Monthly Archives: August 2012

Oh For The Love Of All Things IKEA!

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For those of you who have been following me on Twitter, you will have noticed my recent excitement over a visit to everyone’s favourite Swedish furniture store. Yes, I am talking about IKEA, home of flat-packed, D.I.Y., stress-tested furniture.  I love the idea of being able to put furniture together myself like this.  It makes me feel like I am building something which, for a person who can’t even be bothered sewing up a loose button on a shirt, is a huge deal.  Some of you may well argue whether the furniture-maker should be stress-testing the effects installation of their products might have on their customers as well.

If you are an IKEA fan like me, you will know that their instruction manuals don’t have any text at all. This is a great idea as it overcomes any language barriers that are commonly found in products made in non-English-speaking countries with badly translated instructions such as “insert screw in round hole behind floor” or “hook nail with driver in proper hammer”. Huh?  (Ok, so I may have made those two up, but you get the idea.)

When I recently brought up the topic of building my new IKEA desk with colleagues, this brought up a new debate that went something like this:

“Oh, I hate it when you get to the end and you find there’s a piece missing from the box!”

“No, no! What’s worse is if you find at the end there’s an extra piece and you don’t know where it’s supposed to go!”

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A Life Thirty Years In the Making, And May There Be Many Many More

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I love meeting new people whenever I travel. As soon as I open my mouth, they recognise an “interesting” accent and the question inevitably follows: “Where do you come from?” I refrain from breaking out my Men At Work impression and I reply “I come from Australia.”  That is the answer I have been giving for the past thirty years. Yes, it hardly seems real that it has already been thirty years since my parents packed up the family and moved us halfway across the world from Hong Kong to a city in a country we had never been to.

 

I never fully grasped the enormity of such a move back in 1982. At the time, I knew nothing about Australia – not even about the koalas and kangaroos that people ask me about nowadays when I travel abroad.  The only people I knew who had even been to Australia were friends of my parents who had come here on a family holiday.  I remember going to their house for a slide night but taking very little interest in what was on screen.

 

The only thing I remember thinking was that they spoke English in Australia.  Having attended an English private school since kindergarten, I was not afraid of the language barrier, though if anyone had warned me about the accent, things might have been a little different!  If only I had read Nino Culotta’s They’re A Weird Mob back then, I may have had a better understanding of the Australian slang!

 

The prospect of leaving behind all my friends and my grandparents, who I was extremely close to, never truly hit me until we were at the airport on August 15th, 1982, when I saw my grandfather cry for the first time in my life as we bade our farewells at the departure gate.  Having always been an extremely sensitive and sentimental child, the sight of my grandparents and my parents in tears was the first sign that my life was about to change in a major way.

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