Good morning. After another tense night watching football in the pub, my friend reminded me of how different the experience is to when we were younger.

How do you mean I asked. Well, we don’t reek of smoke, he said.

And I remembered what it used to be like. How after going to a gig, or a bar, everyone stank of someone else’s smoke afterwards. And now we never do.

It was twenty years ago this year that the Health Act passed, banning smoking in enclosed spaces… and today we take it for granted.

Last month, almost under the radar, another law passed so that anyone born since January 2009 will never legally be able to buy tobacco products.

Smoking will become rarer and rarer…but so gradually that we won’t realise.

We don’t notice change as it’s happening, it’s absorbed into the new normal.

If the morning news is immediate and dramatic, history is often incremental and invisible. It happens on the quiet.

Until you stop to notice that it’s hiding in plain sight. Or you measure it against a greater span than a news cycle. A life span, for example, a centurion like David Attenborough.

Penicillin, discovered when Attenborough was two, has a reasonable claim to being the best invention since sliced bread… except that sliced bread was also invented in 1928.

My uncle Dave, who died the other day, was the last of my mothers eleven siblings. One didn’t survive into adulthood due to polio, a disease almost eradicated today.

People no longer have 12 children like my grandparents, - the NHS, born when Attenborough was 22, introduced the contraceptive pill and family sizes fell.

Then there’s electrification or the mobile phone - when Attenborough was 50 … as well as, on the down side, the atom bomb and global warming.

Just as we might wonder how our ancestors tolerated slavery or hanging maybe our descendants will wonder how we tolerated the industrial production of animals for food or tearing down rainforests.

The American essayist Rebecca Solnit, who calls herself, in a winning phrase, an ‘ambient Buddhist,’ says that it’s not heroic leaders who change history but the seeds planted quietly by communities acting together… who may not live to see those seeds flower.

Seeds of equality or justice or peace which, once planted, may seem to disappear.

In her new book, The Beginning Comes After The End, Solnit calls these seeds ‘imaginal cells’ which hold ‘the instructions for transformation’.

Or as Jesus of Nazareth told his friends, ‘unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’