It seemed quite normal to me – until my flatmates freaked out

What's wrong with sitting down in the shower?

I am sitting with my flatmates, eating dinner, and I feel like an alien being interrogated by the FBI. I have made the mistake of telling them that, from time to time, on certain mornings, when the mood takes me, I shower sitting down. This had not, until now, struck me as odd. I am discovering, however, that I might as well have admitted to sleeping upside down in my wardrobe wearing a swan costume.

"You're a freak!" shouts Sam. "I can't believe it."

"That's what old people do," adds Emma, as if anything old people do is automatically criminally insane. By now, they are all openly laughing at me.

"I just don't understand why," says Olly, "why would you do that to yourself?"

"It's not self-harm," I say. "I'm tired when I get up early."

"We're all tired," Sam interjects. "That doesn't mean we go and eat breakfast out of the sink."

"That's not the same," I insist.

"No, it's not," says Olly. "It's normal. Sitting down's like . . ." He pauses to find a reasonable comparison. ". . . like weeing into a cup."

"What? Why is it odd at all?" I fight back. "It lets you wash more thoroughly, it's less effort and it splashes less."

"I'm not denying that it has a lot of benefits," Sam says, sympathetically. "It might even be better in every way. But that doesn't mean you're not a massive freak."

"Do you sit cross-legged or do you squat?" asks Emma.

"I'm going to tell everyone at work," announces Sam.

"Don't." I say, suddenly genuinely worried that I'll be ostracised from society. I spend the next 24 hours in a state of existential self-doubt. In the morning I shower standing up. I start second-guessing everything I do. Do I brush my teeth with the right hand? Do I wash my hair backwards? Do I breathe wrongly?

Sam comes back from work looking confused and miserable. "So I told some people at work. Turns out lots of people do it."

"Doesn't surprise me," I say.

"You're still a freak," he says.