Apart from the obvious benefits of moving house, which include no longer suffering from passive-smoker's cough or soy sauce theft or foreign hairs in the bathtub of suspect origin, moving house means a trip to IKEA. (Note that I'm currently attempting to make light of a horribly awkward situation...how am I doing...?)

You know how I feel about IKEA...

IKEA is my most favourite place. I like to follow the arrows through the whole store, even when I have absolutely no need for 100x tealight candles or a Billy bookcase. Although frankly, there's always room in my life for a Billy bookcase or a sofa called Karlstad. As a random sidenote, I love IKEA naming conventions, you should google them some time. Karlstad has an odd place in my memory. As well as being the namesake of a range of fashionable and reasonably priced sofas (of questionable comfort, in my experience...) it's also a fairly large city western/southern/central Sweden. Large by Swedish standards you understand, ~50,000 or so. About the same size as Grafton, where, incidentally, I am going next week. Anyway...I digrees... I passed through Karlstad a number of times on the midnight bus from Stockholm to Oslo. It stops there in the middle of the night to pick up passengers. It's a long and boring bus ride, especially when the air-con is not working properly and you have an aversion to using long-distance bus toilets.  Too many hours of my life spent on that damn bus.

Mmmmn, so IKEA. I am going to go there as a little present to myself. Or more correctly, I am going to make Rob take me there as a little present to myself. Because you know, taking me flying and keeping me drunk and English-breakfasted for 3 days straight is clearly not enough in the presents-to-myself stakes. Where was I...

When we go to IKEA, we are going to break the rule of the arrow slightly. We are first going to eat meatballs with boiled potatoes and lingonberry sylt. That will be our first cafeteria stop. Then after some wandering through mattresses and oddly shaped cushions, we shall take a second cafeteria stop, at which point I will attempt to eat some lax med potatis (there is a theme here, you see). It will be carnage, somewhat resembling this (except without the bacon):

After that pit stop, full of salmon and presumably by this point, a number of potatoes, we shall meander through the kitchen and diningware. I think this bit is my favourite, because really, you can always find something to do with a comical scrubbing brush. Get your mind out of the gutter.

My plan is to get some pretty plates. And some pretty bowls. They will look like this:

And because I am an impulse-shopper, and I love anything to do with hugs (kram in Swedish, the namesake of the following), I will probably also buy some of these, even though I've no need for 100x paper napkins.

I have no need for 100x tealights either, but who I am kidding, I'll totally end up with some anyway.

I love IKEA. It makes even the most ass-hatted flatmate troubles seem some how less severe. Especially when I think about the third and final cafeteria pit-stop. Daim. Tårta. Life-changing delicious goodness.

Oh how I've missed you.