Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

Buying a house is the only serious purchase where you bid against a number nobody will show you, and everyone has agreed to find this normal.

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.

A university degree is now mostly a signal about who your parents were, and only incidentally about what you know. The tell is that employers screen on institution rather than transcript, and institution is set by admissions, which is set by schooling, which is set by money.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

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.

The four-day week only really works if your job is thinking. Every pilot anyone quotes was an office, and nobody ever ran one in a warehouse.

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

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

We should be spending vastly more on stopping the next pandemic, and we will not, because prevention has no photograph attached to it.

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

Sport is the only place left where we are collectively fine with someone being obviously, measurably better than everyone else, and I find it interesting that we cannot tolerate that anywhere else.

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.

Every winter the entire country gets the same cough and we have all agreed to describe it as "something going round".

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

Being late is a decision that your time is worth more than mine. There is no version of it that isn't that, however pleasantly it gets phrased.

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.

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

Tipping culture has completely lost the plot and I'm saying that as someone who used to wait tables.

Ask anyone whether they want the truth from their doctor and they say yes, then go to pieces the moment a doctor is actually blunt with them.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

Cookie banners were meant to give people control and have instead taught an entire continent to click the nearest button without reading anything. We have trained a reflex, not a decision.

Voting for the least bad option is not cynicism, it is the entire mechanism working as designed, and I have got tired of being told otherwise.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.