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

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

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

Follow the rules that make no sense anyway. The alternative is everybody deciding privately which ones are silly, and that unravels faster than you would think.

Inheritance decides more about how someone's life goes than education does, and we spend all our time arguing about schools because that is the lever we are allowed to touch.

Nostalgia is mostly just not paying attention now. The past feels richer because it has been edited down to the good bits and you were not doing the admin.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

Museums should explain less. I have started reading the wall text before looking at the thing, which means I am now being told what to see before I have seen it.

Being a fan of something has turned into a job. Watch the thing, read the discourse about the thing, have a position on the discourse. I miss just liking a programme.

Most advice on how to argue better assumes both people want to find out what is true, and in most real arguments at least one person is defending a position they have already told other people they hold.

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

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

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

Genuine question: has anyone actually changed their mind because of something they read online? Not softened, not "considered" — changed.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

Every company I have joined has a three week onboarding plan and the actual onboarding is one person who has been there six years and answers questions. Nobody has ever written that person into the plan.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

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

Polarisation gets the blame, but the lasting damage from social media might be flattening — every subject arrives at the same size, in the same box, with the same three reactions available, whether it is a war or a sandwich.

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.

Something I have thought about a lot since I started managing people, which nobody warned me about: you cannot tell someone they are underperforming in a way that does not change the relationship permanently. I do not mean they resent you, though sometimes they do. I mean that afterwards, every ordinary interaction has a second layer. You ask how the weekend was and they are checking whether you are asking because you are being normal, or because you are softening something. That layer does not go away when the performance improves. It just gets quieter. I still think you have to do it. Letting someone carry on failing is worse, and the version where you say nothing and then act surprised at review time is the genuinely unkind option. But I have stopped pretending it is a neutral conversation that a good manager can have without cost. It costs something every time, and the honest thing is to spend it deliberately rather than believe the technique makes it free.

Football fans do not want their club to be successful, they want it to be theirs. That is why every ownership row goes the way it does.

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

Most people who say they want honest feedback want accurate praise, and the two are easy to confuse until the feedback is actually negative. You can watch the switch happen in real time: the request is sincere, and then the first genuine criticism arrives and the next twenty minutes are spent supplying context.