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

Telling people to "just move somewhere cheaper" ignores that cheap places are cheap because the work isn't there, which is the entire thing you needed the money for.

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

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

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

The best manager I ever had appeared to do almost nothing. It took me three years to work out that was the job.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

We keep calling it a housing crisis like it's weather.

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

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

"Trauma" now stretches from genocide to a bad line manager, and somewhere in that stretch the word stopped doing any work at all.

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

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.

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 "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

Everyone I know is one broken boiler away from a genuinely bad month and we have all agreed not to bring it up.

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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.

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

Running a car costs most people about four hundred a month once you count everything, and almost nobody has ever counted everything.

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.

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