficult when you can’t see them. Some of them seem awfully expensive, others suspiciously cheap. There are lists of weird specifications. There are, usually, no user reviews, and no forums where desk enthusiasts post the weekly best deals on solid mango-wood computer desks with slide-out keyboard compartments.

Desks: COMPLICATED.

I phoned up my Dad to ask for advice; he suggested going to a furniture shop. This hadn’t occurred to me for a second. I don’t even know where I would find a furniture shop that wasn’t fucking, fucking Ikea. Google Maps didn’t know either. So I ordered one off the internet.

It looked awful nice on the website. Then it arrived and it was too big to fit through my door. It turns out that you have to do things like take measurements before you order an enormous piece of furniture off the Internet.

So it sat there, up-ended in the living room, for months until I found a proper adult to take the hinges off my bedroom door and put it in there instead. Also, I’d spent so much money on the desk that I didn’t have any left for a chair, so I haven’t been able to actually use my desk. It just sits there, reminding me of my failures.

Once I have a chair, though – THEN I will definitely be a proper adult. Yes?

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