Why saving household items for special occasions is a waste

Cassie got new carpets and nobody was allowed to walk on them. Every time we visited her house, she made us take our shoes off at the door like we were entering a mosque. Then we had to walk around the place by pressing ourselves really flat against the walls and tip-toeing along the skirting. It was tense, death-defying stuff and it was always a relief to reach the safety of the kitchen tiles. Here we could rest, recover and share heroic tales of our epic journey.

Eventually we just stopped visiting Cassie because the carpet-stress was too intense – the only thing trickier than balancing on a tiny edge of slippery wooden skirting is doing it in a pair of socks. And sure, I understand that Cassie just wanted to keep her carpets clean and new-looking, but she’d failed to realise that carpets cover a specific type of surface known as “the ground”, and it’s very hard to cross “the ground” without the involvement of feet, and Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.

Cassie and her new carpets is a bit like my mother and her guest bathroom. Mum got the bathroom done up about 12 years ago and it has a nice toilet, a fancy sink, and a pristine glass shower-unit that nobody is allowed to shower in. It just sits there, gleaming with spray-cleaner sparkliness, the idea being that guests will come in and think, “Wow, these people are delightfully clean” (though they may think “Ughhh, I’m not sure these people ever shower”). In 12 years the shower taps have not been turned on once: even if the bathroom was on fire, mum would probably be fighting off the firefighters, throwing herself in front of the taps, yelling “Back off! You’re not turning on the shower! It’s for guests to look at only! It’s ornamental!”

Cassie’s carpets and mum’s bathroom are kind of like my late grandmother’s couch. It was an upholstered antique-ish scrolly-legged thing that no one was allowed to sit on, and it took pride of place in her living room, in front of the coffee table that no one was allowed to put coffee on, which held the bowl of M&M’s that no one was allowed to nibble on. The only time we could sit on the couch was when she sealed the whole thing in plastic sheeting like she was about to slow-cook it in a sous-vide bath. The plastic was horrible to sit on: if it was a hot, summer’s day, you got stuck there for hours, sweat-suctioned to the seats.

It makes no sense, people having all these fancy, expensive household things that they’re too scared to use – the china plates they never eat from, the decorative furniture they won’t touch, the special-occasion towels they never put out because there’s never been a special occasion that’s special enough. But I reckon all that stuff should be used every day and enjoyed all the time, because if people wait too long for a special occasion, it might wind up being their own funeral, and everyone else will get to walk on the new carpet, sit on the antique couch, use the china plates, and eat from the bowl of extremely precious M&M’s.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a TV series on ABC3.