Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

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

Nostalgia for early internet culture ignores that it was small, homogeneous and mostly male, and that almost everything people miss about it was a property of being small. Two hundred people can hold a norm in their heads without writing it down. Nothing about that survives contact with two million.

Honestly think the four-day week debate is mostly people who already have autonomy arguing about the calendar, while everyone in a warehouse gets nothing out of either version.

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.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

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.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.