Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

Every popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

Owning things is overrated, says the man with a garage he cannot park in.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

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.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

Nobody has a local team any more, they have a team, and the difference turns out to matter.

Every government now governs mainly by announcing things, and the announcement has become the policy rather than a description of one.

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

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.