Old Wives’ Tales still thrive in the social media age

What do white bread, milk and vinegar have in common? No, not my go-to hangover remedy, but crucial elements in keeping our ancestors’ homes spotless. Guardians of Britain’s historic estates have shared their favourite cleaning tips – revealing that, often, the old ways are the best: spongy white bread is perfect for wiping dusty wallpaper, for example, while skimmed milk transforms grubby flagstones.

These Beatonesque household hints delighted me, partly for their practicality. Take white bread: it’s an essential component of a good bacon sandwich, of course, but less than nutritious the rest of the time. With its unappealing blue-grey hue, skimmed milk is wholly unfit for human consumption, so how useful that it has some higher calling.

But more than anything it’s a welcome vindication of that wonderful store of folk wisdom passed down through the generations. These may be Old Wives’ Tales to some, snake oil to others, but thanks to my mother I know to shine silver with toothpaste and pour beer into a bowl to attract slugs in the garden – and never, ever use hot water on a coffee stain. Newspaper and vinegar are brilliant for cleaning mirrors too, something I learnt working at the pub.

My family has at least 10 solutions when – as so often happens – red wine is spilt on a cream-coloured carpet, including white wine, baking powder and vinegar. But take it from me, nothing works better than a pile of cooking salt to leach out the stain, then soda water to lift the remnants.

A Facebook request yielded some more esoteric advice. One friend’s dad swears by Marmite as a midge-repellent. Mayonnaise is apparently brilliant for removing the rings left by drinks on old furniture. But bicarbonate of soda proved the great panacea; curing heartburn, bad odours, the most stubborn stains and doubtless solving Fermat’s last theorem, given a fair wind.

In a favourite classic Simpsons episode, Lisa gets chewing-gum stuck in her hair. Soon half of Springfield’s residents have chipped in with their own suggestions for removing it, all equally useless, from adding peanut butter (Marge) to freezing and hammering it out (Ned Flanders).

It’s fun to try out ancient remedies, even if they don’t all work out in the end – and there’s something life-affirming about the way people unveil their solutions with utter certainty. And who’d want to live in one of those Dettol households; boasting a germ count nearer to a research lab than a functioning family home?

Folk literacy might seem a casualty of the internet age. With so much advice migrating online, word of mouth feels less important, and, despite the success of shows such as The Repair Shop, younger generations in particular remain more likely to buy new things than fix what they already have. We also perhaps acquire a misplaced sense of infallibility from believing that all knowledge is a quick Google away.

But – as I found – social media can also provide an extraordinary compendium of weird and wonderful household hints. Next time you’re struggling to remove an indelible stain, why not do a shoutout on Facebook? The results will amaze you.