One of life's more astonishing facts, and it is reprinted everywhere, is that 70% of visitors to your home look in your bathroom cabinet.
This figure could be culturally disfigured because so much of the research has come out of America, but seventy? I have read voraciously on this topic because quite frankly I have enormous difficulty believing it.
And if this practice is so eye-blinkingly common, it follows that hosts must assemble their medicine cabinet for effect, either to humiliate their guests beyond belief (one blogger said he always filled their bathroom cabinet with marbles so when the door was opening, the resultant cacophony on the porcelain could be heard by dinner guests three rooms away), or to convey a shameless impression of someone you are not (oversized condoms).
Of course, we generally construct our whole house before guests arrive.
Spines.
Everyone looks at the spines of CDs, DVDs and books, this is totally acceptable behaviour, not the sneaky and nosey act of roaming through the sacrosanctum of the bathroom cabinet.
We have a large bookcase in our lounge which is filled with books, CDs and DVDs.
A few weeks ago, because of severe overflow, we bought another bookcase for the back hall, and the questions immediately arose, what do we want to show off to visitors, and which less than laudatory books should we hide? I must confess that just about all of the less than laudatory books in that lounge bookcase were mine.
So until the arrival of the new bookcase, visitors had to head-scratchingly deal with Joe Bob Briggs' Joe Bob Goes To The Drive-In, the sexploitation film bible, and Don Martin cartoon collections sitting beside eight Owen Marshalls and Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
My nature would be to keep things this way, the zeitgeist of unpredictability so often proving a very thin smokescreen for genius and an enviably rapacious mind, but after long and vigorous discussion, my wife and I decided the new bookcase will take all the music and trashy pop culture.
Roy's Stuff.
My immature male friends will stare at the lounge bookcase now in disbelief and ask why there is no music when there are over 700 Georgette Heyers.
I will unflappably reply, come with me to the back hall, bring a torch.
In our first two houses the biggest piece of furniture in the lounge was a cabinet designed solely to house vinyl records.
Such was the power and popularity of a vinyl record back then.
And because I was writing about music, had a record shop, and reviewed records weekly, records that arrived in big fat boxes damn near every day, it was assumed by anyone coming to the house that I must have one of the finest record collections in Christendom.
Unfortunately, this meant I found myself hanging on to records I should have, rather than the ones I actually wanted to play.
Those weird indefensible personal favourites were usually hidden at the back, you had to work to find them.
Amazingly, I maintained this charade for years.
But finally I jettisoned every record I felt I was holding on to only for other people.
Tom Scott came to our house around then, after the first night of his play The Daylight Atheist.
What would you like to hear, Tom, I asked, standing proudly in front my record wall like a hunter with slain buffalo, forgetting I had not long slashed it to shreds.
James Brown, said Tom.
I once had James Brown in at least three languages, but that was Before The Cull.
I coughed apologetically and asked him how he felt about Lucinda Williams.
He has never been back to our house.
I think people should be honest with spines and bathroom cabinets.
Flaunt your flaws and aesthetic weaknesses, treat them like honed muscles.
But, and you didn't hear this from me, I did like that one about the marbles.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
