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I’m putting my foot down – only barbarians wear shoes inside | Arwa Mahdawi
I’m not a hygiene freak but I draw the line at walking dirt into houses. And don’t get me started on suitcases on beds
There are three things that make me unreasonably irritated while watching TV. The first is when the person on screen hangs up the phone without any acknowledgment that the conversation is over. Nobody does that in real life. It’s sociopathic! The second is when people put their suitcase on their bed to pack or unpack (this is extremely common on reality TV). “Do you know where that suitcase has been?” I yell at the telly whenever my eyeballs are confronted with such smut. “There’s a 99.99% chance you now have faecal matter and rat urine on your sheets, you filthy animal!”
Continuing that theme, my third pet peeve is when TV characters lounge on their beds with shoes on. I’m not a hygiene freak – I’ll happily eat food that has fallen on the floor even after the five-second rule has passed: I’ve always believed that a little bit of dirt a day keeps the doctor away. But I have my limits, and the idea of street shoes on a bed makes me gag. This obviously also applies to real life: I don’t care who you are, you are not setting foot in my house with shoes on. (And before you bring pets into this, let me state for the record that I wash my dog’s paws after a walk: he’s a good clean boy). Anyway, I’m not going to bother going into all the statistics about how there are apparently 421,000 units of bacteria on the outside of an average shoe, or how 93% of shoes will have poo on them after a month of normal use. I am not going to bother trying to argue this topic because, unlike most issues in life, there is no room for debate here: only a barbarian wears outdoor shoes indoors.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
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