It’s my birthday tomorrow (woo!) so I’ve got a few friends coming over to my house and we’re going out for a meal. Since two of them have never been to my house before, I’ve made an effort and tidied my room.

I don’t really tend to keep my room very tidy. It’s not so much laziness, but more that I like ‘stuff’ and it just builds up around my room. But every few weeks I’ll have an afternoon where I just go mad and tidy the whole room, with like 3 bin bags of rubbish by the end of it.

Anyway, I’ve spent an hour or so tidying it today, but it got me thinking: when guests are coming, is a tidy room always better?

These friends will come to my house tomorrow and see my room all nice and tidy, which looks good, but in reality it’s never really as neat as this, so in effect I’m giving a false impression. I’m essentially lying to them, pretending to be tidier than I really am. Whereas when Mike comes to mine, I barely make any effort to tidy up, but then he gets to see the real me, what my room is usually like. To me, that’s being honest with him, showing him my life and letting him be in my room when it’s how I like it.

Whenever we have guests in our house, mother goes on a cleaning frenzy and makes the whole house tidy. Again, she wants to give a good impression and let them think that we’re tidy people. However, people often overdo it and when you go to their house it looks like a show home. It looks like somewhere that’s never been lived in. At least if there’s books on the counter you can see what they’ve been reading, or if there’s a remote control on the sofa you know they’ve been watching the dust-free TV. So what if there’s some papers on the floor? That shows that they’re busy and they actually do things instead of just cleaning their house.

That’s what I think when I go to people’s houses and it looks like a show room. To me, it feels cold and uninviting.