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.

Every government IT project fails the same way and everybody involved can describe the failure in advance, which is the part I cannot get past.

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.

Home advantage is mostly the crowd, and the empty-stadium seasons proved it — it shrank, it did not vanish, and what was left was travel and the referee.

Cash is going and I notice I spend more without it, which is embarrassing but seems to be true of nearly everybody I ask.

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.

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.

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

The number of people I know who have quietly cut something out of their diet and never mentioned it to a doctor is, now I think about it, most of them.

Cities that solved housing did it by building an unremarkable amount of unremarkable housing for a very long time, which is why nobody can point to a dramatic example. The absence of a dramatic case is the finding, and it is also the politics: a policy whose costs are immediate and local and whose payoff is twenty years out is the hardest thing an elected person can attempt.

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

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

Everyone I know who is good with money either earns a lot or was quietly given something early. The budgeting apps are for the rest of us to feel busy with.

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

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

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.

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

Reading fiction makes you more empathetic, or at least better at imagining that other people have an interior life at all, which may be the same thing.

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.

"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.

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

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

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

Running is boring and that is the entire point. Every attempt to make exercise entertaining has produced something people stop doing in March.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.