We have a big rosemary bush in our back garden. The bees love it. A sure sign of spring having sprung is the buzzing from the rosemary.

There are beautiful items and there are useful items. Some precious few are both.

I love this wallet. It’s super slimline. Over the years, it has prevented my carrying pocketfuls of cards, coins and the other detritus larger wallets accrete.

The chill of the early morning lent these closely-planted miniature irises the air of having huddled together against the cold. The colour and shape of them couldn’t help but brighten the morning, however.

Many things in It’s So Sad When Old People Romanticize Their Heydays, Also the 90s Were Objectively the Best Time to Be Alive reminded me of growing up. Overall a trip down memory lane, but also a reminder, similar to A truly great country is within reach, that there was a period between about 1990 and 2008 where things seemed to be, generally, on the up.

A record store was a place. And places demonstrate importance; sometimes they demonstrate devotion. You’d go in there and there would be a couple vaguely pretentious staff members and people pawing through racks of CDs and a wall of t-shirts and posters. And they’d play cool shit that you hadn’t heard before, which was one way to discover new stuff. So was flipping endlessly through every CD in a row. When you were there you were Doing Music.

Probably there were a couple of proper record stores in Chester, UK where I grew up, but I was not the kind of confident kid that’d hang out under the watchful eye of any vaguely pretentious staff regardless of the shop type.

A recent piece reminded me of the positivity that we had in the early 2000s.

I still retain an optimism, but it’s a little scary to look how much the country has changed in the last 15 years. In the 2000s, after Labour’s landslide in 1997, the atmosphere was far more positive than it is now. And when we look to things like the quality of schooling and, particularly, the ratings of the NHS, we can see that feels justified.

Nesrine Malik recalls arriving in the UK in the mid-2000s and finding a welcoming country that allowed her to build a life from very little.