Drunk in Ikea

This afternoon, after a Michelin-starred steamed dumpling in Causeway Bay, I headed over to Lantau.

One of our friends is remodelling the interior of a house in Pui O, so we got to sit in a building site and drink champagne, while looking down on the beauty of the bay. There's nothing like the scent of recently sawn plywood, combined with the taste of champagne and hummus. Possibly that is a little bit confused; we should have been eating hors'd'oevres (or spelling them correctly) rather than a recently purchased packet of bagel bites. Ah, them's the breaks.

After a magnum of champagne and a few cans of Blue Girl beer (what could be a better comparison?) we wandered down to Treasure Island, which I was rather disappointed by. I thought it would be a piratical restaurant where every member of the wait staff had a parrot, an eye patch and one less leg than normal, but it turned out to be two bored women desperate to turn out the lights and get home. We had some Mexican food and fish and chips - par for the course in Hong Kong, I guess.

After this, we took the ferry back to the main island and went to Ikea. This is a wonderful experience once you're full of booze, as you'll be devoid of shame and can cheerfully sit on every sofa, groping behind the cushions for loose change/discarded iPhones/missing children.

We didn't find anything (disappointing for Ikea on a Sunday night, apparently) but did end up buying some stuffed toys and a bunch of towels. More the fools us, I suppose.

Ikea is a horrible place when sober, a maze of minimalist furnishings, scented with meatballs, confusing stuffed toys staring at you at every turn.

However, there's a special joy to shopping in Ikea drunk, as the crowds no longer provide annoyance or inconvenience, although there's also some risk. Not so much that your inebriated self might buy the wrong thing (hurrah for enlightened Scandinavian exchange policies) but that you might be too drunk when you get home to realise you're too drunk to assemble your furniture, yet not drunk enough to fall harmlessly asleep.

Oh well. I suppose the bendy bar stool that is the centrepiece of our living room should be a constant reminder of my previous failures in this department.

Remember kids, alcohol and cheap allen keys don't mix. This time round we got away lightly; one bright orange moose and one bear is a small price to pay for forgetting to drink to unconsciousness earlier in the evening.

Oh, and we were silly enough to go for a foot massage to finish the night off, just in case a hangover wasn't enough masochism for one weekend.