Nobody budgets for the thing that actually ruins a month, because the thing that ruins a month is never in the categories.

Nobody has ever been promoted for the thing they are actually best at, in my experience, and I cannot decide whether that is a flaw.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

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.

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.

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

Weddings have got completely out of hand and everybody involved seems to be having a worse time than they would at a decent party.

Are smart wearables a fad?

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

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.

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

Every government now governs mainly by announcing things, and the announcement has become the policy rather than a description of one.

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

Everyone has become an amateur nutritionist about their own dog.

Genuine question: can anyone name a single thing their MP has done? Not voted for. Done.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

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

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.

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.

Science journalism is mostly press releases with the caveats removed, and the caveats were the science.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

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

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.

"Free delivery" is not free and we all know it is not free and we all still pick it, which I think says something slightly embarrassing about all of us.