Of course the big news round here is the opening of Ikea. My friend Ben rang me up the day before the opening. He lives in Kemp Town which is miles away from Churchill Square but he’s very fit.

“I’ve got a proposal for you. You’re not going to like it at first, but there is a reward.” At this stage I do not have the faintest idea what he is talking about.

“Really?”

“A potential reward.”

“They’re opening a new Ikea. And they’re giving out vouchers to the first hundred people who show up on the day.”

“And?”

“Well, most of them will be for £1. But there will be one for £10,000, and one for £1,000. So if we turn up together we have double the chance of winning a ticket.”

“I presume there’s a catch.”

“Well, they’re vouchers you can only spend in Ikea. And you have to go on their website and register as a friend of Ikea. Or family or something. But you have to register, cos if you don’t, you won’t get the money, and if you cock that up, I will never forgive you. Ever.”

He suggests that I get there at 6.30am, 7 at the latest. I try to explain that I am more likely to go to bed at 6.30am than get up at 6.30am, and he tries to explain to me that one in a hundred odds of getting £10,000 aren’t only not bad, but they become better if they are reduced by half. It might mean only £5,000 each, but that’s still not to be sneezed at, especially considering the initial outlay.

But the outlay for me is too much. That is, the early start. I sleep in, and put my phone on Do Not Disturb just in case he tries to ring me.

Later in the day I get in touch. Did he go there in the morning? He did.

“It was incredible. The whole of Churchill Square was packed. There would have been no chance we’d have got even one of the £1 vouchers. You know, even if they’d brought the Turin Shroud over to Churchill Square, with the Pope making a personal appearance, they wouldn’t have got more people there.”

So my decision to have a lie-in was vindicated. A few days later, I popped down to Churchill Square to see how it was all going. I also fancied a bedside reading lamp. The queue, on a Thursday, at noon, or noon-ish, was not the longest I’d ever seen; but it looked like a good twenty minutes, at the very least; and I’ve never been that much of an Ikea fan anyway. But at least, in Brighton, they’re making good use of vacant premises (the old Debenhams, where I would buy shoes and bedding and curtains); unlike – and allow me to bring it back to this – those bastards at the Co-op, and their plans for expansion at Seven Dials.