Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

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.

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

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

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

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.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

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.

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

F1 drivers are athletes in exactly the same sense footballers are, and the people who scoff have never held their neck steady at 4g for two hours in fifty degree heat.

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

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.