Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

The state of the roads is the most politically radicalising thing in this country and nobody in national politics has noticed.

Denzel curry is better than lil dicky. They're not even in the same league

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

Football has too much football now.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.