A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

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

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

A thing about going to the doctor that took me far too long to work out. For years I went in and described my symptoms in the order they had bothered me, which is the order they occurred to me, which is almost exactly the wrong order. The thing I was most worried about came last, usually in the doorway, usually prefixed with "oh, and probably nothing, but". What changed it was a GP who interrupted me about forty seconds in and asked what I was actually frightened of. I said it out loud, she dealt with it in two minutes, and the remaining eight were useful for the first time in my adult life. I now write down one sentence before I go in, which is the thing I am afraid of, and I say it first. I am aware this sounds like a productivity tip for being ill. It has changed every appointment I have had since.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

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.

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.

AI is going to destroy more jobs than it makes. Every previous wave moved people up a ladder; this one is coming for the rungs.

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

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

Try watching a match with the commentary off. It is a completely different sport and you notice about twice as much.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

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.

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.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Most political arguments look like disagreements about facts and are really disagreements about what matters. The first kind can be settled. Nobody in history has settled the second by producing a better statistic.

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.

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Nobody has a local team any more, they have a team, and the difference turns out to matter.

Every messaging app eventually turns into a bad email client. Threads, then search, then folders, then somebody adds a rules engine and we are right back where we started.

Watching your team lose is a better test of whether you like the sport than watching them win.

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

Every complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.