A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

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

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.

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

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

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

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.

Tipping has quietly become a thing you do for a screen rather than a person, and I notice I resent it far more.

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.

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

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

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 handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

A backdoor for one government is a backdoor for everyone, and this is arithmetic rather than politics. A key that exists can be stolen.

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.

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

Half the arguments I have with my partner are about the same four things and we have never once finished one. I am not sure that is a problem, which is new.

We will still be typing passwords in ten years. We have been promised their death for two decades and I am still resetting one most weeks.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.