So my boyfriend doesn’t know about my little love affair with Billy.

Ah, Billy; well over six feet of solid hunk. Tall, white and approaching 30, I see him more often than I’d like to admit. Billy is so good looking that I could just stare at him for hours -and good lord do I love to fill him up! His depth is quite astounding and something you wouldn’t really expect considering his wood is so thick and breathtakingly hard.

I am, of course, talking about the Billy bookcase from IKEA.

So I’m a homewares gay. There, I said it. It feels good to finally get it off my chest (and not my chest of drawers – though I have refurbed those lately).

I don’t quite know when this entire obsession with furniture and interior decorating began, but I know I am stuck in a hole I can’t get out of. I am half loving it and half needing an intervention where my mother begs me to stop inhaling vanilla candles and my boyfriend reveals his fears that he is about to lose me to the upcoming Freedom stocktake sale.

“One of us was hungover, the other was drunk on haberdashery.”

I knew this passion for home fashion had come to a head when I got a text from my friend on the early hours of a Saturday morning. He had gone out for a night on the town, downed more drinks that he could remember and shagged a guy he didn’t know. I, on the other hand, was up to my eyeballs in fabric at Spotlight trying to find something to re-cover a stool with and not knowing what the total was going to come to. One of us was hungover, the other was drunk on haberdashery.

The one piece of comfort I can hold onto in all of this is that I know I am not alone. When I walk through the IKEA market hall and do my best to block out the squeals of those rugrat kids (why do parents bring them to this heaven and make it hell?) I always see a gay couple with those glorious yellow bags looking for cushions and throws and vases – oh my! Some I even recognise from my wild days on Oxford Street and it makes me realise that it’s not just me; the gay homewares epidemic has not only claimed one, but many, many homos.

My boyfriend is not a homewares gay and for that I am grateful. You’d think two home decorating gays would be a match made in heaven, but no. Screaming matches in IKEA over which rug looks best and spending Sundays wandering the Moore Park Supa Centre bickering over bedspreads – they’re activities best left for straight people.

For this great love affair is just for me. And Billy, of course; the one hunk of wood besides my boyfriend’s that makes my heart race.

The intervention is currently pending. But please, before anyone steps in, let me light just one more Papaya candle and have my final hit.