How I met Haldur

Since a few people have been wondering how I met Haldur Gislufsson and how we became friends, I guess now is as good a time as any to tell you the story. Don't expect anything out of the ordinary though, it's all fairly prosaic.

It was a dark and stormy day when I decided I needed some stuff from the local Ikea. As I pushed my shopping cart, which was quickly filling up with all kinds of cool stuff with funny names, through the aisles, I noticed a group of moose sitting in the plants department, nibbling on the ferns.

We started to talk, and it turned out they were Haldur Gislufsson and six of his cousins, who had been lured to Vienna under false pretense and were now employed by Ikea to entertain the customers by day and move around heavy furniture boxes at night.

Haldur in particular complained that he was bored out of his wits and wanted to get out. He suggested attaching a barcode label to his posterior, keeping perfectly still and pretending to be a fluffy toy so I could get him past the cash registers. Would I play along?

"Okay," I said, "but where are you going to live? Being homeless is no fun, you know."

Haldur agreed and asked if he could live at my place, temporarily, until he'd find a permanent place to stay. He reassured me that having a moose as a flatmate never failed to impress the ladies as it was "very macho" (I'm not sure about this so far, though). Plus, he said, having a moose was a perfect way to boost the reader ratings of my weblog.

I was convinced. I slapped some barcode label on his bum (it said "Taggig" or something like that), he said goodbye to his cousins, and I carried him out of Ikea, both of us pretending he was a fluffy toy. The rest is, as they say, history.