We had been watching them pass our window for several days before I finally concocted an excuse just to walk round and find out exactly what it was they did. Hurried leggy blondes, heavyset guys humping huge boxes that trailed esoteric wires, a cast of hundreds had been streaming into the office next door; it was perplexing. What kind of business needed all these people and this weird paraphernalia?

This was just one of many mysteries that distracted Stuart and I as we constructed a monstrous pile of Ikea self assembly furniture. The new studio had needed three trolleys worth of stuff with names we couldn’t pronounce (apart from Erik the filing cabinet). Stuff that if the instructions were correctly followed required inhumanly dextrous, toddler sized fingers to effectively assemble. Ikea World is a godless place; correction, there is one deity, the allen key; its wrath is knuckle crunching. Soon the floor is covered in instruction manuals sporting vaguely suggestive illustrations of people who are joyously hammering MDF into happy home dreams. Needless to say we eventually cocked it all up.

We had bravely gotten through several large items…Bookcases, chairs, a metal trolley. The wardrobe, with its slide rails, mirrors, and millions of tiny oddly shaped widgets, gadgets, fidgets and twistits just freaked us out. We couldn’t get the doors on. Stuart remained his even-tempered jovial self. I wanted to throw it all out of the window; then set fire to it. Its gaping door less front mocked us for two full days before Neef just fixed it.

She just put them on.

Labels: studio