By the way . . . after using the loo, wash your hands!

A recent shopping trip to a high-end London store turned my stomach. Whilst one could easily be made nauseous by the extortionate prices and the snooty sales assistants, it was a trip to the toilet that ultimately put me off my tea.

As I stood patiently in line to use the ladies’ toilet I was bowled over by the number of women not bothering to wash their hands afterwards.

They were brandishing handbags worth thousands and wearing faces that clearly had a lot of work done to them.

They had invested a lot of time and money in their outward appearance and at first glance one would have felt they were a cut above the rest of us.

Failure to wash your hands, though — surely that’s a social faux pas?

It seems only 30% of us wash our hands after we have used the toilet.

Worse still, for a lot of us it’s merely tokenism. We do a cursory drizzle under the tap and feel the job is done. Well, it’s not!

A decent hand wash takes 20 seconds and is more than a palm-to-palm sprinkling of soap and a drip dry.

Unless we get into every nook and cranny, including underneath our nails, we can’t be sure of our health where germs are concerned.

Clean-looking hands are very different to clinically clean hands. Of course, we don’t have to scrub up like a surgeon every time we spend a penny but we could all do with putting in a bit more effort. Countless amounts of money are spent on health campaigns, yet when it comes to hand-washing most of us haven’t a clue.

If you fail to deep cleanse, then you can, in part, blame yourself for a lot of your ill health.

Our hands are our greatest vectors where infection is concerned. Washing them isn’t rocket science, but it is common sense.

So next time you visit the toilet, ladies, aim to spend as much time washing your hands as you do retouching your make-up.

If those high society ladies want to avoid sickness, they need to spend more time at the sink!