Rise up, shoppers - there's power in your purchases It's easy to feel powerless. But the thing is, we're not. We - the customers who choose to spend or withhold our money - are the ones who will shape our future retail economy, if, that is, we can be bothered to make informed choices. Because the truth is, convenience and cost are hard to resist, however high the moral price to be paid. I'm no different; how many times have I fumed at the rudeness and exploitation and cattle-class crush of Ryanair and sworn never to fly with the operator again? And yet, every time the holidays draw near, despite my best intentions, I'm still a sucker for those cheap (but never, ever cheerful) air fares. Similarly, how much do I try to shop local? Evidently not hard enough to stop the independent bakery on my high street from going bust. We're all interconnected, regardless of the modern mantra of individualism. Advertising for hair gel or mobile phones might urge us to be different, to stand out from the crowd, but a bargain-basement £12.99 frock is a £12.99 frock no matter how you wear it. Whether we acknowledge it or not, someone, somewhere has cut corners to produce, deliver and sell it. Those horrendous pictures of the collapsed clothing factory in Rana Plaza, Dhaka, where more than 300 people have died, 1,000 were injured and some remain buried in the rubble, has given the glib term "fashion to die for" a chilling new meaning. None of us can feign ignorance, or bury our heads in the three-for-two special offers, after seeing the grief, anger and agony etched on the faces of bereaved women and children who have lost loved ones in an entirely preventable tragedy, perpetrated in the name of dirt-cheap leggings. There's a crucial difference between need and greed, and mercifully the recession has curbed much of our retail excess; the "one in every colour" mania has subsided and, although I am racking my brains, I still can't recall the last time anyone crowed about the acquisition of a shiny new "It bag." But the flipside of the downturn is that we want our money to go further. Retailers are having to make an effort to persuade us to part with our hard-earned, which invariably means lowering the cost - but we, the customers must insist that it cannot be at the expense of developing world labourers. Needless to say, on my Take a Pop at the Shops board, I'll be awarding extra Nectar points to players who aren't afraid to make their views known about shoddy retail practices; there will be a special canny-with-cash prize for shoppers who haggle with the big boys; and the winner will get a recycled MBA in ethical consumerism and, by way of assuaging my guilt, a lump sum to be spent at the nearest family bakery. I almost toppled off my yummy-mummy hooker heels when I read yesterday that those mucky pups at the Sex Education Forum, a group of health and children's charities, are advocating that youngsters be taught "not all porn is bad." Whaaaat? But it is! All of it! Every last come-hither glance, every moist-lipped nuance of availability. Bad, bad, BAD. Teenage boys, Lord love them, are already surfing a tsunami of hormones and pursued by strumpety images of Rihanna so scantily clad, I've seen better dressed crabs. Telling them some porn is good is like telling an alcoholic (or a frazzled mother) that white wine doesn't count. In my day it was Legs & Co giving boys their modest jollies; nowadays there are striptease acts on Britain's Got Talent and little girls dreamily warbling on about one-night stands before they've had their first sleepover. Just last month in these pages it was reported that teachers are in despair about how pornography on the internet is warping pupils" ideas of sexual relationships. When girls feel under pressure to "sext" intimate photos of themselves, the whole knee-socked Lolita phenomenon should be met with blanket revulsion, not groovy "porn can be great" messages from the likes of NSPCC and Barnardo's, who are part of the SEF coalition. We already struggle to lay down boundaries for our children - saying yes to porn is indefensible cowardice. A schoolboy was stabbed to death on my local bus in north London this week. I hop on the 393 most days because it takes me to the nearest Tube station. It's a nippy one-decker that weaves in and out of residential streets round Highbury and Islington, so everyone sits close to one another. Close enough to chat, close enough to witness the banal horror of a 15 year-old knifing a 16-year-old on the afternoon of his birthday, as he sat surrounded by presents. I know one young adult, barely out of her teens, who looked on, paralysed by disbelief, as the events unfolded before her with a terrible inevitability. Violent crime is down by a quarter in Britain, we were informed by the Institute for Economics and Peace this week, which should be applauded. But enclaves of violence stubbornly remain. Hackney, the London borough where I am bringing up my children, is the third most dangerous in the country, after Lewisham and Lambeth. My elder daughter, just weeks away from her 11th birthday, is starting to take her first tentative, thrilling steps towards travelling to and from school on her own or with friends. We prefer her to take the bus rather than walk. The bus, everybody knows, is safer. Isn't it? There's a cheese and wine festival this weekend at Southbank in London. Now that's a calorific-yet-carb-free blast from the past; who would have guessed? Me, for a start. Always ahead of the curve, I held my own cheese-and-wine soirée last weekend, which morphed into a veritable Abigail's Party. One friend crafted me a cheesy pineapple centerpiece. Another came dressed as a Seventies air hostess. A third had grown a moustache specially. I, meanwhile, went to Waitrose to source Swedish Västerbotten from the Arctic Circle, French Époisses, which is washed five times in Marc de Bourgogne brandy, and Cornish quartz Cheddar, which has a lactate crystal crunch. No, I didn't either, which is why our cheesy nibbles were a lot more educational than my flight attendant had expected. Cheese has moved on quite a bit since Mike Leigh's 1977 excruciating tragicomedy of manners; even Gewürztraminer has fallen out of, and back into, favour. It was an immensely fun evening, even if I had great difficulty stopping myself from barking in monstrous, Beverly-style outrage at guests who had the temerity to neck the wrong vino with the wrong formaggio. But I did calm down eventually when, so help me, somebody turned up with a Demis Roussos CD, and I just had to channel Bev and dance.