The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

Nobody says out loud that getting fitter in your forties is mostly about being willing to be bad at something in public.

Ask a city what it wants and it says better public transport. Ask about the bus and the room goes quiet. The bus is the only bit that is affordable, deliverable this decade and actually useful to people without money — and it is the one thing no city gets excited about announcing.

Ambition gets treated as a virtue and I am not convinced. Half the ambitious people I know are mainly frightened of turning out ordinary.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

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.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

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

Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

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.

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

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.

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

I have changed my mind about anonymity online, and I want to set out why, because I argued the other side for years. The case I used to make was straightforward. Anonymity protects the vulnerable — whistleblowers, people in hostile countries, anyone whose opinion could cost them a job. Real-name policies were introduced by companies with a commercial interest in identity, and they were sold with a safety argument that the evidence never really supported. All of that is still true and I have not stopped believing any of it. What changed is that I stopped treating anonymity as one thing. There is anonymity from the state, anonymity from your employer, anonymity from other users, and anonymity from the platform itself. These are four different properties. A system can give you the first three and none of the fourth, and for almost everyone that combination is what they actually want. The mistake I was making was arguing about a slider when the real question was who each end of it protects you from. Once I separated them, most of the disagreements I had been having turned out to be people defending different columns of the same table.

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.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

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.

Every health app I have tried eventually becomes a thing I am failing at rather than a thing that helps.

Sequels have not got worse. We got older, and no film is ever going to land on you the way one did when you were fourteen.

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

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

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.