Time to leave our idyll at Lower Mill Estate in the Cotswolds and head home via Ikea. Yep, if ever there was a glass of ice water in the face end to a holiday it's a trip to the home of flat pack furniture; the place where people from Sweden have made Allen and his key famous.
After five days of lying by the pool, sitting on the deck and relaxing on our balconies - this is Bea's balcony top right - the perfect way to keep that relaxed holiday vibe is to head into the one-way system of a store that has more square feet than the entire hobbit race.
You might think we're bringing this on ourselves, and in some ways we are, but this visit is a necessity due to the incompetence of the staff at the Warrington store and the call centre. More than 12 months ago we purchased four book shelf lights. We're big readers. We still buy books. We feel our books shelves need illuminating so that visitors to our house can enjoy a spotlight on the knowledge we have consumed.
The lights we bought are on a single power lead but you have to buy this separately. We weren't told that when we first bought the lights in Warrington so when we arrived home 4 hours later and tried to set up our lights we couldn't as there was no way to connect them to the mains.
A call to the help desk and we ordered the necessary additions - this was after many email exchanges via the online help function - and several days later our power cable arrived. Singular. We have 4 lights. I explained this on the phone. We now had the means of firing up one of the lights. But which one? The shelf that includes English Passengers and Bill Bryson's History of Everything or perhaps Bear Grylls' Facing Up and John Peel's A Life in Music are more worthy.
So today, we broke the spell of five days of relaxation by spending 90 minutes in Ikea to pick up three connectors to make use of lights we bought in 2012. Let's hope they all work as I'm fairly sure my receipt won't cover them if they don't. Allen didn't serve us.
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