On sticking your nose into pile-em-high-retail where it's not wanted

On sticking your nose into pile-em-high-retail where it's not wanted

I went to IKEA in Southampton the other week. By incredible coincidence, so did the Leader of the Not Free World. And he's not pleased.

Dear Mr Ikea

Taking time off from by duties as Dear Leader to the triumphant Military-First Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, I had the unpleasant – yes, the UNpleasant – experience of visiting your new store in Southampton recently.

Such was my anger that I am sorely tempted to train each and every one of the nuclear devices we are not developing in my Peoples Kim Il-Sung Memorial Juche Bicycle Factory near Pyongyang on the FASCIST state of Sweden unless you rectify the matter instantly.

Although everything in your store was brand new, and we gorged ourselves on meatballs and cheap coat-hangers, I wish to complain in the strongest terms about one aspect of your business that left a bad taste in my mouth, and an itching to unleash the contents of the germ warfare agents that are not stored at the Mount Paeku Glorious Revolution Baby Milk Concern that is next door to the Peoples Kim Il-Sung Memorial Juche Bicycle Factory.

It's the pencils, man. What, in the name of capitalist running-dog fuckery have you done to the pencils?

I remember the time I used to frequent your formerly excellent store in the glorious socialist republic of Bristol. Your pencils used to be marvellous sharp, chunky items. A tribute to the hard-working patriotic North Korean workers who produced them.

This weekend, I found to my dismay, that you have replaced them with awful, spindly cheap things that insult not only my intelligence, but those of every Dear Leader of a Democratic Socialist Military-First Utopia that I know. And there are a lot of us. And we VOTE (mostly for ourselves).

It's embarrassing. I left your store, my pockets weighed down with these sorry excuses for writing implements, and I find myself quite unable to swap them for biros in Argos.

Mrs Kim was equally scathing, and she says it's the last time she ever shop-lifts under your roof, so that's TWO customers lost already.

I predict a time when your meatball factory will no longer accept our gifts of dog and recently-liquidated political prisoner, and that will be a sorry day indeed.

Sort it out.

Your pal

Kim Jong-Il

PS The SLATTORN 300-foot Kylie Minogue statue I purchased in your store on Saturday appears to be lacking a couple of screws. Could you send some spares by return of post so her buttocks remain attached? Soz, I've lost the receipt.