Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

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

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

Years of reading about the Grenfell inquiry, on and off, and the thing that has stayed with me is not the cladding. It is that everybody involved was following a process. The manufacturers tested to a standard. The certifiers certified against the standard. The contractors specified a product that held a certificate. The building control officers checked the certificate existed. At every single link somebody did the thing their role required, and the result was a building that burned in a way everyone had been told was impossible. That is much more frightening than corruption. Corruption you can find and remove. A system where every participant discharges their duty correctly and the aggregate is catastrophic has no villain to sack, and no obvious repair. The inquiry's recommendations are mostly more checks, and I do not know what else they could have been. But every one of them adds a person who will be able to say, honestly, that they did their part.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

My handwriting has become genuinely illegible and I only found out because I had to fill in a form in front of somebody.

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

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

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

The best sporting moments are almost never the winning ones, which is inconvenient for everybody who sells sport.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

That dentistry sits outside the NHS is the strangest line anyone has ever drawn through a human body. Teeth are in there. They hurt. Nobody can explain it.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

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.

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

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.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.

The honest reason I have not switched energy supplier, bank or insurer is that it is dull, and the entire industry is built on exactly that.

Health advice aimed at women is still mostly either about being thinner or about having children, and it is genuinely strange how little else there is.

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

Everything now assumes you have a phone on you, and we made that assumption into infrastructure without ever voting on it.