Ikea pre-war column John Vanderaart

At the moment – early May – I am in France at the familiar location. Earlier in the year, my French neighbor, who has been retired for a long time, warned me about the upcoming drought. On her strict advice I bought, among other things, more than 100 bottles of drinking water. It has not become that upcoming drought, because the lake has never been so chock full and I have never seen the garden so green. Fortunately, there are still enough sun rays to warm up and pre-tan between the downpours. Forget this further… The same French neighbor across the street is modernizing herself and (to his dismay) her husband. Now the furniture is on offer. She doesn’t want to throw anything away, so the excess stuff goes to me. I have, she says, nothing but rubbish… One of those surplus things is an oak cupboard (= armoire en chêne) from well before the great war (= la grande Guerre). So a 100+ year old case. The thing had been deposited in my attic by the neighbor (in clumsy pieces). I looked at those pieces and I thought it was fine. That was not going to work for him, just like that upcoming drought. But I hadn’t counted on the innkeeper – in the form of my wife’s cousin’s handy man – “An old-fashioned plumber who loves difficult construction puzzles!” The more complicated the issue, the greater his enjoyment. Here in France, where there is no such thing as easy, he always coos through his mini-holidays. Anyway, the clumsy pieces brought him into utter ecstasy. That had to and that would be put back together: “Now!” Only: “I can’t find a manual anywhere. Not even (…) on the internet.” But some old-fashioned cleverness and some wooden dowels were enough to put that – by the way very heavy – oak cupboard back together. The sequence of sliding and inserting was obvious and – after all these years – it was right down to the square millimetre. Proud as a monkey with more than seven genitals, he stood looking at it and spoke the prophetic words: “Well, they can learn something from that at Ikea!” With which it was time for beers and bitterballen imported from the Netherlands. The woman and neighbor across the street smelled the smoking pot and liked to grab a snack. Voila!

Such an old French oak cabinet is easy to assemble. Ikea should take note of that…