Okay, now hands up if the above is true, but none the less you own a least five items from that store? Some TROFAST shelves or a LACK sofa perhaps? Well, count me among your number. It's an ideological battle I've been having with myself this year. Did I not make a New Year resolution to never set foot in the maze of practical solutions to modern living again?

Well, hypocrite that I am, after spending three months scouring architectural salvage yards, antique dealers and flea markets for that rare furniture find that would cure my storage problems – while expressing my authentic personality and defiance of mass consumerism – I gave up this week and found the answer to my angst in an EXPEDIT 4 x 4 shelving unit, with funky relocatable drawers, from, yes – that big blue place.

Now, I could protest, as us Gen-Xers are prone to, about how capitalism left me no choice, and how I didn't buy into it, even as I handed over my credit card. But, I have to say, the experience was not entirely unpleasant. In fact, I was in and out within 20 minutes – with £189 worth of compact storage units. Having gone in without a measuring tape, I found many were provided. And my usual state – being lost in panic in the eternally recurring kitchen section, screaming for help to the non-existent assistants – did not reoccur. The place was swarming with yellow-topped staff, almost begging to help me. Weirder still, I didn't even need them. I seemed to orientate myself with a kind of internal consumer compass and found myself mentally drawing up an appraisal of the egalitarian genius of Swedish design as I queued to pay with only one other customer before me.

And this from a man who once had a nightmare of being locked in IKEA all night, wandering through endless mocked-up perfect kitchens and living rooms, searching for the lost exit, only to be woken in a cold sweat by the laughter of a hundred shoppers staring at my naked body, prone on a LILLEHAMER bed. (Yes, I was still dreaming.) And how many times have I felt giddy with nausea on being invited to the homes of new friends only to discover they had exactly the same FACTUM kitchen and same JOHAN work desk as myself? Did I not then rant that Nietzsche's nightmare of mass global conformity had been achieved, not by communism, but by an apparently benign furniture store?

So I am a hypocrite. Well, so what? I tell myself that the other credo – of discovering a shelving unit that was antiquey but uniquely me – was even more ideologically dodgy. Maybe the belief that furniture can express who you are is both a waste of time and a pathetic bourgeois delusion.

Having said that, when I lose my Allen key and the whole thing is askew and the MDF crumbles to bits, when I try to hammer it all into place and am left with a pile of wood chips and no possibility of a refund, I will sneer with righteous vengeance as Tyler Durden did in Fight Club: "F*** off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say… let's evolve, let the chips fall where they may."