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

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

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

Every generation gets told it is uniquely bad at attention, and every generation was in fact being sold something new that was uniquely good at taking it. Novels, radio, television, phones. I do not think the people were ever the variable.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

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

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

We are going to spend the next ten years discovering which parts of the internet were being held together by people doing it for free.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

Music got worse when it got easy to make — not the songs, the filter. When a studio cost real money somebody had to believe in you before you got in the room.

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.

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

For most software engineers a degree stopped being worth what it costs. It is now mainly a filter that employers use because filtering is expensive.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

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.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

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.

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?