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.

Every few years somebody announces that we have cured a thing in mice, and nobody ever writes the follow-up where it did not work in people.

Every interface is now designed to be learned once and never thought about, which is wonderful until the day it does something you did not ask for.

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

Every handover document is written by somebody who has already mentally left, which is why none of them are any good.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Statistics should be taught instead of trigonometry. I have needed one of them roughly weekly since school and the other precisely never.

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

Football has too much football now.

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

"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.

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

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

I started leaving my phone in another room and I feel slightly deranged about how much better it is. That cannot be right. It is a phone.

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

Peer review does more harm than good at this point. Two anonymous strangers, no accountability, eighteen months, and a result nobody will ever try to reproduce.

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.

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.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

Nobody I know under forty mentions a pension and nobody over fifty talks about anything else. There is no middle period where it gradually comes up. One day it is simply the topic.