Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

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

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.

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Open-plan offices are the clearest case I know of an entire industry adopting something because it was cheaper and inventing the reason afterwards.

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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

Nobody knows their neighbours and everybody says they would like to, which suggests the barrier is not that we do not want to.

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.

How somebody looks after their own body is nobody else's business. Not mine, not yours, not their colleague's, not a stranger's on the internet.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

A thing I keep noticing about rereading. I used to think rereading a book was a waste of a life that only has room for so many books. Then I reread one I had loved at nineteen and found a completely different novel inside the same sentences — the bits I had underlined were not the good bits, and the character I had dismissed as tiresome was plainly the one the author cared about. What I had actually done at nineteen was read my own circumstances and call it a book. That is not a criticism of nineteen. It is what reading is. But it means a book you have only read once is a book you have read exactly one way, and the copy on the shelf has more in it than you took. I have no system for this and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I just stopped feeling guilty about the ones I go back to.

Getting a GP appointment has become a competitive sport and the people who are worst at sport are the ones who need it most.

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

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

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

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.

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

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

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.