How to stop your family from using your towel – forever

There is no respect for towel sovereignty in our household. Other members of my family grab any towel within reach after a shower, and frequently it’s mine. I’ve considered getting the towels monogrammed, but this seems poncy. This issue is rubbing me up the wrong way!
R.M., Hurstbridge, Vic

Credit: Illustration by Simon Letch

Your impassioned rant about towel sovereignty actually brought me to tears: I had to use my wife’s new, soft textured luxury bath towel to mop up my eye seepage and blow my nose.

You’re right: towels are very personal items. You don’t want someone else drying their body parts with a sheet of highly absorbent fabric that you’re going to be using to dry your body parts, their feet making contact with your face, their crotch with your chin, their cheek with your cheek. You’re also right about monogrammed towels: it’s poncy and pricey and won’t stop your family members. They’ll just see R. M. and think your towels were made by R. M. Williams or stolen from the Republic of Moldova.

This could work, though: try colour coding the family’s towels or locking your towel in a padlocked bathroom vault. Or this: nobody in my family has ever used my towel because it’s a brownish-whiteish-mauveish thing that may once have been charcoal and has its own unique “Greek Salad” scent, with raw onions and extra-goaty feta. This towel is so old, so frayed, so gross, that my wife once mistakenly used it as a drop-sheet when she cleaned the oven, and another time to catch a bird that got stuck in the house and couldn’t stop panic-crapping.

So that may be the answer to your problem: just let your towel fester and ferment and fray until nobody wants to use it. Let it be monogrammed with your own permanent natural initials. R. M: Rancid and Musty.

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