The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

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

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

The algorithm has quietly killed the thing where you find something you were not looking for. Every recommendation is a slightly worse version of what I already like.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

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.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

Everyone in this country agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why, so here is an attempt at the actual causal chain rather than the usual list of villains. Start with the fact that almost every decision is made on a different timescale from the thing it affects. Rolling stock lasts thirty to forty years. Franchises ran seven to ten. Ministers last about eighteen months in post. Nobody who commissions a train is in the job when it arrives, and nobody who signs a timetable is there when the consequences of it show up. That mismatch produces a specific failure. It is always rational to defer maintenance, because the cost of deferring lands after you have gone. It is always rational to promise a route rather than fix an existing one, because the promise is legible now and the fix is invisible. Do this for thirty years and you get exactly what we have: a network that is simultaneously over-promised and under-maintained, staffed by people who mostly know what is wrong and have no mechanism to say so upwards. I do not think this is about nationalisation. Both models have produced it here, and both models have avoided it elsewhere. It is about whether the person making a decision is still around to receive its consequences.

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.

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

We built an entire economy on the idea that people will keep buying things they already have, and then act surprised when the things are designed to stop working.

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.