Bank Holiday
Having spent the weekend doing our own thing, it was with a degree of trepidation that I did what everyone else does on a bank holiday, and paid a visit to a DIY store and a Swedish furniture manufacturer.

A few years ago, I made the mistake of popping to my local DIY/garden centre on a bank holiday to get some compost, only to be stuck in a queue for what felt like days. Joining the queue cleanly shaven I finally paid for my purchase with a face covered in stubble, such was the volume of people stood patiently in front of me.

This time, I vowed it would be different.

I was buggered if I was going to spend my precious day off work queuing in some jumped up warehouse. So we decided to try and beat the queues and go early.

Now, with the clocks going forward, and me staying awake to watch Enigma on Sunday night, the alarm going at 7.15 on Monday morning didn't cause me to leap forth from my bed, embrace the day, pull on clothes and leave the house. Instead, I groaned, turned the alarm off and rolled over.

However, by fair means or foul my wife finally managed to rouse myself from my slumber with a mixture of polite persuasion and setting the cat on me.

So it was that we found ourselves outside Wickes before 9.00 in the morning. We were about the fifth car in the car park.

Stage one duly completed, we made our purchases and returned home in record time, and had a quick bout of breakfast, before making the significantly longer journey to IKEA.

As time had now moved on, and as the store had decided to throw open its doors an hour earlier than expected, we were far from being the fifth car in their car park. In fact such was the anticipated rush that they had a man in a fluorescent coat pointing us to where we should park.

Anyway, we managed to find a space where we could still see the blue behemoth looming on the horizon, and left our car to trek towards it, like Hobbits heading to Mount Doom.

By the time we made it inside, it was obvious that rather than take the family to the zoo, the population of the East Midlands had chosen to spend the day perusing oddly named furniture rather than rare and wonderful creatures.

Fortunately we still had one card to play.

We knew what we wanted, and we charged through the store on a mission to find it, decide if we really liked it, and then get home as fast as possible. OK, so maybe this was more my plan than my wife's, but dammit I needed caffeine and I wasn't prepared to mess about.

So we ploughed through the masses, and decided we liked some stuff, but didn't like other bits that had looked nice in the catalogue, and even managed to locate it in the warehouse bit at the end – no mean feat I assure you.

We wheeled our planned purchases to the till, and thanks to our no-nonsense approach managed to get to the checkout before the masses, stopping only to collect a Daim Bar Cheesecake on the way out.

We were back home by 11.00 – and with a cup of tea firmly clenched between my fingers I was able to bask in the knowledge that our bank holiday hadn't been taken away from us by having to queue for hours.

Blissfully unaware that any rest I had planned for the remainder of the day would be rudely yanked from my grasp later when I came to actually assemble our purchases...
- posted by Paul @ 1:18 pm