Game on to solve flat-pack mystery

Mar 28 2008 by Denis Kilcommons, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

BEWARE DIY, I said. Stay a million miles away from painting and decorating, pruning trees, cleaning gutters, building extensions and laying lino with sharp knives.

Easter, I warned, was the time when a young woman’s fancy turned to home improvements and the man in her life fell off ladders and nailed his foot to the floor in the search of approbation and enough brownie points to go to the pub for an hour.

Bank holidays are dangerous. They provide time at home that needs filling and, too often, badly-prepared chaps (and lasses) take on those odd jobs around the house – without real thought or preparation – and come a cropper.

You won’t find me being bullied into DIY, I said. Oh no. Not me.

Instead, I was bullied by my wife, Maria, into going to Ikea and buying a Forhoja.

This is not a Mexican dish eaten with tortillas but a birch-wood kitchen trolley designed by a chap who used to invent puzzles for the Krypton Factor.

Yes, it came in a flat pack.

With a flat pack you get an instruction leaflet that features a little man. Sadly, I always empathise with the picture of him looking flummoxed because that’s me. Flummoxed.

“Good grief,” I said to Maria as I took out the bits and looked at the diagrams. “We’ve got a piano by mistake.”

Ikea sell all around the world and, therefore, have no English language guidance in their instruction leaflets. They are like a silent movie and supposed to be universally self explanatory. They are not. They hold Da Vinci Code secrets and hidden messages that, if incorrectly interpreted, leave you with bits over or screws that will not fit holes, no matter how hard you hit them with a hammer.

Never mind World Snooker Championships or European Cup Football, I think flat pack furniture could become a new global competitive sport. Except, of course, that the Swedes would have to be barred as they invented most of it.

Is there still time to get it accepted for the London Olympics?

Team flat-packing where four DIY experts get stuck in together. The four-by-four relay, where one stops and the other takes over. And free-style flat packing, where a solo enthusiast creates a piece of furniture without benefit of diagram while telling his wife to shut up because he knows what he’s doing. That would be my category.

To prove it, we now have a kitchen trolley piano next to the fridge.

Coincidence? Everything’s now safely in the bag, man!

PETER Hinchliffe, a former news editor of the Examiner, runs the website Open Writing.

In its own words is “features a feast of words from regular columnists, U3A writers and other authors. Every day there is something new to read.”

It’s a popular site (www.openwriting.com) and among the offerings old chum Peter has serialised The Limit, a thriller I wrote some years ago under the pseudonym Peter Lacey.

He planned to do the same with the sequel, The Bagman, which was published in 1989, but found it was missing from his shelves.

He went online to buy a second- hand copy and bought one from a chap in the south of England.

When it arrived he was pleased to find it in good condition, but amazed when he opened it and found a slip of paper inside that said: “Andrew, 200 words, please, Dick.”

This had been the review copy sent to the Examiner almost 20 years ago and the message was from then deputy editor Dick Mallinson asking crime reporter Andrew Hirst for a 200 word review.

How’s that for a coincidence?