You will find it in carpet cleaners, mothballs, toilet bowl cleaners and air fresheners!

If it is in a concentrated form it can give you headaches when you breathe it, vomiting, sweating, and confusion. It can also harm your urinary tract. It is especially dangerous for children and infants. So what could we use that would be safer for freshening the air? Why not make your own air freshener: try this!

One of the best indoor and outdoor air freshener is the synghonium or the good old Money Plant - both grow in water and in soil! You can hang them around the garden gate, or let them clamber up your house walls, or make a green painted screen around the bathroom, the office, the school corridor, even the toilets! They are the cheapest, safest, friendliest air freshener!

Try a carrot salad with rose petals! Grate four large carrots, half a cup of raisins, one fourth cup of mayonnaise, one tablespoon vinegar, lettuce, and fresh rose petals. Mix all the ingredients expect the rose petals. Refrigerate the salad for six to eight hours. When you serve the salad for dinner or lunch, make a curtain of rose petals over the salad. Try pale cream or dark red roses over the green lettuce colours.

Safer toilet bowl cleaners: ask your mother to use a borax solution to clean the inside of the toilet bowl.

Try this: make a solution of equal parts of white vinegar and water to clean the toilet rim.

Home made toilet cleaner: one cup borax, three fourth cup vinegar or lemon juice! Mix up all the ingredients in a bowl or bucket. Put on rubber gloves, wash off the mildew. Now rub this safer paste over the inside of your toilet bowl, and let it remain there for two hours. Then scrub out the bowl with a nice thick brush or a sponge.

If your toilet is not very dirty your mother can simply sprinkle borax into the bowl and scrub it out nicely. If she does not have borax in the house she can clean it out just with baking soda and a sturdy scouring powder like Sabeena.

If your mother is very tired she can just sprinkle the borax into the toilet bowl before going to sleep. In the morning it would have dealt with the stains for her, and they will be easier to scrub off.

Best of all, easiest of all, friendliest of all: you can just use a couple of denture cleaning tablets or vitamin C tablets for overnight cleaning.

All you need to do is dump a couple of tablets into the toilet bowl before sleeping and scrub out in the morning. You will turn into the world’s safest toilet cleaner and mother’s helper. But the other cleaning tricks can be left to her!