IKEA: the wander-full, everyday…
I’m not usually one to do this but we had a frustrating allergy experience the other day which I think is worth drawing attention to. So you’ll have to forgive me for indulging in a bit of a rant.
We decided upon a family outing to IKEA. Having the house so regularly being viewed whilst still unsuccessful on the market has stretched our current storage set up so we tortured ourselves with perusing all the options for setting up a new home to effectively pick up some plastic boxes. It’s particularly frustrating given that we’ve struggled to get much interest after relaunching our home with a new estate agent (after a few licks of paint) and we were meant to be in the house we thought we’d bought by now. This week was yet another lurch in the emotional rollercoaster of moving house: we thought we’d found a buyer at the beginning of the week and booked to see a house that looked potentially exciting. Unfortunately, after making their initial offer, they then came to see the house again and went very quiet. We went to see the house we liked at the weekend and were aware it ticked a lot of boxes for us but by Monday morning it was clear that the offer we thought we were relying on was fading away. So it looks like we’ll watch the house we saw come and go like so many before it. It’s been a tense few days to digest that we’re still back at square one after all this time.
Anyway, the IKEA trip was more about the current than the future; specifically the completely essential requirement to have Duplo train sets available during the summer holidays! I quite like the IKEA set up. Granted it takes a fair bit of time and you really get your steps in for the day but I find if you get there early enough and embrace the process it can actually work quite well. Even if you’re not buying all that much. We did our meandering lap of the top floor, taking in inspiration from quirky room layouts and storage setups, ready to get a semi-early lunch at their restaurant.
We’ve eaten at IKEA quite a few times and it’s worked fairly well for us in the past. It’s never going to win any culinary awards and you certainly don’t go for the variety but we like the meatballs and it’s a fairly cheap and tasty meal for all. Or has been…
I think the first time we went (at least to eat as a family with allergies) I struggled a bit to get allergy information and they had to find an elusive folder for me to look through. But since then the allergy information online has been quite straightforward and you can choose with reasonably high confidence of what options are or aren’t available. This time, we tried to have a look on line on the way there but found that the allergy information was confusing. When I asked one of the front of house team, I was pointed towards some computer screens off to the side for answers. Unfortunately these were the wrong screens and after 5 minutes of trying to work out why my only options were to work out whether I was an IKEA member, I went back and was pointed to the correct screens at the other end of the room.
Unfortunately these second set of screens only gave us the same information we could find online. The issue was that instead of listing all of the options and the allergens in each of these; they had instead grouped the options into a consolidated fixed meal with none of the flexibility that the actual restaurant options represent. For example, you used to be able to see the allergen information for the meatballs, the cream sauce, the chips, the mashed potato etc… all separately. Now they have decided that the ‘meatball meal’ contains a pre-determined set of options and the allergens are listed for that set as one. This means that all the meatball options that come with the (separate) sauce are listed as containing milk. I’ve always known I couldn’t have the cream sauce and been happy to go without it. But now I have to guess that removing the cream sauce makes the rest of the options dairy free. And guessing allergens is not my favourite game.
In the end, we managed to find the meatballs on their own as a ‘side’ in the allergen menu and saw that they contained egg which ruled them out for my daughter and wife. There were few other options that we could be sure would work, even if our suspicion was that was removing one ‘option’ would make it fine. We did manage to get food for everyone and we coped just fine in the end but I was left quite frustrated by the whole exercise. Not least because we arrived to order food well before midday but buy the time we’d got to the bottom of the allergy options (and finding the right screens) we had two hungry kids and the queues had quadrupled in length.
I’ll get off my high horse shortly, but there are a couple of things that I find really weird about this decision to change the allergy information in this way: I can understand why IKEA would want to do this if they were very fixed about what combinations you could order as a meal but the staff are proactively flexible when you’re ordering and you’re given the chance to include/exclude certain items and even switch between chips or mash etc. when you choose. So to move from giving allergy information at the option level to the meal level seems deliberately unhelpful to me. I struggle, even playing devil’s advocate on IKEA’s side, why they would want to move to this with a menu that varies so little day-to-day, season-to-season. The other thing that seems particularly bonkers is that they specifically do vegetarian options (as you’d expect with a restaurant operating at this scale) and I believe the vegetarian ‘vegeballs’ are also vegan. But because the vegeballs meal on the allergen menu now comes with the cream sauce: it’s a contains milk which means you can no longer see whether there is even a vegan option.
To make matters worse, the only person I could speak to the entire time we were there (rather than joining the 20-30 minute queue to then hold up the serving staff behind the counter with finding me allergen info) was a single cashier taking payments from the 100+ people at some stage of ordering and paying. To give her credit, she did actually leave the till to guide me over to the screens when I couldn’t find them but there was no way I was going to be able to press her further on getting detailed allergen information with so many people waiting to pay.
I really hope this is a temporary thing and IKEA revert to allergy labelling at the option level on line. Or at least share some good rational for why they’ve made these changes.
In other news I got to have an evening out for almost certainly the first time since three kids! I went to see Oppenheimer with my best friend (Alan from the Free From Humour podcasts, if you’re familiar). Given that I’m a huge Christopher Nolan fan and that we both studied quantum mechanics and general relativity at university together; this was always going to be a fairly key watch for me. I don’t think any film I’ve ever seen has had such a roll call of famous mathematicians and physicists before.
I won’t start trying my hand a film critiquing here other than to say I really enjoyed the film and was amazed how intense and quick 3 hours of film could seem. I strongly suspect it will feature heavily in awards seasons and I’m really glad I had the chance to see it on a big screen for the full experience. I’d recommend it if you’re thinking of going and haven’t yet.
Perhaps the best bit of the evening though was just the chance to hang out with an old friend and catch up. Something I’ve never really managed (or prioritised) to find time for since COVID lockdowns and the two additional kids that followed after. Naturally it’s always difficult to have a thriving social life with a 3-month-old baby and it will get easier as the kids get older, but I do miss just chatting nonsense with a good friend and am at a bit of a loss of how to make it a more regular feature.
We were lucky enough to give ourselves about an hour before the film started to catch up on the big and little things going on in our lives. (Don’t worry I wasn’t one of those people who talks through the film – I think the only thing I said in the entire 3 hours was to point out that the physicist playing the bongos was Richard Feynman, a charasmatic lecturer and Nobel Prize winner in physics for his work in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED). If you’re interested, QED is the reason you appear to see a wet shimmer on a hot road, but I won’t go into that now – mostly because I don’t have the understanding from which to explain it for a start!).
The catch up before the film gave us the ground work to just discuss the film and the more profound thinkings it raised afterwards. We probably sat in the car park for another hour watching it slowly empty as people filed out from other showings before heading home ourselves. Apart from being so deliriously tired that I’m not sure that I made any sense, this was the best bit of the evening and took me back to the long nights of meandering conversations at university which I remember so fondly. I won’t take you through all of our conversations – that wouldn’t be proper now, would it? – but there was one part of the conversation that stuck with me afterwards: ‘What’s worthwhile?’
To give it some context, this stemmed from discussions about job satisfaction and the all-too-revisited ‘what if you won the lottery’ conversation. But actually it was from me admitting that I struggle with addiction to my phone and the sort of low value dopamine hits that social media scrolling is virtually engineered to provide. I hate that I can waste as much time as I do to just purposelessly scrolling through Twitter (I’m not sure I can bring myself to call it X yet) and Facebook. In the context of the question above, this seems clearly not worthwhile. But it begged the question: what is? I hold novel reading (something my friend does avidly) in much higher regard than social media surfing and stand by this high-level judgement. But at the end of the day (or perhaps, book) how is that really furthering your self or others on a level so much removed from social media? Even working hard or learning a new skill is either gratification for the sake of it or an ends to a means; are these things to be held in high regard?
I found myself looking back over my life and wondering which moments in my near 40-year existence felt most valuable or worthwhile. To my surprise the answers often came back to the union between creation (art, music, film etc…) and human interaction. Specifically, memories of making music and the buzz of adding to what someone else is doing to create something which is bigger than the sum of its parts. The other memory, which feels strangely analogous, is the genesis of new romantic relationships: those early flirtations or sparks where something original is created from a place beyond either of you individually. I don’t feel like I really have the language to describe this in a way that does it justice but these moments are something beyond just gratification and move into being worthwhile. In short, experience that I feel I could look back on and claim to feel a life well lived.
While I am clearly past the days of sparking the genesis of new romantic relationships (having been with my wife for 18 years there are still moments of evolution that reflect the excitement of those early days, it’s just that they now look like a child growing up or a shared battle conquered) and I don’t see myself starting the indie band of my teenage years up again any time soon; I find myself wondering how I can capture these worthwhile moments more and the doom scrolling less. The first pass is probably to put my phone down the toilet, something I genuinely wish I could do if I didn’t rely on it for so much of my necessary day-to-day life. But I also note that a key theme is that social interaction; something I was never great at carving out myself and something that naturally only gets more difficult with three young kids.
Ironically, to bring it back round to moving house, I do think that moving back towards Oxford would help in so many ways. For reasons I struggle to understand, we have more close friends in that direction than we have here and a house with more space would make it so much easier to be sociable at home than we currently are. I worry that I am guilty of looking to purchase things with money as an attempt to plug holes in areas created more by personality and character (a trend I have noticed and had pointed out that I share with my family – sorry dad!). But we’ve been in limbo for so long with this planned house move that I feel like we’re all ready to build some new good habits, just in the home we think we’ll be building them in.
Fingers crossed that something comes along soon and we can find more moments of purpose. Along side the very important (and highly rewarding) responsibility of raising my three gorgeous children, obviously!
Toodlepips x