Pleasure Island

Pleasure Island. You’ve got to remember. Out of Pinocchio? Take a moment to dredge it up. Because it's way down there, buried deep in your psyche, one of the great, uncontested stories at the base of you, like the Nativity and Tommy Cooper dying and the Big Snow of 1981. That was the year you turned eight, and also the year you decided to get your fledging consciousness organised, and stuffed it full of things like Pleasure Island, things with a heft to them, things you thought might come in handy, little realising that for the rest of your life you would approach all sorts of crisis situations with a psychic toolkit packed by an eight year old.

Anyway, Pleasure Island. It all kicks off when Pinocchio falls in with a gang of brattish street kids. (I've forgotten how; maybe they sang to him. He always was a sucker for a catchy tune. Which is the general problem with Pinocchio- the cartoon is apparently intended as a fable about the risks and responsibilities of maturity, but the real message you take away is: don’t trust musicians. A pretty viable message too, as it turns out.) In turn, the urchins fall in with a crew of Satanic circus barkers, who carry them on a hayride to a queasy looking Coney Island mock-up, where they gorge themselves silly and drink and smoke and shoot pool and hurl abuse at the donkeys that are unaccountably roaming free in this funpark, until, in a twist I genuinely didn't see coming, they find themselves turning into donkeys too (the most terrifying scene for me as a child wasn't the sudden onset of braying, or the floppy ears or the fur, but the part where the kids looked at their mutating forearms and realised that they couldn't bend their elbows). It ends with the Satanic circus barkers, who have now revealed themselves in their true guise as Satanic donkey wranglers, locking the whole crew into crates and shipping them out for export to donkey-beaters worldwide. It’s a sequence that still stands out today for its brutality and misanthropy; a lot of awful things were happening in 1940, and Pleasure Island seems to plug into all of them.

As I grew older, I realised that Pleasure Island wasn’t unique. This was a motif which had been used by preachers and painters and storytellers to scare people off their own appetites for centuries: from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. But I never saw it put to use as a business model. Never, that is, until last Sunday, when E. and I took the final, decisive step into coupledom, and visited Ikea.

At the start, Ikea seems ridiculously user-friendly; it’s as if someone designed a walk-through internet. You and all the other doting couples walk along a gracefully curving path through a wonderland of domesticity. Everywhere there are sofas and chairs and wardrobes and shelves that are charming and stylish and cheap, and promise to shear all complications out of your life and leave you both with nothing to do but loll around all day in bleached white dressing gowns, drinking bowls of coffee and reading Le Figaro. To each side, there are apartment mock-ups showing how Ikea furniture can make your 20 square metre studio flat look like a villain’s penthouse from a Luc Besson movie, and even though their idea of optimising space seems to include covering up all the damn windows, you are charmed and inspired, and want, more than anything else in the world, to be a villain in a Luc Besson movie. And all you need to do to claim any of this plenitude is to take a stylish stub of an Ikea pencil and note its number in a little pad, a process that is actually less physically demanding than pointing and clicking. So you walk along the mazy path, plucking items of wonderful furniture as you pass, a wardrobe here, a bookcase there, and believing with all your heart that it is going to be magically spirited into your living room, that, in fact, it is all there waiting for you right now. Then you go downstairs, and steady yourself for what looks like a brief trot to the checkouts, when the path unaccountably veers rightwards and leads you into a giant hangar of a warehouse, and that, my friend, is where the donkey wranglers come out.

Two hours later, braying, exhausted, unable to bend our elbows, we arrive at the check-outs. We’re toting enough pine to build a barn, and we’ve just completed three long-haul expeditions against the crowds back to the showrooms upstairs, first to get hinges, then to get door handles, and finally to get the right door handles.
“All in all, I think it’s all gone pretty well,” I say.
“Have you got the piece of paper, honey?” E. says.
“The piece of paper we got at the sales desk upstairs when we came in?” I say. “The piece of paper that this guy needs to scan to process our entire order?”
“That’s the one,” E. says.
“I gave it to you,” I tell her.
“You know you didn’t,” she says.
“I gave it to you, then,” I tell the cashier. He looks at me blankly.
“Aside from that,” I say, “I think it’s all gone very well indeed.”