"SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED"

FLAT-PACK FURNITURE was once a small segment of the market. Those who were up for a challenge could visit IKEA and test their wits against the evil geniuses who wrote their instruction manuals. It all worked out, provided you were attentive to every tiny detail and had the patience of a saint.

- Richard Glover

These days, though, nearly everything you buy has "some assembly required." When you order a chair, a bed or a barbecue, you get a bag of tiny parts and an instruction leaflet that needs a magnifying glass to decode. If I bought a new car, I'm sure I would be given 1,043 pieces, a wrench and an oxy-acetylene welding set.

Recently my wife, Jocasta, ordered two outdoor lounge chairs so we could enjoy some time together in the sun.

When they arrived, she suggested that I assemble them. The instruction pamphlet had a picture of a tiny, straightshouldered man and a clock indicating that the job would take 45 minutes.

They could have entered the pamphlet in the Booker Prize for Fiction. A more accurate ideogram would have been a clock spinning to infinity and a bent double fellow whose spirit was broken. I started work on the chairs at noon and finished, ironically, just as the sun was going down.