I watched Bridget Jones 4 and it gave me strange flashbacks to these Noughties events

I’d read the erring-on-bad reviews, though decided to go anyway. I dodged the other two sequels, so there was no meat in this Renee Zellweger sandwich. It’s just Bridget Jones’s Diary, then this doorstopper on the other end.

Anyway, against the odds and, though I’m not a romcom fan, I very much enjoyed it.

The film is annoying in parts, but also silly, hopeful, charming, and quite retro.

In fact, it gave me more flashbacks than an ayahuasca ceremony. I suddenly came over all nostalgic for the Noughties, which is strange, as I’ve always found it quite hard to define that decade. It seems too recent. After all, I still have serviceable black tights that date from those years.

However, the original came out back in 2001, which was quite a formative time for me.

It was just before I started on the features desk of The Scotsman, and the film had the entire department, which was pretty huge at that time, in its thrall.

It was pre social media, Netflix and that ilk. Our website was but a twinkle in a future editor’s eye.

As a society, we all still had an attention span longer than 20 seconds, so blockbuster films, pop stars and fashion happenings had a much longer and stronger effect on popular culture.

There were also way more column inches to fill, because plenty of people still read newspapers.

Thus, every motif in this period piece of a film was spun out into a trillion features. We wrote about chugging ice-cream, chain-smoking, ‘smug marrieds’, interviewed the author of the original book, Helen Fielding, did round-ups of Christmas jumpers, and discussed the fact that Bridget was ridiculously considered chunky at a very slim size 10.

As far as travel content goes, the mini-break, as featured in the film, when Daniel takes Bridget to Stoke Park Club for the weekend, became a thing.

When the recession hit a few years later, the Noughties also saw the rise in glamping and staycations. Those were buzzwords that never died.

The same goes for ‘fashionista’ - a term that was coined in the Nineties, but which we used relentlessly in the Noughties. This was adapted to ‘recessionista’, when times got tight.

And there were the ubiquitous skinny jeans. Almost the entire department shoehorned their thighs into these Noughties equivalents of the Victorian corset.

They were the uniform for the ‘indie sleaze’ trend, as sported by the likes of Amy Winehouse and Kate Moss.

You teamed those with the obligatory ballet flats. I remember my physiotherapist mother-in-law telling me to stop wearing them, but I didn’t pay heed. Now, my chickens have come home to roost, so I won’t be participating in their current joint-bothering revival.

While the newsdesk were in smart shirts, our department looked like we were off to Glasto.

We had an entirely separate and much more casual dress code. Mind you, there were shots over the barricades when a feature department sub got sent home by the editor and told to change. He was wearing Hawaiian shorts and flip-flops to work. Too far.

Later on in the Noughties, there was a revival of vertiginous platform heels, as Prada showed them on their catwalk and two models pancaked onto their faces.

I remember one intrepid features writer being sent out to see if she could negotiate the cobbles of the Royal Mile while wearing six-inch-high versions. I don’t think it went well. She ended up having to steady herself by grabbing hold of an unwitting tourist.

We produced a lot of first person features in those days.

For example, we were still excited about Ikea, which had opened its first Scottish store in Edinburgh at the very end of 1999.

At one point, we had a race to see who would be faster - a man or a woman - to assemble a Billy bookcase. I can’t remember who won.

The Devil Wears Prada film was another zeitgeist-y biggie. It was released in 2006. To my chagrin, a few of my then superiors seemed to start channeling the Miranda character, and I was forever running out to get them lattes. Flat whites were yet to be invented.

This came after the original series of Sex in the City, which ran until 2004, and prompted a colleague to wear a Carrie-esque pink tutu to work.

Everyone wanted to sport Manolo Blahnik shoes, drink Cosmopolitans and get a Brazilian, and, after Carrie and Miranda sat outside the Magnolia Bakery in New York in a 2001 episode, cupcakes became totally massive. We all became experts in swirly buttercream.

I’m not sure if our then recipe writer, the cook and television personality Clarissa Dickson Wright, ever contributed recipes for those.

I can’t imagine her being a fan of cutesy cakes.

Anyway, there were definitely no vegan options, since veganism hadn’t even been invented. Same with Scottish street food.

There are other Noughties feature writing influences that have sprung to mind.

Jamie Oliver as the Naked Chef, tote bags, the opening of Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh - with Meg Mathews and Ewan McGregor at the launch shindig - Kylie Minogue in her gold hotpants - I definitely wrote a piece on that - Britney, Beyonce, so much Alexa Chung, supper clubs, the start of pop-up restaurants and the revival of make-do-and-mend.

It was even the decade when Madonna married Guy Ritchie at Skibo Castle, and they got divorced eight years later.

As soon as the daily features editor got wind of that, she asked a writer to get an interview with the Queen of Pop. Despite knowing the outcome, the minion did as she was told, and contacted the PR. God loves a trier.

I really feel that I unlocked these and plenty of other Noughties memories, after watching that film.

It also reminded me that it’s time to ditch the last of my skinny jeans. And I’ll consider getting rid of those dusty tights, too.