Is Your Dad Home?

Driving in South London gets more stressful every day. Last weekend, my wife and I took the kids for a day out at Ikea – they love that pine-based flat-pack, and no mistake! Now, according to my A-Z, Ikea is barely 6 miles away as the crow flies. All I can say is that the crow obviously doesn’t fly through Sunday afternoon traffic in a Ford Mondeo… (At least, I’ve never actually seen one do it. I could be wrong.)

It took us the best part of 9 hours to get there, and we only stopped once to take photographs of a semi in Mitcham that had a particularly interesting gable end (in my opinion).

Women and motors, eh? My wife insists on promoting the half-baked theory that if I put the engine back in, we’d go a lot faster. Yeah, well if you know so much about cars, why don’t you drive? And so she did, for the rest of the journey. We sat in stony silence as we pulled into the car park, and she was a bit off with me for the rest of the day. Needless to say, there was no custard for me when we got home – let alone custard with hundreds and thousands!

Ikea, as always, was a delight. The kids made their usual beeline for the kebab van, while my wife and I bought our weekly supply of light bulbs. I’m still not sure how we manage to get through so many of them. I’m not 100% convinced of their nutritional value, either. But the kids seem to like them, and you know how hard it can be to find anything that children will actually eat.