Can you smell a retail boom?

I love to be the bearer of good news. The UK just had the biggest year-on-year rise in the quantity of goods bought in the retail sector since 2004. Yes, you heard right.

OK, so a lot of the 6.9 per cent  fillip has been precipitated by food sales (thanks, Tesco, for your efforts there), but if consumers are forking out for a bigger weekly shop, then sure as eggs their paypacket, confidence – or both – are improving too.

Bear in mind what this actually means: even in the height of the boom years, when the economy was considered to be fine and dandy, we didn’t once see year-on-year figures rise by this much for any given month.

Furthermore, if you look at a ‘three-month-on-three-month’ comparison, i.e. February, March and April 2014, versus February, March and April last year, this is the 14th consecutive such period of sales growth.

For so much of the great recession, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) was the harbinger of doom – quarter after quarter we braced ourselves for yet another onslaught of economic soul-searching as the metrics inevitably worsened.

Now, though, it feels less like the sands are shifting beneath us, and more like people are making money again. Now to get them buying Britain’s world-class jewellery…