Daily life, as a long-term guest saw it change

Statistics record output and income. They do not record what it feels like to spend an afternoon getting something done, and that is the part I have watched change.

What is unrecognisable

Dealing with the state. Twenty years ago that meant a day, a queue, cash in an envelope for someone and a form nobody could explain. Now it is frequently a phone.

Paying for things. The transition to card and phone payment here went further and faster than in most of Europe, and a market trader taking contactless payment stopped being remarkable a long time ago.

The cities. Cafés, restaurants, cycle lanes, renovated public spaces, and a service standard in hospitality that would have been unimaginable in the early years.

What changed more slowly

Wages, which rose but not to the level that keeps everyone at home.

Healthcare, where the reforms are real and the experience of a patient in a district hospital changed less than the policy documents suggest.

And the gap between the large cities and everywhere else, which widened before it started narrowing.

The generational shift

The most striking single change. People who began working after 2000 have a different set of assumptions about what is normal — about service, about corruption, about travel, about what a workplace owes an employee — and they now run a great deal of the country.

What did not change

Hospitality, and the assumption that a guest is fed. That has been constant for twenty years and through everything.

This is the most personal piece in the archive and its closing should be too. When I arrived as a student in 2004 it was a country I did not know; twenty-one years later I am still here and not planning to leave. I have listed what changed, but the thing that changed most does not go on a list: in the early years this was a place to me, and then it became a life. Nobody tells you when being a guest ends; one day you notice.