A pay rise disappears in about four months and nobody warns you. You adjust, the new number becomes normal, and you are back where you started with a bigger flat.

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

Nearly everything we were told about food between about 1980 and 2015 turned out to be wrong, and almost nobody who told us has ever accounted for it.

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

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

Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

I would rather pay for a thing once than be in a relationship with it forever, and almost nothing is sold that way any more.

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

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.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

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.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

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

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.

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

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.