1774: they blew tobacco smoke up drowning victims' backsides to revive them, and the kits hung along the Thames like lifebuoys. 1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily tonic, and a pope pinned a gold medal on it. 1898: they sold heroin as a cough medicine, and spooned it into coughing children. 1918: they sold radium water as a health drink, and the millionaire who drank 1,400 bottles was buried in a lead-lined coffin with most of his jaw gone. 1921: they put lead in petrol, and Britain kept it in the pumps until 2000. 1930s: they X-rayed children's feet in shoe shops, and kids queued to watch their toes wiggle on the screen. 1940s: they rubbed mercury teething powder into babies' gums, and about 1 in 500 of those babies was poisoned. 1946: they sold cigarettes on the line that more doctors smoked their brand, and put a man in a white coat on the advert. 1949: they gave the lobotomy a Nobel Prize, and doctors went in through the eye socket with an ice pick. 1952: they sold a cigarette filter made of asbestos as the greatest health protection in smoking history, and smokers drew it into their lungs with every puff. 1957: they sold thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and around 10,000 babies were born with missing or shortened limbs. 1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat, and spread trans fat on a generation's toast. 1996: they sold OxyContin as barely addictive, and started an overdose epidemic. 1999: they sold Vioxx for sore joints, and pulled it five years later after tens of thousands of heart attacks. 2026: they're selling seed oil as the heart-healthy fat, and it's in almost every packet in your kitchen. Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and the same total certainty. The people telling you which fat to fear today sit in the same chairs as the ones who put radium in the water and a doctor on the cigarette packet, and they're every bit as sure. "The experts recommend it" has the longest body count in medicine.

Polyester has been about to replace wool since 1941, and every decade has announced the victory before finding the catch. 1941: Two chemists in a Lancashire calico works invent Terylene. The future of clothing, they say. It is a plastic bottle in the shape of a shirt. 1951: DuPont launches Dacron in America. Wash and wear, never needs ironing. It also never breathes, which America discovers in July. 1960s: Crimplene. A suit that never creases and can be heard approaching. Static electricity joins the British dance floor. 1973: Children's polyester pyjamas go up like paper, so they are soaked in a flame retardant called Tris. 1977: Tris is banned for causing cancer. The treated pyjamas are shipped abroad and sold to other people's children. 1979: A Manchester Woolworths burns. Ten dead. Foam and polyester furniture turns a room that used to take seventeen minutes to burn into one that takes three. 1982: HMS Sheffield. Sailors in synthetic uniforms are treated for the fabric melted into their skin. The Navy goes back to cotton and wool. 1993: Fleece is relaunched as the eco fabric, made from recycled bottles. The jumper is now proud of being a bottle. 2006: The US Marines ban polyester shirts in Iraq, because a burning man teaches faster than a brochure. 2016: Scientists put a fleece through a washing machine and count what comes out. Seven hundred thousand fibres, one wash, into the sea. 2020: Polyester fibres found in the human placenta. 2022: Found in human blood and deep in living lungs. 2024: Found in every testicle sampled, and in the plaque of arteries. 2025: Found in the brain. About a spoonful. 2026: Still "the future of clothing". Still melting, still smelling after one wear, still shedding, still sold on the hanger next to a sheep that solved all of it before the pyramids. Eighty-five years of upgrades, and the only fabric in the shop that has never needed a recall is the one standing in a field.