The eternal quest of the human being is to conquer his loneliness.

You don’t have to see the whole staircase in the climb to succeed either, but simply take the first step and go from there.

Trouble is I live in a bungalow, so I drove to IKEA instead.

The dog had piddled by the back door and I needed a bright plastic bowl to support the clean-up operation and lift the general mood. I’ve also been on the lookout for a coat stand and a shoe rack for the porch ever since I moved in here, so after four years I bit the bullet.

The best part about being alone is that you don’t have to answer to anybody which is a good job, because no woman worth their salt would want a late night trip to IKEA, would they? (Would they?!)

‘Bowl, coat stand and shoe rack’, I repeated in my mind as I entered a Swedish maze from hell, until a NYSKOLID dish drying mat I never knew I needed caught the eye.

Bowl. Coat stand. Shoe rack.

Tucking an industrial sized yellow canvas bag under my arm seemed like a shrewd contingency plan on the off-chance I’d spot anything else. Not that I would because I didn’t need anything else and I wouldn’t be buying anything else…

…Aside from a RINNIG dish brush, an ÄNGARNA football lamp, a BLÅHAJ shark and a DJUNGELSKOG game – because you can never have too many cuddly toys or packs of cards in the event of a guest coming round for tea.

Which reminded me, I needed a trio of chrome BLOMNING tins to make my tea, coffee and sugar storage look more presentable in the kitchen, obviously.

A KONCIS garlic press was another pre-requisite, as was a decorative moose called HÖSTAGILLE, because my dog’s nickname is Moose and it would look all kitsch next to the RIBBA photo frames of Arthur hitting cricket balls.

My failing eyesight just about made out that the HÖSTAGILLE was a ‘decorative item made of solid pine with felt antlers, designed to add a cozy, forest-inspired touch to the home’, although I couldn’t be sure because I hadn’t brought my glasses.

An optician test earlier in the day confirmed that I could only just read that an old man called Norman was carrying a heavy chair across the living room in the same sized font.

I paused to feel sorry for Norman’s futile existence, before spiralling into the lighting department with the industrial sized yellow canvas bag weighing heavy on my shoulder.

In a different space and time, Norman squints at a laminate vision card in thick rim glasses, reading the trials of a middle aged man called Ben, who was carrying a lilac BONDSKÄR coat stand from IKEA across the hallway.

‘The silly old sod,’ he muttered with the shake of his head.

The fun and games were just beginning as I tried to decipher where my coat stand could be collected, from the shorthand scrawl on a dog eared piece of paper.

Aisle 32 for the BONDSKÄR; aisle 40 for the GREJIG shoe rack.

Wrestling the items to the self-check out zone, I zapped barcode after barcode like a retail edition of Laser Quest.

£101.45.

One thing to pay over the odds for a load of stuff I didn’t need; quite another to return home without the plastic bowl I went to purchase for the clean-up operation in the first place.

A second puddle of piss greeted me by the back door.

A thought then etched itself in my mind from the tip of a little IKEA pencil, scribbled in answer to the loneliness-conquering-conundrum…

‘It’s the price you have to pay!’