Born on 1 January 2017

Back in 2017, the world felt just a little bit more colourful, didn’t it? If you’d popped into the local then, you’d have heard Ed Sheeran’s *Shape of You* playing on a loop until you could hum it in your sleep, and the pub garden would’ve been packed because we actually had a proper scorcher of a summer. Everyone was obsessing over *Line of Duty* on the telly—bent coppers were all we talked about at the kettle—or gathered round to watch a crisp-packet-munching Liam Gallagher in his *As You Were* comeback glory.

On the high street, you couldn’t move for kids frantically spinning those little fidget spinners between their fingers, and every other person was ordering an avocado toast or a gin and tonic served in a glass the size of a fishbowl. We spent half the year worrying about the "Beast from the East" and the other half absolutely gripped by the drama of the snap election. If you went to the pictures, it was all about *Dunkirk* or *Paddington 2*, which, let’s be honest, still brings a tear to the eye.

It was a year of simple obsessions and long, warm evenings before everything got quite so complicated.