Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.

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

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

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

Reading a hard book slowly is not the same activity as reading an easy book slowly, and treating them as one thing is why reading targets are useless. Counting books is like counting meals — the number is accurate and it tells you almost nothing about whether anything was absorbed.

Films are too long. Not artistically, logistically — I have children and a bus to catch.

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

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

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

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 government now governs mainly by announcing things, and the announcement has become the policy rather than a description of one.

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.

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

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

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

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

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.

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.

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

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

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.

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.

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.