Does being retired make a person more prone to the kind of intolerance described in this retirement blog? I suspect that getting older does help you lean in this direction. Don’t know what you think.
If you’d told me that I’d be writing a retirement blog about a visit to IKEA or that Hieronymus Bosch took his inspiration from IKEA I would be doubtful in the first instance but I wouldn’t dispute your opinion in the second. If you made a list of all the experiences you haven’t missed in the last two years and top of that list was shopping in IKEA, I would not disagree.
I say this because we paid our first visit to IKEA this week after a two year break. It used to be bad and they’ve built on their previous success in it being an appalling place to shop by making it an even more unpleasant experience. Hard to believe I agree but true none the less.
In short or rather the opposite, they have packed in more sections, increased the number of items, generated longer routes and more meandering routes with none apparently of the short cuts / escape routes, those that used to set you free or at least reduce the pain, the claustrophobia is huge and the visual effects include an increase in uniformity which made me feel as if I was on an endless loop towards insanity. By the time we got to the exit I was close to hysteria.
Of course this may have been their strategy – reduce the shopper to a point where they would buy anything, at any price, to be free of this hell hole. And this without mentioning the biggest Bosch like factor of all – the people. Bloody millions of them. Had they all just emerged from their burrows today, like us or have they been going round and round on their IKEAN hamster wheels for the last two years without any break?
And, the icing on this poisonous cake? They had no masks on. Aargh. But hang on neither had I but that was because I’d forgotten mine. Surely the absence of masks on everybody else was an act of defiance or a symbolic raising of two finger to the rest of the world. Or could every one of them be simply feckless? The booster jab we’d had the weekend before offered some comfort but this was a veritable hothouse of Covid spreading. And all for the usual shelf-sagging bookshelf (for the barn).
Why don’t I just give away some books? That would mean no need for a toxic experience in IKEA world. But of course I’ve never been any good at getting rid of stuff. A sign of a deep-seated insecurity in childhood (probably the same insecurity that leads me to panic in bloody IKEA) and probably ever since. So I don’t get rid of stuff I simply move it around from place to place.
The trip up to the barn yesterday was a case in point. We had to use the van (ex-gardening van) to return the grape containers I’d borrowed from my game-keeper neighbour to deliver our harvest to the wine-maker and they were in the van from this visit to the wine-maker 3 weeks ago.
As it happened my dog-walking chum came to fix our out-door electrics the day before and he was disparaging about how we’d filled up the garage (with rubbish – his term) since his last visit. He was quite right, it was a disgrace and his criticism cut deep.
So sensing an opportunity to kill two birds etc I chucked random objects from the garage into the van thereby filling the van and partially emptying the garage. Take all the crap to the barn where there is more space to hide stuff you don’t want but can’t bear to throw out (carefully positioned and you’d never know it was there). Job done.
It’s true the garage is far from empty but there is a certain therapeutic pleasure in clearing at least some floor space. Just the kind of control-seizing experience a person needs after a mind-shredding visit to IKEA. So hence the barn visit. True when we got there a whole new set of unplanned and unwanted events occurred the next day but that, as they say, is another tale.
At a period in our retirement lives when, though no fault of ours, our retirement seems to be drowning in complexity a retired person needs to identify and put into practice all of the mind-soothing therapeutic experiences we can lay our hands or at least our minds on. Maybe this retirement blog is a part of the therapy.