I have yet again found my ultimate tribe in a high-street shop, this time Ikea. As far as the eye could see, there were middle-aged women trying to choose kitchen essentials for their late-teenaged sons, for whom the next chapter of life, in which they move to another city and never once use a kitchen, cannot commence fast enough. I don’t know where all the girls were – did they do it all online? Have they been collecting teapots for years, as part of a wistful university trousseau?
The negotiation started with a chopping board, which my son said he absolutely did not need or want. I said, “How are you going to chop vegetables?”, and he said he would cross that bridge when he came to it, and I said: “Oh my God, you’re going to get scurvy.” Behind me a woman and her son were arguing about whether or not he needed a cheese grater, which ended in her saying: “I think you might be about to starve.”
The household-item shop is a uniquely confronting experience, I realised halfway through, and one I had in no way prepared for. It’s the moment you find out how much domestic wisdom you’ve managed to impart. When you get a question like “Can you wash sheets?”, it turns out the answer is: “None.” I remember going round a far larger Ikea with my own mother, when I was in my 30s and my youngest was a baby, and my mum noticing, on the way in, that my daughter had nits. I say “nits” – it was one tiny nit. “Give her a chance,” I said. “She’s barely got any hair.” My mum, taking this as proof that I wasn’t serious enough about hygiene, tried to buy every bath-related item in the shop – at the top of her voice. By the third hour, there was nobody in there who didn’t know about the nit.
Ikea should have a sign at the door, saying: “Parents! If you’re having this conversation now, it’s already too late.” It would probably sound quite melodic in Swedish.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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