Subtitles have quietly changed how everybody watches television and nobody has written the piece about what that does to acting.

My mother has started every phone call for about eleven years by asking whether I have eaten, and I used to find it maddening. It is not really a question. She does not want to know what I ate. If I say yes she moves on immediately and if I say no she is briefly upset, so it is not information she is gathering, it is a check that I am alright, in a form that does not require either of us to say anything embarrassing. I have come round to thinking most of what people find irritating about their parents is this — a real thing being expressed in a code that got set decades ago and never updated. The content is fine. The format is from 1994. What changed my mind was catching myself asking my nephew whether he is keeping busy, which is the same question wearing a different coat, and realising I had inherited the whole apparatus without noticing.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

Nuclear is the safest energy we have per unit generated, and thirty years of being squeamish about it is a large part of why we are still burning gas.

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

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.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

We treat mental health at work like it is about resilience training when it is mostly about workload and whether your manager is a decent person.

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.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

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.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

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

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

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

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.

The best thing about a newspaper was that it ended. You got to the back page and you were done and nobody suggested anything else.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

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

Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.