Get the stain out in the first five minutes

Cold water, a clean white cloth, and thirty seconds of blotting will save more clothes than any bottle you can buy. Start there, every time, before you go looking for a product. The stain that's still wet is a chemistry problem. The stain that's been through a 60-degree wash and a tumble dryer is a decision about whether you like the shirt enough to wear it in the garden.

Two rules do most of the work. Don't rub, and don't use heat until you know what you're dealing with. Rubbing drives the stain deeper and breaks the surface of the fibres, so even after the colour comes out you're left with a dull, fuzzy patch that catches the light. Heat cooks protein — blood, egg, milk, sweat, gravy — into the cloth permanently. Hot water on a blood spot is how a small mark becomes a brown shadow that never leaves.

The first sixty seconds

Lift, don't wipe. Scrape solids off with the edge of a spoon or a blunt knife, working towards the middle of the mark so you're not spreading it outwards.

Then blot. Clean white cloth or kitchen roll, pressed straight down, lifted straight up. Move to a fresh part of the cloth each time so you're not putting the stain back. You're trying to get liquid out of the cloth, not push it around inside it.

Now flush with cold water from the back. This matters and almost nobody does it. Turn the garment inside out, hold the stained spot over the sink, and run cold water through from the reverse side so the stain travels back out the way it came in. If you flush from the front you're pushing it through the weave.

Put a folded cloth or a wad of kitchen roll underneath and keep it there for any treatment that follows. It gives the stain somewhere to go.

What to keep under the sink

Five things cover nearly everything:

• Clear washing-up liquid. Plain, uncoloured. Fairy or the supermarket's own. This is your grease weapon.
• White vinegar. For tannins, for deodorant marks, for hard water residue.
• Surgical spirit (isopropyl alcohol). Ink, grass, some dyes.
• 3% hydrogen peroxide from the chemist. Whites only.
• Oxygen bleach powder — sodium percarbonate, sold as a laundry booster. Safe on colours in a way chlorine bleach never is.

Two safety lines that are not negotiable. Never mix chlorine bleach with ammonia, and never mix it with vinegar. Both combinations produce toxic gas in a closed bathroom in seconds. And if you're using a solvent, open a window and stay away from gas hobs, pilot lights and candles.

Test anything stronger than cold water on a hidden seam or the inside of a hem first. Dab, wait a minute, blot with white cloth. If colour lifts onto the cloth, stop.

Then match the treatment to the stain

Grease and oil — butter, salad dressing, chain lube, chip fat. Dry first: cornflour or talc, left on for fifteen minutes to draw the oil up, then brushed off. Then a drop of washing-up liquid worked in gently with a fingertip, left for five minutes, and warm water is fine here. Grease is one of the few stains that likes a bit of heat.

Red wine, tea, coffee, blackcurrant, fruit juice. These are tannins. Cold flush from the back, then a solution of one part white vinegar to two parts water, blotted in. On whites and colourfast cottons, follow with oxygen bleach soaked in cool water for an hour or longer. Don't reach for bar soap — soap can react with fruit tannins and fix the mark in place.

Blood. Cold water, and only cold. Keep flushing from the back until the water runs clear. If a shadow remains on white cotton, 3% hydrogen peroxide dabbed on with a cotton pad will usually take it. On coloured fabric, peroxide will also take some of the dye, so test first and accept the trade.

Ink. Lay the fabric face down on a pad of kitchen roll. Dab surgical spirit onto the back of the stain and let it carry the ink down into the pad. Change the pad the moment you see ink on it, or you'll just soak it back up. This is slow. Ten minutes of patient pad-changing beats two minutes of enthusiastic scrubbing.

Grass. Surgical spirit, dabbed, then an enzyme detergent worked in and left to sit. Chlorophyll is a dye, so expect a faint green ghost on white trousers. Sometimes that's the best you get.

Chocolate and gravy. Fat and protein together, which is why they're stubborn. Scrape, cold flush from the back, then enzyme detergent left on for half an hour before washing cool.

Deodorant and collar yellowing. These build up over months, so they're not a first-five-minutes job. White vinegar soak, then an enzyme detergent. Chlorine bleach makes protein-based yellowing worse, not better. It can turn the mark darker and lock it in.

Mud. Leave it. This is the one case where doing nothing beats doing something. Let it dry completely, take it outside, and knock and brush the dried dirt off. Wet mud smeared into a weave with a damp cloth is a much bigger job than dry mud flicked off with a stiff brush.

The fibre matters more than the stain

Wool and silk are protein fibres. That means enzyme detergent will happily digest the garment along with the stain, and oxygen bleach will leave wool feeling like wire. For both, use cool water, a wool-safe detergent, and very little agitation.

Anything labelled dry clean only: blot, flush nothing, and get it to the cleaner inside a day or two. Tell them what the stain is. "Something red" is useless to them. "Red wine, Saturday evening, I blotted it with cold water" tells them which solvent to start with. And don't iron over a stain you can still see, on any fabric. That's a heat press, and you're setting it.

Check before it goes anywhere near the dryer

Wash as normal, at the coolest temperature that will still get the garment clean. Then hold it up to daylight — not the utility room strip light — and look at the spot while it's still damp.

If any trace is left, treat it again and wash it again. A stain will survive three wet cycles and still come out. It will not survive one dryer cycle.

That's the whole discipline, really. The dryer is the door you can't walk back through.

I learned that on a christening Sunday, holding a niece who was holding a cup of blackcurrant squash with a lid that wasn't on. Shirt front, straight down the placket. Two minutes in the vestry loo with cold water and paper towels, twenty minutes at home with vinegar, and the shirt is still in rotation four years on. The one I lost that year was a plain grey T-shirt with a spot of chilli oil on it, because I couldn't be bothered and put it in the machine on hot.

Keep the five bottles under the sink. The skill is mostly just getting to the sink quickly.