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My story begins far away. In the cotton-growing country where I come from.

Uzbekistan is one of the biggest producers and exporters of raw cotton.

However, for the last few years it has made headlines not for the amount or quality of cotton it exports, but for using child labour for picking the harvest.

Many Western and British companies such as Tesco banned products made from Uzbek cotton.

But despite an ongoing international campaign to stop using forced child labour, there were still reports of children working in cotton fields this autumn.

I myself picked up cotton from the age of 13 and throughout my school and student life.

It was a part of our curriculum - to spend two or three months every autumn in the cotton fields of Uzbekistan.

Our daily quota was to pick at least 50 kilos of cotton. Every cotton boll weighs just two or three grams.

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Imagine how many times you have to lean forwards over the cotton bushes to achieve your 50 kilos.

The best among us would pick up to 100 kilos or even more a day.

It really was a slavish job!

I must say though that when you're a child, you don't pay too much attention to the hardship of it, you accept it as the price of freedom from lessons and parents - especially when you are camping for the summer with your schoolmates (girls and evening discos included).

It so different for rural kids, though, who are in the fields all year around.

With age you start to understand that it's deeply immoral to use children and keep them from their studies for all of their childhood. And to cover up the failures of the whole agricultural industry.

I digress.

A world away from Uzbekistan in Pendle, Lancashire, there are, nonetheless, shared similarities. Not for the use of child labour, but a shared history of cotton production.

Once upon a time Lancashire was one of the world's leading centres of cotton industry.

In nearly every town there were mills and factories. The buildings are still there, but now they are used to house other businesses - storage, retail, restaurants.

There are different theories about the industry's rapid disappearance in the 1960s and '70s, but all of them agree on one point - it was fierce international competition which caused so many mills to close.

Before going to Pendle I did an online search for mills and found that the only cotton-producing factory left in the area was one that made towels.

But when I arrived, I discovered that the factory closed down earlier this year.

From that point on I began a mission to find a working cotton mill

I asked people in the local area - but with no sucess.

I finally found a weaving association in Blackpool, but they told me that there's nothing left in the Pendle area.

Higherford Mill in Pendle has been turned into a museum.

With some doubt, the staff there directed me towards the town of Foulridge, saying there might still be a working textile mill there.

I drove to Foulridge and locals directed me to different mills but none of them made fabric any more: one had been turned into a tile storage depot, another one into trade outlet.

The next day I finally found a small textile company - County Brook - one of the last Mohican remnants of a glorious former cotton industry and you can see how they are dealing with the industry's demise in the following audioslide show.

County Brook audioslideshow.

And you can understand that after such a quest, I was really relieved to know from its owner Mr Andrew Mitchell, that no cotton gathered by forced child labour is used there.

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