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.

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

Youth sport got professionalised and the result is ten year olds with strength programmes and nobody left to make up the numbers on a Sunday.

Nobody knows what to do with an afternoon any more. Give most people four unplanned hours and they will tidy something.

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

Nobody plays anything until it goes dark any more and I cannot work out whether that is the traffic, the phones, or the parents.

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.

The most useful thing I was ever taught about science is that a result with no error bars is a story.

Search has got noticeably worse and I have started adding the name of a forum to the end of every query, which is a strange thing to have to do in 2026.

The friends I have kept are not the ones I had most in common with, they are the ones who happened to live nearby at the right time.

Anyone else notice that every "wellness" thing at work is something that would be unnecessary if the job were slightly less bad?

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.

Everyone in this country agrees the trains are bad and nobody agrees about why, so here is an attempt at the actual causal chain rather than the usual list of villains. Start with the fact that almost every decision is made on a different timescale from the thing it affects. Rolling stock lasts thirty to forty years. Franchises ran seven to ten. Ministers last about eighteen months in post. Nobody who commissions a train is in the job when it arrives, and nobody who signs a timetable is there when the consequences of it show up. That mismatch produces a specific failure. It is always rational to defer maintenance, because the cost of deferring lands after you have gone. It is always rational to promise a route rather than fix an existing one, because the promise is legible now and the fix is invisible. Do this for thirty years and you get exactly what we have: a network that is simultaneously over-promised and under-maintained, staffed by people who mostly know what is wrong and have no mechanism to say so upwards. I do not think this is about nationalisation. Both models have produced it here, and both models have avoided it elsewhere. It is about whether the person making a decision is still around to receive its consequences.

Most people who say they "believe in science" mean they trust institutions, which is a completely different thing and much easier to break.

Shah rukh is indeed the last of the stars. Prove me wrong ✌🏻

Live music is the one thing that has actually got better, and it is because everything else got worse. Nobody can make money from a recording any more so they all have to be able to play.

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.

I have never regretted spending money on a good mattress or decent shoes. Almost everything else I have regretted.

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 complaint about immigration in my town is actually a complaint about not being able to get a GP appointment, and both parties have found it easier to argue about the first one.

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.

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

First past the post keeps producing governments that most people voted against, and we keep describing this as stability.

Nobody finishes books and we have all quietly agreed to lie about it.

Hot take: the reason nobody trusts polls any more isn't that polls got worse. It's that we started reading them as predictions instead of measurements, and then blamed them for failing at a job they never claimed to do.