Lesbian Mecca- its all about the balls

My other-half and I spent much of yesterday trawling around Ikea. It was time to return to the lesbian Mecca.
My lover has now recovered from the mirth that ensued when, early on in our relationship, on one of my first visits to Norway, after spying the store: I exclaimed "Hey, you've got Ikea in Scandinavia too!". Several years better acquainted, a momentary aberration has now been chalked up to my ability for large parts of life to pass me by; I have officially become an oxymoron (I tenaciously keep the oxy prefix) and been dubbed "the most stoopid clever person" she knows.

Anyhow, I digress, Ikea. (I've been fishing for a clever acronym but these things can't be forced.) Ikea trips are fascinating in a relationship dynamic sense- in terms of the shared goals being literally made concrete: if you find you are getting in each other's way in the mock-up 35 km square flat, then the sea-scape is becoming Turner-esque. If you're all Billy and she's all Gertha, it won't work. If you cannot walk past any partly-shielded beds without suggestive raised eyebrows and check out your partners arse when they are checking out the lower shelves, then all is healthy (clean bill of health here, sayeth I). Ikea in Norway has playfully docked its minimalistic cap to the potency of Ikea and its bed ads are quite raunchy here. I believe ending up with the couple in a store in fact (maybe their ad prewired my instore voyeuristic flirting).

A conceptual mutation accelerated ideological evolution and someware (deliberate misspelling, believe its called onomatopeia- which is ironically very hard to spell) house-became home, home became lifestyle- which is broad enough to include alternative lifestyles. In fact, the staff are so used to lesbian couples, that as you skip into view- joined at the hand- their expressions assume that seen-it-all-sheen. Norwegians are expert at this. Nonchalance (ie. non-plussedness) is practised nowhere better then here in Norway, and ironically phenomenally lacking in La France (where at Sarkozy's right hand stands hyperbole, actually is it possible there could be anything to the right in the spatial spectrum of Monsieur Sarkozy?)

Anyhow, being awash in cool classic design aroused my Libran aesthetic sensitivity, while the homeliness had my beautiful Cancer-crab-partner salivating with desire, cooing "just imagine..." and then leaving me to fill in the blanks, each time we entered a pseudo-kitchen/living room. Such was the seductive nature of the store that we followed the arrows as commanded and even enjoyed a romantic meal in their canteen/restaurant. Scandinavian meatballs, to be precise, and to be authentic, next time order "Kjøtboller være så snill"/meatballs be so kind/ kyutboller var sho snill, only don't say all three they'll think you're crazy. It was there that I caved, and the lifestyle became too irresistible: around the same time that whatever they put in the meatballs worked its magic on me. If there is a lesbian equivalent of catnip- its in the Ikea meatballs. Food-for-thought, literally.

Post-balls, I found myself fantasizing about us having little baby lesbians, and wondering where the trolley-loads of babies were from and which cryptic aisle code I needed to write down and then lose en route to the warehouse (my usual procedure) to buy me some Ikea sperm. Even our shopping list/wish list became faintly like a life-goals visualisation exercise embodied in furniture and soft-furnishings. "Become tantric sex master/mistress" leads one to the candle section (making babies should be fun after all, can't allow procreation to replace hedonism). Becoming a self-dubbed chef rather than a cook would be a natural progression in a well spaced kitchen. While the home offices impart a work ethic with Protestant zeal (in the sociological sense). Achieving my ideal balanced (Libran) life was simply a matter of interior design. My partner's unfulfilled Cancerian yearnings for domestic bliss were no longer out of reach due to a clashing nomadic tendencies, she had an epiphany, and it was suddenly all a question of interior design and hitherto due to a lack of that Ikea magic. (We both had balls.)

Regarding the balls with lesbian catnip (note the feline affinity for us Sapphists), I feel I should qualify this statement. I am not given to tossing around such wild accusations, I shall endeavour to domesticate them somewhat or at least atone for my rashness.
Proof 1. Post-meatball acquisitions went through the store roof, we couldn't keep ourselves from picking up and fondling whatever we passed (although the cute female Unicef rep was exempt, just).
Proof 2. A strange sense of euphoria accompanied the smallest design features, bandying around words like genius (for peg-design and the trivialities of life: now morphed into beautiful, often overlooked details.
Proof 3. I am now sat in a bamboo forest (it can't be right-wing monetarist consumerism if its Feng-shui, can it?) where all the furnishings have their own names. What with that and my just-the-right-side-of-delusional dependency on "age-defying" cocoa butter, and an impulse-buy of a cuddly panda bear, and this little pad of ours smells and looks like a sort of Amazonian wilderness, a minimalist one of course.

For those enslaved to the Ikea philosophy, preachers in the guise of after-sales support service are always just a phonecall/ e-mail away. A year ago, I couldn't assemble our new flat-pack love nest, I rang up and said, I've just bought the bla-bla bed (I think that was the name) and "the voice of heard-it-all before" interjected with "the slats are laid out convex-wise", then sensing an extra-silent pause that could only be due to intellect deficiency on my part, as I raced to remember physics lessons of yore, gave me the stupid person suffix in words free from multiple syllables or abstract concepts: "like a bridge", then sensing she should clarify further, "not like a boat, like a bridge". By the time my partner entered the room I was putting the finishing touches to my FIY job (F***-It-up Yourself), and murmuring in knowledgeable tones, "Oh-yes, it was convex", even daring to offer up a "thought so". Hoping the murky grey-lie would somehow obscure my earlier lack of problem solving ability beyond my repeated exclamations of, "Pictograms, why pictogram instructions?", topped off with the ego-balming and faintly arrogant sign of things to come: "I speak five bl**dy languages and not one of them is hieroglyphics".

What concerns me is the bed episode is a scene faintly reminiscent of one with an ex (could we be shaped by our exes?) Said ex once buffeted me away from a flat-pack bookshelf I was happily tinkering with and inexplicably shrieked at me, "My father's a carpenter!" whilst pouncing on the screwdriver and dominating the project. No further explanation or apology to atone for such odd behaviour was ever offered up. Indeed, my current partner (and soulmate, just to negate the temporary nature of "current") had an ex who did exactly the same thing (we checked rapidly, not the same one): they had a Jesus complex maybe.

I've wandered off the arrows again, although the theme of delusions of grandeur and born-again experiences remains the same (walk the "non-straight" line through my hot-waffle and you too shall reach enlightenment in a few steps). If I sound a little dazed, I blame it on the balls, I'm just not used to them. Thankfully, the evangelical power of the Ikea rhetoric and food-drugging is waning now, and a towel peg looks like, well, a towel peg. As Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", sometimes balls are just balls.