Cleaning the toilet is a household task few people look forward to.

But how frequently should you actually pull on the marigolds and give the bathroom essential a proper scrub?

The question has divided internet users, whose answers range from cleaning it daily to waiting until it is visibly dirty.

Delia Cannings, a cleaning expert at the British Cleaning Council, says there is a straightforward answer to the long-running debate.

According to Cannings, a weekly clean is enough, although the toilet should also receive a more thorough deep clean ‘periodically’.

‘In a family home of about five people, it’s sufficient to give it a wipe over when needed and a thorough clean once a week,’ she explained to Which?.

Reddit users have revisited the toilet-cleaning question countless times, with once-a-week routines emerging as a popular approach.

‘Once a week and then a quick clean before I have guests over (toilet, spot clean sink, disinfect where hands will touch),’ one user said.

Another wrote: ‘A good, overall deep cleaning 1/week, then a wipe down clean & presentable for folks coming over.’

However, others have admitted to leaving more time before cleans. 

One said: ‘I don’t clean my toilet unless i start to see discoloration forming in the bowl, which could be 3 weeks.’

And one quipped: ‘If it’s not visibly dirty, I don’t worry about it.’

Ms Cannings agrees with the once-a-week method, and says that if this is done properly, it should only take ten minutes or so. 

However, she also recommends giving your toilet a more in-depth clean every so often. 

She advised: ‘This involves using a screwdriver to unscrew the bolts, before gently removing and dismantling the seat and cleaning the brackets, hinges and the small connection holes on your toilet where you attach the seat.

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‘A periodic clean of your toilet should take around 15 minutes.’

Primrose Freestone, a microbiologist at Leicester University, points out that you need to be particularly on top of your toilet cleaning if anyone in your home is unwell. 

‘For normal use a deep clean once a week would be enough, with seat, pot, toilet handles all getting a disinfection and the pot a toilet brush scrub,’ she told the Daily Mail.

‘If someone is ill and infectious, then you clean the toilet and surrounding bathroom (because of the spray area of a flushed toilet is over a metre) after every use.’

In terms of the clean itself, Ms Cannings recommends having six products at hand – a toilet brush, a toilet cleaner, rubber gloves, a cloth or two, an old toothbrush and a bucket.

‘It’s useful to have a colour–coded system for your toilet cleaning kit,’ she said.

‘For example, you could use red cloths and red gloves to reduce the risk of transferring bacteria to other areas of the house.

‘The products you use are really important. You need to make sure you use a cleaning product that cleans and disinfects and note the recommended dilution guidance.’

Once you’ve got your products ready to go, Ms Cannings recommends a three-step process – Flush, Push and Brush. 

Start by flushing the toilet to ensure any debris left in the bowl is removed – giving you a clearer view of the cleaning area. 

‘Make sure the lid is down when you flush to avoid a “toilet plume”. This is the spray of particles that occurs when you flush the toilet, which can coat other surfaces in your bathroom,’ she said. 

Next, use your toilet brush to push the water right back into the bowl and down the channel, so you can see the tide mark. 

Apply the toilet cleaner around this point and leave it for a few minutes to work its magic. 

Finally, scrub and rinse the inside of the toilet with the brush, before flushing the toilet again.  

Imagine the setting: a warm, faraway terrace at sunset, a chilled bottle of rosé sitting in an ice bucket and no reason to set an alarm for the morning.

Perhaps it is a party in the garden at home, with the Pimm’s jug constantly refilled and everyone’s glass kept topped up.

Or maybe it is a spell of balmy evenings when a beer in the garden at 6pm turns into one at 5pm, followed by another or two because the weather is simply too good to head indoors.

I am not here to scold anyone for that. I enjoy a drink myself. Summer is there to be enjoyed and, for many, a drink in the sunshine is among life’s simple pleasures.

But September has arrived, the children have returned to school and the nights are closing in. Every year, I see people in my clinic who realise their holiday drinking routines did not get packed away with their luggage.

It is not merely an anecdotal observation. Drinkaware released its annual survey into the nation’s drinking habits at the end of last month, and its results make for sobering reading.

Half of drinkers say they consume more alcohol while on holiday. One in five drink more in good weather, while almost the same number say they drink more when they have nothing planned the next day.

Taken together, those conditions describe large parts of June, July and August for many people.

The survey also found that weekly binge drinking rose from 11 per cent to 13 per cent of drinkers in just one year — equivalent to around six million people binge-drinking each week.

The trouble with alcohol is that it’s easy for the goal posts to move without you realising. It’s sneaky and insidious. Tolerance builds within a few weeks of drinking more, so the two glasses that used to be enough no longer have the same effect, and you find yourself pouring a third without a second thought.

At the same time, cues around alcohol get rewired. Sunshine, the end of the working day, cooking supper, a phone call to a friend: each one becomes linked to reaching for the bottle, and by September that link is well and truly bedded in.

The good news is that all of this is reversible, and you don’t have to go teetotal to do it. What you need is to bring your drinking back inside the guidelines, which is no more than 14 units a week, spread over at least three days, with several days off.

So here are the steps I suggest to patients who want to reset rather than stop:

Count before you cut

Most people have no real idea what they drink, so for one week write down every drink and its units. A standard bottle of wine is about ten units, a large 250ml glass is over three units, a pint of ordinary strength lager is nearly three and a double gin is about two. A pint of ale (4 per cent strength) is 2.3 units.

People are usually startled by the total, and that jolt is helpful, because you can’t change something until you understand what needs to change and by how much.

Have drink-free days

This is the single most effective thing you can do and, according to Drinkaware, it’s the moderation technique British drinkers use most.

Aim for at least three, and ideally have them run consecutively rather than dotted through the week, because a stretch of clear days lets your tolerance fall back to where it was, which in turn means less alcohol will satisfy you when you do drink.

Pick your drink-free days in advance and treat them as fixed appointments.

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Shrink your glass

Over the summer, measures creep up. The 125ml glass gives way to the 175ml, and then to the 250ml, or a third of a bottle.

Go back to the small glass at home. In the pub ask for small glasses of wine, half pints and single measures of spirits. You’ll drink less without feeling you’ve gone without.

Start later at night

If the holiday routine had you opening something at 5pm, make it 7pm for a fortnight, then 8pm.

Eating first helps too, since alcohol on an empty stomach is absorbed faster, making you more relaxed faster and more likely to reach for a second drink.

The aim is to break the link between the end of the afternoon and the start of drinking.

Take the soft option

Begin with one drink, then have a glass of water or a non-alcohol version, then another drink.

It halves your intake over an evening, keeps your hand busy and nobody will notice. The low and no-alcohol options are now good enough that Drinkaware says half of young adults are using them, and I have patients who swear by them for the first drink of the evening.

Set a review date

Give yourself four weeks, then tot up the units again and see where you got to. If you’re back under 14 and it felt manageable, well done.

If you found the drink-free days hard, or the numbers didn’t move, or you told yourself you’d cut back and somehow didn’t, then please don’t shrug it off as a summer hangover.

That is precisely the thing to talk to your GP about, and the earlier you have that conversation, the simpler it tends to be.

Those who drink their tea and coffee very hot have about three times the risk of a type of oesophageal cancer compared with those who have it warm. It may be due to repeated heat damage to the gullet lining. Add milk or let it sit.

A shocking 44 per cent of the time adults spend on social media or other video sources is now spent alone. That’s up 10 per cent on a decade ago. To make it worse, adults now spend 11 per cent less time talking to each other face to face, figures from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising show. Normal interactions are essential for mental health so if we’re no longer getting together around the TV, get together round the table. I’m obsessed with the family evening meal and the 30 minutes of attention and conversation it brings. Adolescents who regularly eat with their families have lower rates of depression, substance misuse and disordered eating.

Maryam’s crucial blood tests

BBC presenter Maryam Moshiri has spoken about living with polycythaemia vera, a rare blood cancer she was diagnosed with in November 2024. Maryam, 49, said she had few symptoms and was diagnosed from routine blood tests, that her doctor happened to be thorough about, rather than from anything she’d gone in to complain of.

That is how polycythaemia vera is usually caught. The bone marrow churns out too many red blood cells, the blood thickens, and the danger is clots, which means stroke, heart attack and deep vein thrombosis. 

Yet for years it may cause nothing more than tiredness, headaches or itchy skin, if that, and a great many cases only surface when a full blood count done for some other reason comes back with haemoglobin that’s too high. 

I’ve had several patients over the years for whom an abnormal result was the first they knew of anything being wrong, and it’s a reminder that routine bloods aren’t a box-ticking exercise. It’s incredibly important to actually go when a GP orders them.

Britain’s high streets are increasingly marked by empty premises, with small business owners saying it is now harder to achieve success in the UK than in mainland Europe.

A survey of 526 UK small businesses found that more than one in five shop owners, or 22 per cent, said over a quarter of nearby shopfronts are vacant. Nearly two-thirds of those questioned, 64 per cent, also said Britain has become a more difficult place to run a business than comparable European countries.

The Growth on Hold report, published by start-up and small business network Enterprise Nation, points to rising wages, business rates, energy costs, VAT and National Insurance as factors curbing expansion in town and city centres nationwide.

More than three-quarters of high street businesses, 77 per cent, have put growth plans on hold, the report found, while 42 per cent have had to reduce customer-facing staff numbers.

Retailers on the high street are particularly vulnerable to business rates. According to the study, 67 per cent of shops pay the levy, compared with only 21 per cent of businesses based elsewhere.

Across all small firms included in the survey, 69 per cent had delayed or abandoned a growth plan over the past year, while half said they had reduced investment opportunities.

Businesses identified employer National Insurance, business rates, supply costs and energy bills as key financial strains. VAT was also among the three biggest pressures for six in ten respondents.

Victoria Cozens grew Perky Blenders from a one-kilo roaster in her north London garden into an independent coffee chain with six shops and 40 employees.

Ms Cozens said the business was on course to franchise and launch further outlets only two years ago. Those ambitions now appear less likely to be realised.

She said: ‘We started that process and then the changes came in. Employers National Insurance (ENI), related wage increases, and more recently the extraordinary increase in business rate costs, especially for hospitality.’

The company’s annual employer National Insurance bill alone has risen by more than £20,000 since 2024.

Ms Cozens said: ‘We’ve always tried to pay above the minimum wage for our barista roles. With the increases in costs across the business, especially ENI, it has been hard to support the people we care about the most.’

The company previously employed specialists across marketing, customer service, website management and fulfilment but those jobs are now covered by Victoria and the wider team.

She added: ‘You can be an owner-operator and find ways to make it work.

‘But if you want to operate multiple sites, grow your business and employ more people, that has become so much more challenging.’

A similar squeeze is being felt at Broken Eggs, a 30-seat Spanish restaurant in Fitzrovia founded by former City banker Gabriel Larraz, 29.

The restaurant employs 14 people and has full tables, strong reviews and steady growth, but that growth has failed to translate into increased profit.

Mr Larraz said: ‘When I look at our profit versus last year, the amount of volume that we’ve grown this year has basically all gone to paying extra costs.

‘It’s not one thing that’s changed. It’s the national minimum wage, employer contributions, business rates, energy costs.

‘It’s a double hit: your direct costs go up, but all of your inputs go up as well because your suppliers are facing the same pressures.

‘The most annoying thing is that it keeps changing all the time. Tell me these are the rules for the next five or ten years and I can plan my business.’

VAT was ranked first by approximately one in three (29 per cent) businesses cited in the report, compared with one quarter (24 per cent) who said wages. 

Cutting the standard rate of VAT is now the number one policy demand among small businesses ahead of the Autumn Budget on October 28. 

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More than one third (37 per cent) called for a VAT reduction – far surpassing the 12 per cent that said lower business rates and a further 12 per cent that said reducing employer National Insurance. 

And demand is even stronger among businesses on the high street, where more than half (54 per cent) named a VAT cut as their top ask.

But the research also suggests most firms would use the saving to protect their businesses rather than immediately cut prices.

Nearly half (46 per cent) said they would use a VAT saving to absorb other rising costs, while two in five (44 per cent) would reinvest it in their business.

This compares with three in 10 (29 per cent) who would use it to hire and nearly a quarter (23 per cent) who would cut prices.

Enterprise Nation CEO, Aaron Asadi, said businesses ‘simply want the opportunity to grow’ – and are not asking for bailouts from Westminster.

He said: ‘For a government that prioritises growth, a quick look at the High Street should tell them it’s been anything but for the last few years.

‘And, this new data presents the indisputable truth. Empty shops, fewer staff, traders fighting to stay afloat. Far from growing, our High Streets are shrinking.’

Mr Asadi added the data highlights a small business community that has ‘done everything’ asked of it but is still ‘being ground down’ by mounting costs.

He said: ‘Businesses aren’t asking for a bailout. They’re asking for decisions: say at the Budget whether hospitality VAT will be cut, aim the promised rates relief at the smallest premises, and make the support that already exists actually reach businesses.

‘Without that, we will keep seeing owners forced to shrink businesses they’ve spent a decade building.’

The report also cited energy as another major pressure on small business – with those able to estimate the impact saying rising bills have cut their margins by around 18 per cent on average. 

Yet the research found three-quarters (75 per cent) are unaware of efficiency grants or reliefs available to them, while more than two-thirds (69 per cent) did not know the rule of thumb that cutting energy costs by 20 per cent can boost their bottom line by as much as a five per cent increase in sales.

Cash flow is also emerging as a major dividing line between businesses coping with the squeeze and those in distress.

Among businesses that are not confident about their cash flow, the majority (86 per cent) have delayed growth compared with half (50 per cent) of those that are confident.

Six in 10 (62 per cent) were found to have cut investment, while almost half (48 per cent) have considered closing altogether, compared with just one in 10 (12 per cent) of businesses confident about their cash flow.

Card and digital payments were found to be dominant, with just two per cent of businesses saying they are paid mostly in cash.

The Growth on Hold report has made six recommendations to the Government in light of the findings, including deciding on hospitality VAT at the October Budget and raising Small Business Rate Relief thresholds.

It also calls for payments to landlords who re-let empty shops, the next round of cost support to be paid as flat grants through councils, tougher enforcement of late payment laws, greater backing for small business lending through non-bank and community lenders and the rollout of the West Midlands Business Energy Advice Service across England.

Robert White, Executive Director and Head of Payment Partnerships at Square UK, said many of Britain’s small businesses are not ‘standing still by choice’. 

He said: ‘Rising costs on all fronts have stifled the opportunity to grow. The heaviest of those pressures – VAT, National Insurance contributions, business rates – are ones only Government can address.

‘The small businesses on the front foot are those with the clearest sight of their money and quickest access to capital.

‘Alongside the policy changes this report recommends, that is how growth on hold starts moving again.’

A man whose criminal offence dates back nearly a decade says he was stopped by police after AI facial recognition cameras allegedly identified him while he walked through the city.

Western Australia Police have been testing the facial recognition software across selected locations in Perth and Fremantle since June.

The rollout of the AI-powered technology has drawn strong backlash from Australians concerned it could pave the way for what critics describe as a “mass surveillance state”.

Those privacy fears were again thrust into the spotlight on Friday, when independent journalist Jesse Noakes recorded police approaching and surrounding a man in the street.

The man, who was not identified, had been walking in Perth’s CBD when officers stopped him. 

“My face got recognised in the system as a person who does have a criminal record,” he told Mr Noakes.

“It’s been almost 10 years at this point, so I’m kind of used to it.”

Although the officers did not charge him and he said he was not distressed by the encounter, the man questioned why the cameras had flagged him when there was no warrant out for his arrest.

“It doesn’t matter if they’ve got a warrant or what, they’re still keeping tabs on me,” he said.

‘I wasn’t in custody at that moment – they didn’t have me under arrest or anything.’

The confronting video received thousands of comments from Australians, many who said the new cameras used this way by police was ‘creepy’ and ‘dystopian’.

‘Why are we having police chase some poor guy down who did something 10 years ago?’ one wrote.

‘Harassing people not committing a crime because of a crime 10 years ago, when they’ve been held accountable, seems like a complete waste of resources,’ another said.

‘They stopped a man just because he had a previous criminal record? What was the point of that?’ another wrote.

Facial recognition cameras powered by artificial intelligence are becoming more common across Australia.

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While WA Police were the first police force to adopt the technology, retailers have begun introducing the systems to combat theft.

Bunnings won its fight to monitor customers using facial recognition technology at an Administrative Review Tribunal in February. 

Privacy Commissioner Carly Kind in 2024 had claimed Bunnings breached Australians’ privacy with the cameras.

‘Facial recognition technology may have been an efficient and cost-effective option available to Bunnings at the time in its well-intentioned efforts to address unlawful activity, which included incidents of violence and aggression,’ she said at the time.

‘However, just because a technology may be helpful or convenient, does not mean its use is justifiable.

‘In this instance, deploying facial recognition technology was the most intrusive option, disproportionately interfering with the privacy of everyone who entered its stores, not just high-risk individuals.’

However, the tribunal in February ruled the cameras did not breach customers’ privacy so long as they were properly signposted.

Grocery giants Woolworths and Coles followed the announcement with their own trials of facial recognition cameras.

Both grocers announced in August they would test the technology in a bid to reduce in-store crime, but haven’t shared plans on permanently implementing it.

Public information from WA Police showed the cameras scanned 130,000 faces around Perth and Fremantle within the first week of trialling.

The system compared those faces against a watchlist of about 4,000 people, resulting in 33 alerts and 18 arrests.

The Daily Mail has contacted WA Police for comment.