THE aphorism that there is a skeleton in every family's closet is so spot on that it would really be quite churlish to recoil if, on opening a friend's cupboard door, one was confronted with a pile of bones.

In such circumstances the polite thing to do would be to discreetly prop Boney back up, close the door and keep your cakehole shut. One really shouldn't comment on other people's family secrets.

However, while a skeleton might not have fazed me, my grasp on etiquette evaporated somewhat when, searching for an ironing board, I opened a friend's closet and found it crammed full of hundreds and hundreds of neatly stacked bags of sugar. ``Why is Jamaica's annual sugar crop located in your hall cupboard?'' I asked her.

``Hmm?'' she answered astonishingly unperturbed; ``Oh, well, you know, I just stock up in case I run out.'' ``But you take Hermesetas in your coffee,'' I pointed out. ``Yes, but you never know when you might need some sugar,'' she replied a little testily. I stared at the rows of little white bags. ``What?'' I countered. ``Are you thinking of starting a fudge factory in your kitchen?''

Kate was baffled by my bafflement. Clearly she did not consider it odd to hoard a commodity she hardly ever uses. It transpired that compulsive sugar purchasing was a family tradition. In the post-rationing years her sweet-toothed grandmother, fearful of future shortages, had started buying sugar with unparalleled zeal. Kate's mother had unquestioningly picked up the bizarre habit.

In turn, Kate, schooled in years of buying a bag of Tate & Lyle on every shopping expedition no matter how minor - ``Even if I was only sent to the shops to buy a newspaper'' - had carried on this saccharin worship, building a little altar of her own in the hall cupboard when she bought a flat. She acknowledged that such hoarding was uncommon, but bristled at my imputation that her family's sugary compulsion was the stuff of fruitcakes.

My suggestion that a spot of therapy might be in order was firmly rebuffed. Her faith was firm, her argument smacked of a ``ha ha, when the next sugar shortage comes along you will be eating your words, but I'll be damned if you'll be eating my sugar, oh, non-believer''. Stubborn sanctimoniousness. I gave up.

``Fine, where's the ironing board?'' I asked. ``In my wardrobe,'' she said. I bit my tongue.

Families are funny things. They are little, hermetically sealed societies with rules and regulations of their own. To a stranger another family's sense of order can seem like total anarchy. To me, ironing boards should be kept in the hall cupboard (certainly not in wardrobes), boot polish should be kept under the sink, saucepans should be in the low cupboards, glasses in the high cupboards, and the drawer beneath the cutlery drawer is for bills, elastic bands, combs, replacement Hoover bags, clothes pegs, takeaway menus, bits of string too small to be useful, empty tubes of glue, partnerless earrings, and the small travel iron which you have never actually taken on holiday because you always forget that it is there.

I was raised believing things should be that way and I am flummoxed by any other domestic arrangement. I am genuinely confused when I go to other people's houses and discover that some people use that second-from-the-top drawer to store neatly folded napkins and table mats. Somehow it just doesn't seem normal. It can be strangely alienating. What can I possibly have in common with people who don't have a clutter drawer?

There is such comfort to be found in the familiar, but occasionally we overemphasise its importance. Anyone who has flat-shared might appreciate the subtleties of the fight for supremacy over the cutlery drawer. I once spent seven months engaged in one such gritty battle with a seemingly mild-mannered but obstinate dental student who not only did not share my political views but also failed to appreciate that spoons, forks, and knives should be stored in that order from left to right. We never discussed this dispute but simply took turns to sneak into the kitchen to re-arrange the other's sabotage, switching spoons and forks around.

Such passion has nothing to do with being house proud. Sometimes we stake out our identity on the most trivial of details, finding some intrinsic sense of self in our notion of how certain things should be done. The rituals we fix on are often arbitrary. I have a mate who will happily live amid the squalor of ankle-deep empty Coke cans, sweet wrappers, old news- papers and overflowing ashtrays, but is appalled if milk is not served from a jug. If I plonk a milk carton on the table he will rant and rave about my ``common'' habits.

At a recent group lunch, a friend produced the remnants of her birthday cake, left over from a family celebration. Telling an anecdote about the occasion she mentioned something about her niece urging her to blow out the candles so it could be her turn to make a wish next. Puzzled, we asked her to elaborate. She explained that it was a family tradition that whenever anyone had a birthday they relit the candles and sang Happy Birthday to every member of the family one by one. Convinced that this was entirely normal behaviour she was a bit miffed when we all fell off our chairs laughing at the weirdness of the scenario.

But then the joke could so easily be on any one of us. A chance remark, a giveaway comment about what you imagine to be an innocuous ritual and you could find yourself revealing your family's very own eccentricities. To this day my ``milk jug'' friend bitterly regrets the time he blithely confided to the company that his family were wont to bury cars they no longer had a use for. Ten years later we're still laughing at that confession. He has yet to exact his revenge and find out my family's car burying equivalent quirk, but no doubt one day I'll slip up and that skeleton will come clattering out of the closet.