In the stratosphere and Ikea, no-one can hear you scream

I'm torn. Which is the better way to start a new year? Is it:

1. Flying home from London to Moscow via a one hour stop-over in Zurich, convinced that the total saving of, oh, about £150, is completely worth it because, what's an extra hour or two on your journey when you have two sons who absolutely love flying? Until, that is...

...the plane for the first leg of your journey leaves 20 minutes late, cutting your 1 hr window to change planes to 40 minutes in an unknown airport where you don't know how long the disembarking / changing gates / re-scanning bags / resubmitting passports for visa checking / embarking process takes...

.... and your husband notices in an annoyingly relaxed fashion just after you have boarded the first of your two flights that he only has baggage tags for 3 of the 4 bags you checked in (WTF?)...

...and your younger son proceeds uncharacteristically to throw up on not one but both of the flights you take.

Or...

2. Spending a grey and drizzly Russian Bank Holiday afternoon in Ikea with most of the population of Moscow, all of whom seem to be there with their extended families on a lovely day out, as you stagger around with jetlag and (look away now, any gentlemen reading this) period pains, trying to hold an intelligent conversation with your husband about bathroom cabinets and frying pan lids. Although not in the same section of the store, obviously.

Hmmm. The jury's out on this one, I think.

Dear So & So

Dear Mr Ikea,

just a quick question. Really, I won't take much of your time. I mean, I know how busy you must be, designing all that furniture and travelling round Sweden taking photographs of all sorts of good-looking people showing us how to use tables, chairs, cutlery and other difficult stuff like that. I should - I live in a house almost entirely furnished by your store in Moscow, after all, and believe me, given the time it takes me to put some of your flat-packed furniture together (bookshelves, anyone?), I can't imagine how long it must take you to design it...

Anyway, I do just have one teensy question.

If you can design all this clever stuff (pull-out sofa beds, for example... Who would have thought of putting a special drawer underneath to store your guest bedding in, that doubles up as somewhere useful to hide the rolls of wrapping paper from your sons who are convinced that the shiny red cellophane one is the spitting image of a Jedi light-sabre and therefore ideal for beating the living daylights out of each other with? Genius...), I just wondered...

Why on earth do you make the barcode stickers on the top of your storage boxes so bloody difficult to remove?

Yours, (in search of a plaster following an unfortunate incident with a table knife and the label on top of a certain storage box),

Potty Mummy.

PS - if you want to watch something really funny, (and which I had nothing to do with) I recommend you check out this link to a video by Dan & Dan (courtesy of an inital pointer from Powder Room Graffiti). Go on - you know you want to.