When I tell people that I never had hayfever until I moved to London, they are confused. For a long time, I was too. But I started to notice that alongside the sudden onset of summer allergies (sadly, including allergies to my favourite fruits), I was also blowing out globs of what looked like soot from my nose day in and day out.

Neither the allergies nor the soot bogies appeared when I lived back in Birmingham. In fact, when I travelled back to Birmingham during the summer I could spend an entire day outdoors, rolling around in daisies and eating grapes and mango and I wouldn’t get a single sniffle or the whisper of an itch on my tongue or lips.

I came to my own conclusion: it had to be the pollution in London. I was very literally living in The Big Smoke.