I just love Charlie Brooker’s column in The Guardian. His latest take on the media lists is spot on. And is so impressive, that it clearly lightened up my day when I was nailing together a bookshelf, just by wondering if it would make it into his list of “908 Items of Flat-Pack Furniture to Assemble Before You Die”.
Definitely, I would NOT put the ARGOS bookshelf into this list, but the small animal wooden log cabin should easily be able to make it into the Top Ten. Because the little hut is made of untreated wood for the guinea pigs to eat, consists just of 4 walls and a roof, and has got three windows and a door and has a beautifully rustic and simple architecture and looks pretty snug, too. It’s so easy to assemble that nobody would ever need even instructions for use. With a price of only £10, any first-time buyer and property developer in Britain will be doomed to be jealous.
The bookshelf though was rather horrifying; I needed about a week to understand the instructions and another week to know how to put it together without following their obligatory legal disclaimer: “It would be useful to ask someone to help out at this stage”. I really don’t like to nail the back on, which is just a sheet of formaldehyd-ified sheet of an unidentifiable mixture. And in the end, I was mortified when I thought I had lost one of the little metal pins acting as shelf-supports, they should really have put in some more. But for a strange reason, there were several screws present which was not needed, as well as the plastic nailing precision tool was broken.