Monday, October 31, 2011

When Worlds Collide

My reading pleasure has been considerable enhanced this summer by working my way through the Wallander books by Henning Mankell.  I do like a bit of good detective fiction.  For those who don't know the novels are set in a town in southern Sweden.

Another pleasure in my life is the occasional trip to the Swedish Temple to budget home furnishing IKEA.  There is much amusement about the naming of the products with many people giggling in a childish way about whether they are rude.  According to this:

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikea#Product_names

There is meaning and significance to the names.  And this is whee the worlds collide...there I am reading a novel when my mind suddenly thinks "That's that cushion with flowers on, not the island where a young women has been chopped up by a crazed lunatic!"  It works the other way too...I handed my husband a plastic bag and said "That's the town Wallander lives in".  To say he was baffled would be an understatement.

Given that I have the kind of memory that hangs on to useless information, such as IKEA product names, or places in books, I wonder what sort of weird neural contortions my brain is having to perform to make connections between these two lists???