The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

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.

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.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

Podcasts are radio with the editing taken out and we have agreed to call that intimacy.

Half of what gets called "doing your own research" is reading until you find somebody who already agrees with you and then stopping.

The useful question in a job interview is not what they ask you, it is whether anybody there seems to be enjoying themselves.

Does anyone else think we gave up on repairing things far too easily? Not in a nostalgic way, I mean it was a policy choice and nobody voted for it.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

We have lost the ability to be mildly interested in something. It is either your whole personality or you have not heard of it.

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

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.

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

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

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

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.

The first time I earned more than my father had, and what it was actually like. I had been quietly aiming at it for years without ever saying so. Then it happened, on an ordinary Tuesday, and the thing I felt was not pride. It was a sort of vertigo — the number had been a fixed point my whole life, the thing a household ran on, and now it was just a figure I had passed. What I had not expected is that it changes the conversation permanently and in one direction. He cannot ask me for advice, because that would be an admission. I cannot offer it, because that would be worse. So we talk about the car and the garden, and the one subject where I could actually be useful is the one we have both silently agreed to leave alone. I do not think either of us is handling it badly. I think there is no way to handle it. The money was never the thing that was being measured, and finding that out did not help as much as I assumed it would.

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

Every health app I have tried eventually becomes a thing I am failing at rather than a thing that helps.

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.

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

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

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.

Every job I have had contained about four hours of real work a day and an enormous amount of theatre around it.

Public transport should be judged on whether it is usable by someone with a pram, a suitcase and a bad knee — not on its top speed. Every network that passes that test turns out to be pleasant for everyone else too, and almost every network that fails it was designed around a commuter who is twenty-eight and carrying a laptop.