At least no-one's there to see

BECK ELEVEN

I am cooking some sort of pasta dish.

It's just a few bits and pieces like olives and capers and parsley, thrown together to make a dish with no recognised culinary name.

It was almost pasta in a puttanesca sauce, but ingredients were missing, so I am simply concocting an unidentifiable hotchpotch.

The fact that I am not following a recipe is not testament to an enviable set of cooking skills, but rather a sad indicator of my latest Home- Alone Habit (HAH!)

You see, if I were putting my HAHs to good use, I would be following one of the hundreds of recipes I have seen in the last month.

This recipe-less performance shows I am wasting my time with a daily routine of scouring recipe books.

HAHs, also known as SSBs or secretive singular behaviours, start incrementally, almost without the knowledge of the very person developing the habit.

The next thing you know, you are regularly indulging in a practice you would never perform in front of others.

Every morning before work, I shower and wash my hair. Good hygiene is a good habit.

But then I proceed to blow dry my hair in the laundry, using the washing machine as a lectern and flicking through recipe books while idly drying my ginger mop.

It's basically me, naked, with a hair dryer and a picture of zabaglione. (Puttanesca? Zabaglione? Yes, my latest book is Italian).

I tell myself it's a good way to pass time but really, like not doing the dishes for three days, it is a product of living alone.

No-one is around to judge and it's only embarrassing if somebody makes an unexpected visit.

I guess another home-alone habit is the late-night, in-bed, Trade Me surfing, which netted me the small pile of old recipe books in the first place.

I thought I had won an incredible bargain - half a dozen books for $1 - but by the time I got the books home, I realised I might have overpaid. They were slightly damp and smelled like cat pee.

For a start, I thought the seller (a woman who lived alone and was selling old cat's wee recipe books), deserved more than a measly dollar. Unless, I thought later, she was actually making a recipe that called for wine which she chose to substitute for cat's night-water.

Anyway, I think that being around the hair dryer has done the recipe books a good turn and dried the cat smell away.

Like mother, like daughter, Mum lives alone.

I asked her what her worst home-alone habit was.

She said she never wears her false teeth around the house.

To be honest, she doesn't wear them in company that often either, so I think we can assume that's not exactly a HAH. It's just a bad habit.

I asked a good friend in Auckland what her home-alone habits were. She reeled them off with frightening ease.

"Getting up at 2am and doing the vacuuming or the dishes," she said.

"Not doing the vacuuming in the first place. Not doing the dishes in the first place.

"Walking around naked. Having your own disco." (I assume she meant a naked disco but I didn't get a word in to ask).

"Leaving piles of clothes around the house, like a bra hanging off a chair or a pair of pyjama bottoms kicked under the couch.

"Dressing like I ought to be committed.

"And talking to myself, like having a conversation in my head but a few words come out towards the end. But there's no- one can look at you funny."

She was disappointed to know my major HAH was flicking through cookery books.

There are, of course, people with bizarre home-alone habits who continue to live with others. These are popularly known as flatmates.

* Got a bad HAH? Email: beck.eleven@press.co.nz

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