Bad bathroom habits you're probably guilty of

There’s something “anything goes” about the bathroom. Perhaps it’s because (unless you’re some sort of degenerate) it’s standard practice to always shut that particular door, creating a safe space within which the id can be freed and one’s true self revealed.

Yes, while you may leave small piles of tissues all over the desk, or change your bedsheets less often than you should, or ignore the five-second rule in the kitchen, it’s within the bathroom that the most shadowy of a householder’s activities come into play.

So, here’s a spotters’ guide to the guiltiest of bathroom habits, beginning with the one it is likely we can all admit to:

Weeing in the shower

At the risk of sounding like the exposition from an After-School Special, everybody does it, so we may as well get that out of the way. And there’s good news: having a whizz in the shower means you’re saving a flush (so much so that grassroots activists in Britain  have begun a campaign for people to “go with the flow“). Peeing in the shower while the water is running, that is; don’t be a weirdo.

Turning the shower on early

Listen you Water Wally, it may well be cold in there unless you leave the hot tap thundering for 10 minutes, and you may very well find the sound of running water relaxing, but unless you want your children to live in a future of wet wipes and drinking their own wee (see above), pump the brakes on that water wastage!

Shower beers

A glass of wine in the bath? Forget about it: these days all the cool kids are drinking beers in the shower. Here’s hoping they are also making stubby-holders out of non-slip shower mats, because nothing puts paid to your relaxing Sunday afternoon beverage like a bathtub full of broken glass and blood.

Flushing matches down the toilet

Look, we don’t know which desiccated old guru told you that lighting a match would, uh, “clear the air” in the smallest room, but it’s mostly bunkum. If, however, you are going to persist with your alternative air-freshening techniques then for god’s sake, put the used matches in a dish and then throw them out. Those alligators in the sewers are going to end up with splinters in their mouths otherwise.

Sticking your false eyelashes to the mirror ‘for next time’

Oh, just me then? Righto, on to the next one.

Indoor plant graveyard

There was a time when the bathroom was the place to install a cheerful rack of African violets, back when indoor gardening was taken as seriously as its out-of-doors cousin. As time has gone by, however, the white-walled living room has become the Pinterest-approved home of potted plants, and the bathroom has become the charnel house for that maidenhair fern you forgot to water/aloe vera plant you occasionally use for sunburn/quickly shrivelling orchid you were given in Kris Kringle. Stop that!

Watching movies in the bath

There are few things more relaxing than lying in a rapidly-cooling bath full of dispersed luxury bath additives, while your bum and lower back start to go numb, watching a streaming movie that keeps conking out because the WiFi signal isn’t very strong. Bliss! 

Reading on the dunny

This is another one that we’re all guilty of; sometimes you just need something to pass, well, the time, among other things. Whether you’re a toilet paperback fiend or you keep a stack of magazines nearby so as to keep up with the trends, it turns out there’s not much danger in dunny reading (despite what your grandmother might have told you about haemorrhoids) beyond accidentally dropping your book, iPad or Kindle in the bowl.