Like many academic families we were wired up early, acquiring our first PC in 1982, a hulking IBM which eventually suffered a massive system failure brought on by an accumulation of croissant crumbs between the keys. A year later, the better to pursue our ceaseless journeys across the Atlantic, we bought a Compaq portable, carried by a top handle like an old Singer sewing machine.
My enthusiasm for computers and my incredulity when I first saw words materialise on a blank screen now seem as na?vely remote as the anachronistic innocence of postwar movies. None the less, I am convinced that coming back to the US, I will be returning to the land of digital efficiency. So I decide, still sitting in the east end of London, to buy my new household online. Fired by this notion, and the victim of a thousand triumphalist articles on globalisation, I sit down and summon from across the ether the home page of Ikea, USA. Ten minutes later I have before me a map of suburban Chicago with a large cheerful star marking the site of the local store. Although this could have been ascertained in one tenth of the time by telephoning international directory enquiries and looking at a map, I glow with such a sense of triumph that I click on catalogue and wait for the magic to start, my credit card and Chicago address neatly placed beside me.
But of course the PC has not been born yet that can download the whole of the Ikea catalogue. I have to be content with a pitiful selection; there is no facility for online ordering and, by midnight, it all becomes surreally absurd. Here am I, a supposedly grown-up woman, with three degrees, two children asleep on the floor above me, and no sense, patiently sitting in front of a screen on which, slice by slice, a white "Ektorp" sofa slowly accumulates.
And so it is that, a few days later, we are reeling to and fro across the ground floor of Ikea in Schaumberg, Illinois, balancing (on three absurdly skittish trolleys) four armchairs, eight desk legs, two desk tops, one dining table, 40 pieces of cutlery, three desk lamps and other sundry items grubbed up in the cabin-fever that sets in as soon as the automatic doors close behind you. Our trolleys veer uncontrollably about like demented metal-detectors above an Iron-Age hoard and we advance, crab-wise, towards the check-out, coaxing along the third trolley, now with half of a spare hand, now with a knee.
We arrive without loss of limb, but we have trouble handing over our money. In comparison with its US counterpart (even, in this case, its Swedish-American counterpart), British retailing is so streamlined that I wonder, leaning against my Pisan Tower of cardboard boxes, why it hasn't taken over the world. In America parting with cash is often a slow and bureaucratic process, partly because banking services are so decentralised and partly because numeracy and literacy standards are so low. This time our English and Italian credit cards are rejected as English and Italian and our US one has been discontinued on the grounds that we've spent too much. So we have to settle in the end for that quaint pre-global activity of writing a cheque, before lurching across the carpark to the nearly new white Toyota Camry my husband bought for $18,000 when he thought he was having a conversation with two charming salesmen about the decline of the Pakistani cricket team.
Idly reading the nonsensical Ikea "service commitment" as I wait at the till, I am reminded that I have come back to the country where it is not only people that part company with alarming frequency. Words and meanings, too, live in a state of divorced and anomic isolation, torn asunder by wave upon wave of linguistic hyper-inflation. Thus on the side of my teabag packet, under the heading "Ingredients," is written, "High Grown Darjeeling Green Teas, Natural Succulent Flavors and the mumbled chantings of a certified tea-shaman." On the wall of the plastic-roofed lean-to shed that houses a small swimming pool and a few unwell palm trees at the base of our apartment building, is a plaque with brass letters which reads: "Dedicated to all who love the infinite beauty of nature. With great admiration for those who-through their vision, imagination and commitment-have created this unique communion with nature."
Of course I am over-sensitive to all this, and to the compulsive naming and re-naming of rooms, corridors, carparks and parts of art galleries that goes on in the US. It is partly because I have been living in Italy, where the things that really matter are nowhere written down, and partly because, as a recovering dyslexic, it is bad enough having letters and words slide about without the anxiety that meaning is going to join them. In fact, it is only etymologically that the American language is becoming meaningless. In a culture where vast numbers of people do not have English as their mother tongue, it is not the purity of the language that matters, but its ability to join people together. Multiculturalism creates anxiety and open-endedness; language must create community. As new groups of immigrants arrive language has to be more and more elastic, stretched thin to wrap everyone up in some sense of belonging. In the hands of good writers it can have a dynamism lacking in English English, but elsewhere it can turn into drivel.
Still, even drivel can contain a useful double entendre. My new Blenderchef has "twelve speeds including Ice-Breaker and Pulse Option/Option de Pulsation", and I can't help thinking that's something I need right now. Setting up house in a new place can wreak havoc on the libido.
