A world of IKEA

The IKEA spring catalogue has finally arrived. A couple of weeks ago, there was a bit of a buzz in the German blogosphere about the imminent/long-desired arrival of the Northern hemisphere's autumn IKEA catalogue, so when I laid my hot little hands on Sweden's contribution to low price homeware pornography, I got to thinking - one day, surely, the whole Western world will be IKEA-ised. Every home, from San Fancisco to Sydney, will be chockers with Billys, Lekvigs and Ömmerdöls. Mind you, as the inimitable Will Self pointed out in The Times as far back as March 1998, this might be a strangely alluring thing:

I begin to entertain fantasies of completely reordering my life around timelessly modern, Swedish furniture and home furnishings. Winters spent in the far north, cocoa mugs resting on warm beech; I only venture out when the local maniac chainsaws another sheep to pieces. Then spring. The long journey south with my daughter-in-law driving me in my customised fifties Volvo (dashboard of birch-free antisepsis), with only the occasional roadside break for temporal hallucinations. Then autumn with Liv Ullmann in a cherry-beech, split-level house on a southern islet. As I chop cauliflower on a solid beech chopping board (a snip at £16), she remains resolutely silent. Winter again. Death plays me at chess and wins repeatedly; although at Pictionary I continue to reign supreme.

Is IKEA indeed "a union of action and reification which nullifies traditional Marxist categories of surplus value", as Self has it, or is it just nice furniture that makes you feel a tad blonder and go a bit ABBA-esque just by looking at it?

Ah, who cares. I can feel a bit of homeware shopping coming on!