While recovering from frostbite, hapless explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes plans to create the first accurate map of IKEA, for which no useful chart exists. The explorer hopes to complete this challenging cartography feat in about four months.
Sir Ranulph will set up base camp in Carpark Level 2, raising a Union Jack and claiming it back from the Swedes. He has allowed a week for the second stage - hand to hand combat for the possession of a complete functioning flatbed trolley - a great prize and status symbol among Ikeans. Thus equipped, he will set about mapping the interior using only the same basic tools available to the natives - a stubby brown pencil hewn from wood and a crude metre rule fashioned from coloured paper, traditionally hung about the place in decorative strips.
Travelling light, Fiennes will sustain himself on locally-sourced supplies of frozen balls of meat similar to beef. For liquids, he is dependent upon finding the fabled never-ending spring of flat lingonberry juice.
The main goal of the mission is to prove or disprove the existence of a passage from bedrooms to kitchens. Many say it doesn't exist. Some have died looking for it. If as expected it turns out to be a myth, Sir Ranulph has allowed a month to cut one using his flatbed trolley as a battering ram. Her Majesty The Queen has agreed to name it 'Sir Ranulph's Shortcut' in his honour, as it could shave weeks off the journey time for the nomadic Ikeans. Marching penguin-like along a barely discernable winding route, these world-weary tribespeople scavenge for shiny trinkets which they save in special yellow pouches slung on their backs, before ending their journey, exhausted and dazed, at the checkout delta.
Sir Ranulph is planning to commence the adventure before the end of the month, just as soon as he can get through on the phone to chase up his IKEA Family card.
