Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

Most "we need better communication" is really "somebody needs to make a decision and nobody wants to be the one who did".

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

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.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

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.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.

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

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.