Every day items that'll soon be extinct

I recently watched the 127th repeat of the movie 'Jerry Maguire'. My favourite scene is when the character played by Tom Cruise is talking to a nude Cuba Gooding jnr in a locker room.

Cruise keeps beseeching him to at least drape a towel around his waist because the raging homophobes otherwise known as heterosexual males are extremely uncomfortable with other males' nudity. Cuba dismisses him with a wave of his hand: "Nah. I air dry."

Until I first watched that scene some 20-odd years ago I thought there was something wrong with me. You see, I have never really understood the purpose of a towel. After wiping myself down with a wet cloth I, too, prefer to air dry. Too much info?

Anyway, my point is that all of us have those really popular everyday items that we never use. Take the good ole-fashioned belt. Everyone needs one, right? Ding! Sorry. Wrong. I'm willing to bet you a post-Pravin $100 that Ntobeko, my firstborn, does not own a belt. If he does, it's one of his best-kept secrets. I have not seen the bugger wearing a belt in the past 10 years.

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About two months ago we were en route to a friend's 40th birthday. We stopped to get some beers. (Calm down, he's 22 years old!) While I was at the Tops, he went into the Spar and returned with a comb, another item I don't think he's used since his budding "gentleman" days at Kearsney.

I was recently at the mall searching for a present for a friend's dad who is joining The Arch and Inkosi Mangosuthu Buthelezi in the cantankerous octogenarian club. One of the presents I considered was some kind of gift pack that included a smoking pipe and three handkerchiefs.

Them old geezers love their handkerchiefs, don't they? The very last time I ran into the late Dr Lionel Mtshali, the IFP stalwart and KwaZulu-Natal premier, at a funeral at Nkonjeni, he rested on his stick, took out a hanky and wiped his brow before extending his hand to shake mine. I remember thinking how odd it was that an item as ubiquitous as a handkerchief was totally alien to me.

I blame my mother for my irrational aversion to them. When I was in Standard One (Grade 3), my class teacher, Miss Allie, got so fed up with all the sniffing and nose wiping with the back of hands in her class during the flu months that she decreed that all and sundry would carry hankies. Everyone except me complied. My mom's reasoning? "It's no different from carrying snot in your pocket and then intermittently smearing it all over your face."

This was the wrong thing to say to a boy already struggling with the onset of OCD. To this day the sight of a hanky gives me the heebie-jeebies. And this is how it to came to pass that I was teased for being the "Kleenex boy" all throughout my school days.

As I've grown older, I have become aware of a few more everyday items that some people can happily live the rest of their lives without. Fidel Castro, for example, never contributed to Gillette's super-profits. The same can be said about Donald Trump and hairdressers. Or Helen Zille and decent history books/the common sense to know when to shut up. There are just certain articles that folks, for whatever reason, manage to totally bypass all their lives.

I personally have a particularly long list. For some reason, pyjamas just floated to the surface. I just don't get the whole idea of a flannel or silk two-piece suit to wear to bed. It's a great idea when you're eight years old and are in the grips of your Spiderman or Barbie phase. Past the age of 14 I never saw the point of pyjamas.

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My pyjama hatred was intensified when I got to university and started living in sin. If she came to bed in her birthday suit, it likely meant, "Come here, you stud!" Cotton pyjamas meant "Whisper the appropriate sweet nothings and maybe there's hope." Silk pyjamas meant "Bring your best game." Flannel pyjamas meant "Tonight, we sleep." I think this was training for marital bliss.

Bread is another one of those things I just don't get. And I have not voluntarily eaten cake of my own volition in the past 30 years or thereabouts. The same goes for biscuits. Or tomato sauce. Or mayonnaise. Yeeuch!

And as for this butternut-and-creamed-spinach abomination that 90% of restaurants have adopted ... Whoever convinced them that this is a thing needs to be shot, thrown down a mineshaft, dug up and made to watch five years' worth of Boer Soek ' n Vrou repeats.

My latest addition to the list? Tequila. I don't get it. Not only have I tasted that radioactive sludge but I've witnessed a friend get so sloshed on the stuff she had an animated conversation in Mexican Spanish with the gate at her block of flats in the Pretoria CBD, in full view of street kids and other vagrants. I know she was speaking in Spanish because I know the words diablo and mentiroso - and I'm certain that she called the devil a liar.

• Follow the author of this article, Ndumiso Ngcobo, on Twitter: @NdumisoNgcobo