Rural walking made accessible, tiniest snake rediscovered and more of this week’s uplifting stories

Good morning.

Despite this week’s heavy news cycle, here are some uplifting moments you may have missed.

Volunteers for the campaign group, Slow Ways, have mapped 10,000 walking routes across Great Britain for public use, to help make rural walking more accessible for disabled people, parents and children and older people.

The dedicated website includes 7,699 routes in England, 1,510 in Wales, and 854 in Scotland, with more being added which will also be available on an app that is in development.

Daniel Raven-Ellison, the chief executive and founder of Slow Ways, said: “For millions of people, these routes give the psychological security and confidence that they would not have had otherwise. They do not want to take the risk of not knowing whether a route is right for them, or if it is something they will enjoy.”

Keep reading for more good news stories from our First Edition newsletter.

The Guardian newsletters team

Rachel Reeves is the first female chancellor of the exchequer, but she is far from alone in holding a senior position in managing the nation’s finances. As the Guardian’s economics editor, Heather Stewart, notes, the commanding heights of economic policymaking in the UK are becoming much less male.

The Institute for Government’s director is Hannah White, its chief economist, Gemma Tetlow, and the new director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies is Helen Miller. The Resolution Foundation is now run by Ruth Curtice, a former Treasury economist.

Two of the four deputy governors of the Bank of England are women, too – as are the leaders of a string of powerful trades unions.

“This female takeover has been a quiet and matter-of-fact one,” Stewart writes, “but it marks a significant change, very noticeable upon returning to covering the field, after a few years away.”

Andy Kalli once lived a double life, earning money during the day and spending it on crack cocaine at night. He first took cocaine at a pub in his late 20s after a business deal went wrong. “Once I took that line, in my brain, I was 10ft tall. I started doing a bit more. I started going to casinos to make up the £50k I lost. I ended up blowing £100k in a week,” he says.

The years ticked on but it became harder to hide his addiction after his daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Kalli missed hospital appointments during her final year of life due to his addiction. Six months after her death, in 2014, he visited a hospital in the West Midlands and asked for help.

Kalli has been clean ever since, and he trained as an addictions counsellor and graduated, at 61, with a degree in psychology focusing on substance misuse. Now he works at the Perry Clayman Project in Luton, Bedfordshire, and says he advises rehab clients not to apologise. “Your families have heard it a thousand times. It’s by making change that you’ll be making amends.”

At first glance, the idea of buying books by the metre to fill out our bookcases may seem like an indictment of our shallow, consumption-obsessed culture. However, as Lucy Knight discovers in this piece, this interior decorating trend has real value for booksellers, and is “a savvy way for retailers to get rid of large numbers of titles that would otherwise be difficult to shift”.

But books are made to be read, you may say. As Lucy herself notes: “In an age of constant scrolling, there is social capital to be gained by simply looking as if you are a cultured person who listens to music on vinyl and reads lots of books. And creating an aesthetically pleasing bookshelf is now easier than ever.”

And, as one bookseller remarks: “We’ve all got lots of books on our shelves that we haven’t read.”

For this week’s edition of our games newsletter, Pushing Buttons (sign up here!), Keith Stuart writes on the couples who game together, and how they strengthen their bond through games such as Final Fantasy and Animal Crossing.

“There is a lot of romance in experiencing new places together, getting lost and combining skills to help each other out of calamities. There is sweetness in a shared Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing escapade; there is intellectual challenge in quiet evenings with Blue Prince or Split Fiction,” he writes.

“For too long, gaming was seen as the preserve of lonely young men, a hobby too guarded and insular for lovers; now everyone can play and the digital world is opening up.”

The world’s smallest snake, as thin as a strand of spaghetti, has been rediscovered in Barbados 20 years after its last sighting. The Barbados threadsnake, thought to be extinct, was found under a rock in the centre of the island during an ecological survey by conservation organisation Re:wild.

During the survey in March, Justin Springer, who had been looking for the threadsnake among other reptiles for more than a year, jokingly told his colleague: “I smell a threadsnake,” while turning over a rock trapped under a tree root. And there it was.

“When you are so accustomed to looking for things and you don’t see them, you are shocked when you actually find it,” he said.