How many insomniacs does it take to change the world?

Answer: Not sure yet.

When you can’t sleep, do you grab your phone and idly peruse Facebook or Instagram, fretting all the while about half-remembered reports about how your phone’s demonic blue light is going to rewire your frazzled eyes and brain, short-circuiting a million years of human development until you’ll never properly sleep again and will be condemned to some kind of zombie half life, treading a hellish torture wheel that bombards you constantly with Candy Crush requests? All underpinned by the grinding realisation that 80% of people don’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ and none of them care?

I do.

So I’m scrolling through my news feed, reading good people’s ardent affirmations about utter tosh, peppered with pressure groups valiantly trying to hold back what seems like a crushing tidal wave of religious persecution, topped off with a good sprinkling of wholly inaccurate alarmist hokum about coughing when you’re having a heart attack, entering your pin number backwards next time you’re attacked at a cashpoint and AIDS-injected oranges.

I don’t think it’s the blue light that’s making me sleepless.

Suddenly, in the search for a better solution, it strikes me that we already have all the tools to create a revolution.

In the past, the heady brew of power was only created by mixing wealth with influence. Business, politics, the media were all controlled by an elite who jealously guarded their position.

Today, you just need to be wealthy enough to get yourself online at the local library and influence is only a hashtag away.

But we’ve been  brainwashed us so successfully for so long. Handed the tools of change, we don’t know what to do with them. We know our place and our place is apparently using the most powerful communication platform ever created to troll female celebrities and share pictures of our dinner.

The internet is a vast, terrifying engine of communication – and it’s literally at our fingertips. Only trouble is, we’ve clogged it up with so much snake oil, race hate and discussion of Kim Kardashian’s arse that we can’t see the opportunity.

A general election is weeks away – and we feel more disenfranchised than we have in living memory. Even on a local level, we’re frustrated. We don’t trust politicians, we don’t trust newspapers, we don’t trust the BBC, we don’t trust businesses, we don’t trust doctors.

On my Facebook feed, I’ve just read: ‘Everyone wants this to change but no-one is prepared to do anything about it.’

Elsewhere, I read an encouragement for people to vote, followed by the proviso ‘But we’re kidding ourselves if we believe we’re voting for humanity or democracy. They left politics a long time ago.’

We’ve created a society in which the boss of Next can file a £782 million profit and, in the same breath, decry the living wage because he claims his staff don’t need it. What’s more, we all keep flocking to this unimaginative, exploitative shop – and all the others like it – and buying this crap.

I want to live in a culture that’s about sharing, listening and learning. I want a culture that is generous and fair. I don’t want a culture that worships the shareholder at the expense of the worker.

Working in marketing, I hear a lot about how mainstream advertising is widely ignored these days. Nowadays, the power lies in peer to peer recommendation.

In practice, that means we’re bombarded with messages, arguments, persuasion. I don’t know who’s got an agenda and who hasn’t. As individuals, we’re so overwhelmed that we’re crippled.

If we’re suddenly, for the first time, holding all the power, what are we going to do with it? Yes, I’m talking about the big issues – but I’m also talking about the day to day questions. I want to feed my kids good food, support local growers and traders – and protect the environment. I want to know where to buy the best present for my mum, how to find a plumber I can trust and whether I need a doctor or a nutritionist. I want to know what will clean my face, my clothes and my loo without ripping me off and pouring a ton of chemicals into the sea. I want to know how to get my depressed friend the benefits she needs – and which (if any) supplements might help.

I want to share our experiences. I want to change our goal in life to be generous, sharing – and to make people smile. I want the Top Answer to all the questions. I’m working on it but I can’t do it alone. Who’s in?

Want to be inspired?

Well, I don’t often get called ‘inspirational’.

‘Ridiculous’, yes. ‘Quick-tempered’, all the time. ‘Your clothes are weird, Mum’, daily.

But someone called me the ‘i’ word in a comment on this blog – and then a friend said it. She said it to my face, too, so I’m fairly certain she meant me.

My friend’s compliment was about dressmaking. She’s been extraordinarily supportive to me during some difficult times, so I offered to make her a dress. As we chatted about it, she asked if she could stick around and pick up some tips while I made it, as she’d never sewn before.

Did I want to sew AND chat? It’s like telling my 9-year-old he can swim in Nutella. We grabbed the extension lead, hauled the trusty old sewing machine out into the sunny garden and spent the day stitching and giggling.

She acts fast, my mate. She announced she was inspired and within days, we were in the shop, choosing her a sewing machine, selecting fabrics and discussing zips.

We cut a simple A-line skirt pattern from a skirt she loves and she was off! I showed her the basics, told her to You Tube anything she got stuck on and just a few hours later, she’d made her first skirt.

She chose the fabric and trim she wanted, fitted it to the exact size and length she wanted and knows that no-one else will have one the same. It cost less than £15.

The sense of achievement is priceless.

 What do you think?

Fizz, bubbles and short-term excitement

I think I’ve found a cure for cancer. And I think it’s probably soda crystals and white vinegar.

I mean, I was honestly beginning to believe there was nothing these two frugal little beauties couldn’t do.

I use them for virtually all my household cleaning. I shake some soda neat onto bleugh stuff that needs a gentle abrasive; I mix them in a spray bottle with some orange peel for surface cleaner, I made a fairly successful dishwasher detergent from soda crystals, together with their mates, citric acid and borax; I do all my laundry with soap flakes, soda crystals and borax and if you’ve been following the ‘no ‘poo’ posts, you’ll know that I even wash my hair with bicarbonate of soda and condition with dilute white vinegar. (It’s still working great, by the way.)

But, my fellow frugalistas, I’ve had a failure.

The dishwasher started to leak and I’ve got no cash for a new one, so it’s back to the good old kitchen sink.

Well, of course, we were sudsing up like revellers at an Ibiza foam party, squirting washing up liquid all over the place and chucking fluffy bubbles down the sink.

So of course, I got on google and started looking for recipes for home made washing up liquid. OMG, it was AMAZING!

I didn’t just make the first one I found, you know. I did, like, proper RESEARCH an’ that. I made one that included the comment ‘we tried a lot of internet recipes before we found one that worked’.

The chosen concoction is this:

3 litres boiling water

1 heaped tablespoon bicarbonate of soda

1 heaped tablespoon grated soap (I used soap flakes)

1 heaped tablespoon soda crystals

1 heaped tablespoon citric acid

1 tablespoon white vinegar

The instructions then said ‘Mix in a bucket to allow reaction’. This was starting to sound interesting.

Well, the only bucket I’ve got is an old nappy bucket that we now use for ill children to vomit into if necessary, so I wasn’t going to mix washing up liquid in that. I pulled out my biggest mixing bowl and measured out one litre of water, instead of three, figuring that the mixture would simply be more concentrated and I would just put less into the washing up water.

My goodness, it was brilliant! It fizzed up and expanded, hissing its way to the top of the bowl and expanding like the magic porridge pot. I felt like Hermione hitting the jackpot in Snape’s potions lesson. (There’s a picture, but it doesn’t convey the thrill of the fizz).

Unfortunately, that was the best bit.

It worked OK on crockery. Cutlery wasn’t fantastic but it was all right. But no matter how hard I tried, all the glassware was greasy and streaked.

I’ve gone back to Co-op ecological washing up liquid for now, but if you’ve been more successful yourself, I’d love to hear your recipe. Don’t make me splurge out on detergent now, when it was all going so well…..