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.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

Every awards ceremony is now three hours of people who have already won things being given more things by people who won them earlier.

Every sport eventually optimises the fun out of itself, because the people playing are trying to win and nobody is trying to make it enjoyable to watch.

The hardest thing to find now is something made by one person who was not thinking about an audience.

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.

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

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

"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.

Am I the only one who finds "quiet luxury" is just expensive clothes for people who got embarrassed about logos?

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.

Startups are a worse deal for employees than they were ten years ago. Same hours, same risk, a much thinner slice, and the exit that justified it happens far less often.

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

Saying the uncomfortable thing is usually the kind option, and almost nobody does it, because the discomfort arrives immediately and the kindness turns up months later.

Everybody says they want politicians to admit mistakes and everybody punishes the ones who do, and I include myself in that.

Walking is free, works for nearly everybody, and has no equipment attached, which is exactly why you never hear about it.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

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.

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.

Being poor is expensive and nobody tells you until you are in it. Cheap shoes twice a year, the meter that costs more per unit, the deposit you cannot save because you are paying someone else's mortgage.

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.

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

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

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.

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.