However, a clean car is much nicer to drive than one that stinks. Some second-hand cars that haven’t got the new car smell aren’t too bad – all they smell of is dogs. Worse ones smell of cigarette smoke, vomit and/or alcohol. (Mind you, if a car stinks of all of these three, don’t buy it – do you really want to buy a car that’s been thrashed by the sort of person who drinks so much that they throw up while driving? Exceptions can be made for ex-taxis – they may have higher mileage, but they will have been well maintained).

New car or second-hand, buying a car or sticking with your trusty set of wheels, it’s important to stop your car ponging if you’re going to spend time in it. If you’re not desperate to get out of it to escape the reek, you’re probably going to be a more relaxed driver – which is good for everybody’s safety. So how do you get the car smelling nice?

First of all, give up smoking. Some people choose the car as being an OK place to smoke as it doesn’t put the fumes and poisons all through the house where your children and non-smoking family members can breathe it in. Stopping smoking is tough, but it will be the best thing you can ever do for your health. It will also get rid of a lot of the pong.

Secondly, clean out your car regularly. Old chip packets can turn quite nasty. Keep a plastic bag in your car for wrappers and peels (OK, orange peel scattered through your car will help it smell nice at first, but they turn mouldy and nasty if left too long) and change it regularly. Also make sure you vacuum your car out – a must if you have a dog that rides in the car. Sometimes car washes have vacuuming facilities, but resist the temptation to add in the car fragrancing that’s often on offer – this is pretty awful toxin-laden artificial stuff.

If you have a dog that rides in the car regularly, consider spreading out a rug for the dog to sit on. When it starts looking a bit hairy (the rug, not the dog – the dog always looks hairy unless you have one of those Mexican Hairless dogs), take it out and give it a good wash.

Also be sure to get rid of any vomit promptly. If you have someone in your family who frequently gets travel-sick, always carry a spare ice-cream container or similar in case of emergencies when you can’t stop for them to be sick. Scrape up any spilt sick with a towel, then scrub like the blazes with soapy water. Sprinkle on baking soda to absorb the pong, then vacuum this up. Never vacuum up vomit unless you want to smell it every time you use the vacuum.

When you choose a child’s seat, make sure that the cover is washable. Sometimes, you can’t stop so a child can pee, and leaks in nappies happen.

Open the windows frequently and let the fresh air in, especially when you’re driving through more rural areas. Fresh air is the best deodorant.

Limit the amount of eating you do in the car. You may have picked up food from the drive-through, but you can wait until you get home before eating it in many cases.

Make your own car fragrance from a mixture of water and either vinegar or alcohol with 10–20 drops of essential oil. Shake the mixture together and spray around your car whenever you fancy. Citrus scents are good for helping you stay alert – a must when driving.

However, you don’t have to stick with ordinary white vinegar for your cleaning. You can enhance the disinfectant power of vinegar with essential oils, as making the experience of cleaning more enjoyable with pleasant smells – and without breathing in the rather dubious chemicals in artificially scented household cleaners that are often listed in the worst offenders in any list of household toxins.

Essential oils are the easiest ingredient for adding into vinegar to make your own household cleaners. All you need to do is add about 10 to 20 drops of the oil(s) of your choice to about 1 pint of vinegar and shake them together vigorously in a spray bottle and leaving them to sit for an hour or so before use. The result will be an excellent multi-purpose cleaning spray that not only will be great for cleaning windows and general flat surfaces but can also double as an air freshener in the toilet.

However, a scented vinegar made with essential oil cannot be used for cooking. For this, you need to steep herbs in the vinegar to extract the scent – and flavour. The end result will not be as strong as the product made with the essential oil, so you won’t be able to use it for cleaning the toilet, but you will be able to use them for cooking. The cold method that preserves the most delicate scents and flavours is to cram a jar full of the herb(s) of your choice (rosemary is the easiest one to start with for this method, with lavender coming in as a close second) and top the jar up with vinegar. Put it away in a dark cupboard and forget it for a week. Then strain the vinegar off and replace the old herbs with fresh ones. And put the jar away for a week again. Repeat once more before using.

However, you can speed the process up by making a sort of vinegar herbal tea. Simply heat up the vinegar in a saucepan or the microwave, then drop in the herbs of your choice. Cover and allow to cool. Strain and bottle.

Scented vinegars made following either method can also be used as a cosmetic – and what commercial cleaning product is able to claim this? Scented vinegar can be used as a deodorant, in the bath or as a toner before moisturizing.

If you want to make a scented vinegar that is suitable for cleaning the toilet, then choose one of the more disinfectant (antiseptic) essential oils such as tea tree oil, pine oil or lavender oil rather than a more floral one such as ylang ylang. However, most disinfectant essential oils smell scrumptious and smell pleasant.

But what do you do? How do you get that stain out? And does stain removal have to involve harsh chemicals that do goodness-knows-what to your skin and make your eyes water when you use it?

First aid for all stains is plain cold water and lots of it. Water is the closest thing we have to a universal solvent, and it can start dissolving and breaking down the stain. Well, most stains, anyway. What’s more, it also saturates the thing being stained so less of the unwanted substance can get into the fibres of the fabric, allowing a good bit of the stain to float out and away.

Every household that has human beings living in it (and other species as well) would pay to have an emergency stain cleaning kit. Like the first aid kit and the natural disaster emergency supplies that should also be part of all sensible households, everyone in the house ought to know how to use the stain removal kit.

The kit should contain:

A jug for pouring water onto the spot. If you have to clean a stain out of a carpet, don’t overdo the water, or you will start spreading the stain. Try to keep the stain contained.

Salt: If you spill something really staining (red wine being the most common culprit) onto the carpet, the sofa or the tablecloth, dumping a generous amount of salt onto the stain while it’s still wet prevents a lot of problems. Salt absorbs the moisture more easily than fabric does, so the wine will go into the salt rather than into your carpet. Vacuum or sweep up the salt once the moisture has evaporated.

Several towels: Once you have flooded a spot with water, you need to blot up as much fluid as you can, which will contain the stuff that stains. Blotting with a towel is also the first step when cleaning up puppy pee (or human pee, in the case of a child who is still getting the hand of being potty trained), and a towel is also the best thing for scooping up vomit.

Methylated spirits, isopropyl alcohol, vodka or some other strong spirit: Any one of these is great for removing grass stains, permanent marker and biro. Hairspray is also supposed to remove permanent marker, but this writer hasn’t tried it.

Sard Wonder Soap: If you can get hold of it (it’s made in Australia), this is great for general stain removal in the laundry. It even gets grass stains out of cricket whites.

A scrubbing brush: Often, a good hard scrub with soap (Wonder Soap or ordinary soap) is all you need to clean a stain out of a carpet. The dirt floats up in the foam and can be rinsed or blotted up.

Kerosene: Not exactly natural, but removes tar. Handle with rubber gloves and don’t breathe the stuff in if you can help it. Rinse everything well afterwards, including your hands.

…you are quite prepared to have an argument with your spouse/partner/flatmates about the merits of baking soda and the like for cleaning versus “that overpriced stinking chemical muck” in the middle of the supermarket, regardless of crowds collecting to watch.

…you are a bit dubious about hiring a professional cleaner for your house, as you suspect that a professional might bring in all the chemicals you’ve been trying to avoid for years.

…you buy baking soda in bulk and you know where to find the massive containers of vinegar commonly used by restaurants.

…when you read period novels about life below stairs, you have your eyes peeled for descriptions of how the maid(s) cleaned various odd items, either to spot mistakes or to learn new tips.

…most of the essential oils in your home are disinfectant-type ones such as tea tree oil rather than the more flowery ones like ylang-ylang.

…you are a frequent visitor at your local liquor store and have given up explaining that you need large quantities of vodka for cleaning glass rather than because you’re hitting the bottle.

…you have considered starting up your own professional cleaning company using natural cleaning methods only. Surely there are other people like you who want to avoid household toxins as much as possible but don’t have heaps of time to clean their house.

…your concern for your household environment extends to the wider environment and you cringe when you see people glibly spraying chemicals around your child’s classroom.

…the only interest you have in brand-name cleaning chemicals is the package they come in – that spray bottle that has a foam-producing nozzle looks very handy.

…you have tried cleaning the toilet using a brush for the part under the rim – and lived to tell the tale, even though you gagged when you saw the gunk coming out.

… you have been to at least one Enjo sales party and have bought a few of the microfibre cleaning cloths.

…you don’t balk at the idea of cleaning leather upholstery. A bit of olive oil will do the trick, won’t it? (It will).

…your recipe book has a section dedicated to cleaning products, and this section has more entries than the section dedicated to entreés.

…it’s been so long since you used an ammonia-based product for cleaning glass or floors that you start gagging and coughing if someone uses it near you. The same applies to chlorine, but trips to your local swimming pool have hardened you to it.

… you are quasi-fanatical about saving soap scraps to boil down into soap gel, which you will use for cleaning floors, cleaning cars, cleaning the toilet…

…you’ve got no idea where your local dry cleaning agent is located, as you are quite capable of handwashing anything delicate.

But just because you’ve got a modern washing machine with a wool cycle, a hot cycle and enough lights for a very small Christmas tree doesn’t mean that you have to use fancy modern wonder ingredients to get your clothes clean. Do yourself and the environment a favour, and use natural laundry products to wash clothes like your grandmother (or great-grandmother) used to use.

If you must use commercial washing powder (and I have to admit that I do – in a hard water area, using liquid soap in the machine on a cold cycle has a tendency to gung up the pipes and valves) you can get away with using less than the manufacturer tells you to use on the side of the box. Let’s face it: who wrote the stuff on the side of the box? Who’s going to make more money if you go through three boxes of powder in stead of two? Right. In practice, you can reduce the amount of soap powder per load to three-quarters what the manufacturers tell you to – or even half. You can also be kinder to the environment by using a brand (which, happily, is usually cheaper) that doesn’t have oodles of whiteners, brighteners and fragrance. This means you will pump less goodness-knows-what into the water system. And remember that washing clothes in commercial powder is still better than dry cleaning.

If you wash in hot water or if the water in your area isn’t hard (lucky you!), you may be able to get away with using liquid soap in your washing load. This doesn’t mean a commercial liquid soap. Instead, save soap scraps and pour boiling water over them to melt them down. Once the result has cooled to a gel, it can also be used for soaking grubby clothes as a pre-wash treatment, as general maid-of-all work for cleaning floors, cleaning cars and spot-cleaning carpets. You can also use it as shampoo. You can also use soap flakes, which you can buy again, thankfully, if you don’t fancy grating a bar of soap.

If you are in a hard water area, you can still use soap flakes or soap gel to wash clothes, but you will have to add a water softener. Borax is the classic water softener used in many natural cleaning recipes.

Soap residues are responsible for making towels and blankets as stiff as cardboard. Thorough rinsing helps, as does drying in the open air. But to really make sure things stay soft enough to rub on sensitive bits of your body, use vinegar as a fabric softener. Put about half a cup per load into wherever fabric softener is supposed to be put in your washing machine, or else add it to the final rinse.

Essential oils are also popular additions to natural laundry products. Some oils not only add a pleasant scent but also help remove stains and act as disinfectants. Eucalyptus oil makes a great stain remover and is the key ingredient in Sard Wonder Soap (if you can get hold of this, it is fantastic for removing all sorts of stains). Tea tree oil is antibacterial. So is lavender.

1. Make your own household cleaners using natural ingredients. Not only does this mean that you will be less exposed to some of the most common sources of household pollutants and toxins, you will also cut down on the amount of waste your household produces (you won’t have to buy and dispose of one product for cleaning windows, one for cleaning floors, one for cleaning the bathroom, one for cleaning kitchens, etc, etc. ad nauseam) and you will also be easier on the environment, as producing cleaners like vinegar, baking soda and soap is less polluting and often uses by-products of other industries.

2. Dry your clothes naturally using the sun and the air. A good washing line or clothes horse gets clothes beautifully dry, whether you dry clothes outside or just stand the clothes horse near a home heating source. This not only means that you’re using less electricity to power a dryer, but you will also cut down on the need for anti-static products and you may even be able to get away with doing less ironing.

3. Learn how to mend and make do. It’s silly to throw away a shirt or pair of jeans just because it’s got a falling hem or a split seam – or even a hole worn in the knees. These are easy mending jobs, and sewing by hand is a soothing task that’s good to do while watching TV or sitting down to talk – and it can help keep your hands busy so you don’t go reaching for a snack or a cigarette.

4. Consider switching to more environmentally friendly brands, such as Ecover, for home cleaning products that you can’t or don’t want to make yourself. For me, this would be laundry and dishwashing detergent.

5. Start a recycling system. It’s good to have a portable container for putting recyclables because then you can go around your house as you clean up and put things straight where they’re supposed to go.

6. Switch to reusable shopping bags as much as you can. This means that you won’t have half a million cluttering your drawers up. However, you may still need a few, as you will need to make sure meat doesn’t drip all over everything else – and old shopping bags are great for corralling rubbish and recyclable paper (and many shopping bags are themselves recyclable).

7. Find an alternative to retail therapy. Not only will you save money, you will also save on packaging and then filling your house with things that you have to clean and care for. Take up another soothing hobby instead.

8. Get some pot plants for your home. Not only will these help clean the air in your home (especially if you buy plants that absorb and eliminate toxins such as spider plants and peace lilies) but you will also help –albeit a little bit – reduce the overall CO2 in the atmosphere. Every little bit counts!

9. Start a garden. It’s good exercise for you, it makes you more aware of the environment, it encourages you to compost food and other organic waste (which includes the bits from your vacuum cleaner bag – beans love these!) and you can eat the results. Composting makes your house smell nicer, as you don’t have food waste sitting around in the bin stinking.

10. Cut down on waste by finding new uses for old items. Old towels, shirts and sheets can be used as cleaning rags. Old toothbrushes can be used for all sorts of cleaning jobs. Old containers can be used to store home-made cleaning products. Thin little soap scraps can be melted down to make soap gel (used for all sorts of cleaning jobs).

Blood: Fresh cold water is the best method. If you have got blood on an item of clothing, soak it overnight in cold water. In the case of cleaning blood off carpets, sponge the area with lots of cold water before blotting dry.

Beetroot: Easier to wash out than you might think, given the brilliant colour. Ordinary soap and water will do the trick, in this writer’s experience. Fresh beetroot can be quite staining to the skin, so if you have been chopping or grating fresh beetroot, wash your hands very thoroughly afterwards, possibly using a scrubbing brush and/or an exfoliating soap (e.g. one with oatmeal) before going near paper or anything pale coloured.

Chewing gum: First, freeze the chewing gum hard by holding an ice cube over the spot (takes at least 10 minutes, so be patient). Then pick off as much as you can, using fingernails and/or a blunt knife. Garments can be put directly into the freezer and frozen solid. Any residue can be sponged with vinegar before washing as normal.

Coffee: Flood the stain or spill with lots of cold water before washing as normal. For cleaning carpets, blot up the excess water with a towel after flooding the site of the spill. This usually does the trick, but if any residue remains, rub a little soap onto the site and scrub the carpet gently, working the soap up to a foam. Blot with fresh water again to remove the foam. Allow to dry.

Egg Yolk: As this is a protein stain, treat it with cold water. Soaking overnight followed by normal washing tends to work for most items. However, a small greasy stain may remain. Treat this either by rubbing a paste of baking soda and salt into the spot and allowing to dry before washing as normal.

Grass: Remove grass stains by rubbing strong alcohol into the spot and allowing it to “sit” before washing as normal. Alternatively, rub Sard Wonder Soap (if you can get hold of it) onto the site and work it up to a lather. Allow it to sit for at least ten minutes before washing as normal. Really bad grass stains (usually found on sports clothes) may require soaking overnight in warm soapy water as well as regular treatment.

Ink: Ballpoint pen ink washes out in the regular wash, as anyone who tried to decorate a pair of jeans on the cheap by doodling on them found out. It may take several washes. If you’re in more of a hurry, apply a little strong alcohol such as rubbing alcohol or vodka.

Lipstick: Either rub the spot with glycerine or with alcohol and allow to sit for a bit before washing as normal.

Mildew: Items with really bad mildew should be thrown away. Mild mildew can be treated by rubbing the spot with lemon juice and putting the item into the sun. This kills the mould spores. Vinegar also works, but has less of a bleaching action, so may be suitable for coloured or black items.

Oil: Many oil, grease or fat stains can be treated by scrubbing the site of the stain with warm soapy water until it lathers. If the stain persists, treat it with a paste of baking soda and eucalyptus essential oil. Allow this paste to dry before washing as normal.

Permanent marker: Douse the site with strong alcohol as soon as possible, then soak or wash before the alcohol evaporates. Many people claim that hair spray will also work to remove permanent marker.

Poo: Scrape off as much as possible with loo paper. Using rubber gloves, rub a paste of baking soda and water into the site to remove the smell and any fatty residues, and allow this to dry before washing as normal. Dry in full sunshine to kill any remaining germs.

Red wine: Immediately scatter salt over the spill to absorb as much as possible. Leave for half an hour (or until dry) before sweeping up or vacuuming up the salt. Be generous with the salt. Alternatively, flood the spill with white wine or fresh water (or soda water) to dilute the red and blot up with a towel. Flood with more fresh water and continue blotting until the stain disappears.

Tar: It’s not exactly natural, but a little kerosene works wonders. Alternatively, try freezing the tar hard with an ice pack before scraping and picking it off. Glycerine or vegetable oil can also be used to soften the tar, followed by eucalyptus essential oil. Leave the essential oil to work in and try scraping again.

Urine: Sponge with vinegar before washing.

Vinegar: This is a stain remover in its own right, so it doesn’t actually stain! Balsamic vinegar may stain, but sponging the site with white vinegar will dilute it. Wash as normal.

However, it should be no surprise that the ideal cleaners for baby clothes (and bedding and soft toys and changing mats and…) are natural products. We are at our most sensitive when we are small, and if the household toxins in commercial cleaning products are bad for us, they are worse for developing babies and toddlers. To make things worse, cleaning and laundry products that have been “specially formulated” for babies are often loaded with artificial scents – usually artificial musks that are really, really bad, especially for human hormone systems.

Nappies: For the sake of the environment, I hope you’re using cloth nappies. If you are signed up to one of those companies that offers a professional cleaning service for nappies, good for you, as they will take the dirties and give you a batch of clean ones. All you have to do is change the baby and pay. You don’t have any problems, although it might pay to do your homework a bit and ask what products these professionals use to clean the nappies. If they use dry cleaning methods and products, forget it and try somewhere else. If you’re washing your own nappies because you don’t have a professional cleaning service nearby or you can’t afford it, the nappies will need a good soak in soapy water first to loosen the smelly stuff, followed by a thorough wash. To kill germs in nappies, use boiling water. To get the last traces of soap and other alkaline substances out of the nappy (and thus reduce the chances of nappy rash), add about a cup of vinegar to the final rinse instead of fabric softener – gets the nappies nice and soft, too.

Bibs and tops: These are prone to getting stained by bananas. This is a real beast to wash out. If you don’t want to cheat and dress your baby in dark or bright colours that hide banana stains (and there’s no real reason why you can’t – who says that all baby clothes have to be pastel?), then try rubbing the fresh stain with soap and leaving it to sit before washing. Eucalyptus oil can help shift the stain, as can glycerine rubbed into the spot.

Soft toys: Definitely don’t dry clean these. These can easily be washed by hand using ordinary soap, followed by a good rinse and a spin in the washing machine to remove excess water. “Washing teddy” can be a fun game to play in the bath with a toddler who doesn’t like having their hair washed. The toddler can get Teddy all foamy and lathery using soap while you wash the toddler’s hair. You will need to rinse the soap off Teddy somewhere other than the bath, though – try the basin. Teddy can then spin in the machine while toddler is getting dry and dressed. Teddy will still be slightly damp after spinning, but will be dry enough to cuddle and play with – the rest of the moisture will be removed by evaporation and a little light osmosis.

Cleaning down the walls and the wallpaper has something of a 1950s housewife touch about it – the sort of thing that only fanatical cleaners do. However, it’s a lot easier to wash a wall down than to change the wallpaper. And it’s certainly cheaper. You might not want to clean the wall every day or even every week, but it’s certainly something that ought to be done – maybe in the annual spring cleaning bash (or else save it until you are flush enough with cash to hire a professional cleaner to do the dirty work you’ve been avoiding).

Wallpaper these days is, thankfully, easier to clean and tends to have a finish that stops it falling to pieces if the slightest bit of damp gets onto it like old wallpapers did. If you have an older wallpaper of this kind that’s looking grubby, don’t bother cleaning the wallpaper. Just replace it or else live with the grub (shudder). And painted walls are even easier to clean.

Tips for cleaning walls:

* Remove cobwebs by wrapping a clean duster around a broom and sweeping this around where the cobwebs are (probably up in a high corner). You can do the same to cobwebs on the ceiling. Once the cloth gets all covered in bits of web, dead spiders and flies’ legs, remove it from the broom and replace it with a clean one. Don’t just use the broom – the dust inevitably trapped in the bristles will get all over the wall and make things worse. Cobwebs within easy reach can simply be removed with a duster (the cloth sort, not the feather sort). The presence of cobwebs in your home is a good thing – it shows that your house is free enough from toxins and other nasties that other species want to live in it.

* General grime can be wiped off with a solution of dilute vinegar and warm water. It’s best to do the whole wall in one sweep (maybe leave this job until the test cricket is playing on the radio to keep your mind occupied, because cleaning walls down is very boring, especially if the wallpaper is white). You’ll need a whole bucket of the solution and several rags, which you will change periodically. A soft toothbrush can also help with really stubborn bits. This works with wallpaper and with painted walls.

* Stone walls can be scrubbed down with warm soapy water.

* Vodka or some other strong spirit can be used to remove permanent marker after some wretched toddler has scrawled on the wall. You will need plenty of it and a lot of patience. Felt tip pen is easier – these are usually water-based so sponging the mark with plenty of water should clean it off– and pencil is the easiest of all to remove… just use a rubber (eraser for our transatlantic friends). Crayon can be removed by gently rubbing the scribble with toothpaste or a paste of baking soda. Sponge off any residue with a damp cloth.

* While doing so will make your manicurist gasp in horror, fingernails are superb cleaning tools. You can’t beat them for cleaning wax off wood or tablecloths (in the case of a tablecloth, you may need to get the last bit of residue off by padding the area of the spill with a lot of loo paper or tissues, then holding a hot iron over the spot to melt the wax so it can be absorbed by the paper). And they also help get stubborn fly-spots and the like off windows.

* Newspapers are great for cleaning windows. Scrunch them up and use them to buff the glass up after spraying on whatever window cleaner fancy. The ammonia based products can be tough on the eyes and nose, but dilute vinegar (the best natural alternative, closely followed by dilute vodka) works just as well. Change sheets of newspaper as soon as they look damp or they will disintegrate and leave papier-mâché all over the window, TV screen (a CRT glass screen) or shower door.

* Keep old toothbrushes. They are perfect for getting into lots of little nooks and crannies that get covered with gunk. Have one for cleaning around the hinge of the loo seat and another one for other scrubbing jobs (e.g. around filigree or fretwork in wood).

* If you have to scrub a floor on your hands and knees, get hold of one of those kneeling mats sold in garden shops. Don’t use a cushion – it will get soaked and grubby.

* Use a transistor radio or a ghettoblaster to give yourself something to listen to as you work. Cleaning can be done on autopilot. Using an iPod or other personal stereo with a headset is possible but the cords can get in the way as you work.

* A feather duster made of real feathers is great for cleaning computers, as they use static electricity to pick up dust and other gunk from keyboards and off plasma/LCD screens. Hen feathers are pretty good, but ostrich feathers are better still, if you can get them. These look like the classic sexy maid prop, but if you want to use one for this purpose, have one for work and one for… play… as the work one picks up heaps of dust. Give a feather duster a good shake outside on a windy day to get rid of the dust.

* Work systematically when vacuuming. As you will need to go back and forth over a section of carpet, it’s best to divide the floor up into sections and work section by section. This means you are less likely to miss any of the floor.