Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

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.

The replication crisis never really ended, we just stopped finding it interesting.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.

You can love the work of someone appalling. I have never once met a person who manages it consistently, but in principle you can.

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.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

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.

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

Cricket commentary has got unbearable. Nobody describes anything any more, they just wait for a stat to read out.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

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.

Nothing is allowed to be medium-sized any more. Everything is either a phenomenon or it failed.

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

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

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

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

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Long covid got dropped from the conversation very abruptly and I do not think anything about it was resolved.

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

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

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

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

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.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.