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Once upon a time firemen in asbestos suits rescued children from burning buildings. Curtains had asbestos woven into them to prevent house fires. Every ironing board had an asbestos panel to rest the iron on. During the war, the gas masks that were issued to everybody in the country, man, woman and child, had a filter containing, you guessed it, asbestos. Over the years the asbestos in gas masks must have killed more people than the Luftwaffe. Anybody dealing with the tiniest amount of the stuff now arrives on site dressed as an astronaut; in the past, nobody wore any protective equipment whatsoever.

Picture this. In the early 1960s, a young boy of 15 leaves school and rides his bike to work for the first time. He is starting a six-year apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery (yes six years – those were the days). I was quickly introduced to the joys of asbestos in all its forms (for I was that boy, dear reader). Being carpenters, we didn’t use asbestos all the time but it was a standard building material. We used it for bath panels, garage ceilings, roof soffits, for boxing-in pipes and turning ordinary doors into fire-check doors. Every building constructed in the 1950s and 1960s was full of asbestos. Even now I bet I could still find some of it in most buildings.

The week before I wrote this I found asbestos sheeting on the soffit of a first-floor oriole window.

We used to cut soft asbestos with hand tools and with power tools. It produced millions of grey motes that hung in the air for hours on end, drifting in the sunlight. When the dust finally settled it covered every surface; people were covered in it from head to foot. I used to travel home from distant jobs on the bus still covered in asbestos dust.

Fast forward to August this year, and our hero is out of sorts and off work with a bad back.