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

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

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

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

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.

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.

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.

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

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

I have started saying no to things eleven months in advance and it turns out absolutely nothing happens.

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

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.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

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

Local elections are the only ones where your vote plainly matters and they have the lowest turnout, which I cannot square with anything.

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

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.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

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.

Cities keep building cycle lanes that stop. Just end, mid-road, and you are in traffic. What is the point of ninety percent of a cycle lane?

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

I have started going to bed at the same time every night like a child and it has been more effective than every other thing I have tried combined.