Why asbestos in the home is now not my only worry when having building work done

Oh, relief, the last remnants of the building work I've recently had done are being cleared up and life is beginning to return to its usual rhythms, uninterrupted by scattered furniture, windowless walls, mind-numbing, tinnitus-inducing drilling and a whole obstacle course of health and safety hazards. Perhaps most relievingly, the two bags of asbestos that had been sitting in front of the house for a whole week have finally been removed.

In my more impoverished days I used to look with disdain on anyone who had, as I saw it, the bourgeois temerity to complain about having building work done. "Oh, you're having a new kitchen put in," I'd think. "Poor you! How absolutely dreadful to have so much disposable income that you have to spend it on replacing a perfectly functioning kitchen for a new one inspired by that glossy centrefold you saw in Home & Garden magazine. It must be a nightmare for you. And to think that there are people out there sleeping the streets without a single responsibility in the world - lucky sods, eh?"

"Don't be sarky," my brother-in-law once said after he'd been met by a similar response when calling me to say how having builders in his house had brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

"Some of us have real lives," he said. "Not all of us spend seven days a week in pubs pretending to write poetry and attend lectures while complaining about the people who work hard enough to have a bit of money. The past fortnight has been really difficult. All four of us have been forced to live in two rooms."

"The people who live in a golden age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks," I replied.

"What's that?"

"Oh, nothing, you will have been too busy making and spending money to have ever heard of Randall Jarrell. He was a poet."

I'm afraid that all the early-twenty-something atoms I've shed since those days must now be turning in the wind, or wherever they now find themselves. These days my brother-in-law and I have been brought closer together than ever before by having the misfortune - yes, the misfortune of both having had building work carried out during the winter months.

At least I only had to deal with a low-grade asbestos threat; he had evacuate to a neighbour's house after builders at work accidentally disturbed an asbestos insulating board.

We were okay, although one morning I did have to request the disposal specialists remove the bags immediately - they had been chewed through during the night, I suspect by a fox. I only hope it doesn't live long enough to develop mesothelioma.

Can I claim?