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.

Nobody knows their neighbours and everybody says they would like to, which suggests the barrier is not that we do not want to.

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.

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

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

The best thing about going to a match is the twenty minutes before anything happens, and no broadcast has ever worked out how to show it.

Splitting the bill evenly is a tax on whoever ordered the salad, and everyone knows it, and everyone does it anyway because saying so costs more than the difference.

Nobody actually likes standing desks. We all just got told sitting was killing us and now we're too embarrassed to sit back down.

We talk about AI as though the hard part is intelligence. The hard part has always been that we cannot say what we want precisely enough.

Living in a city is greener than living in the countryside, which reliably annoys everyone who moved out for the fresh air.

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.

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.

The first time I earned more than my father had, and what it was actually like. I had been quietly aiming at it for years without ever saying so. Then it happened, on an ordinary Tuesday, and the thing I felt was not pride. It was a sort of vertigo — the number had been a fixed point my whole life, the thing a household ran on, and now it was just a figure I had passed. What I had not expected is that it changes the conversation permanently and in one direction. He cannot ask me for advice, because that would be an admission. I cannot offer it, because that would be worse. So we talk about the car and the garden, and the one subject where I could actually be useful is the one we have both silently agreed to leave alone. I do not think either of us is handling it badly. I think there is no way to handle it. The money was never the thing that was being measured, and finding that out did not help as much as I assumed it would.

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

Everybody is tired and nobody can say precisely of what, and I think that is the actual condition rather than a symptom of one.

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.

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.

Everyone in this country has a story about a builder and I have started to think they are all the same story. Someone comes, quotes low, starts, disappears for eleven days, returns, discovers something behind a wall, revises the price upward by forty percent, and finishes to a standard you would describe as fine. You pay it. You tell the story at dinner parties as a comedy. Nothing happens to the builder. The reason it keeps happening is not that builders are dishonest. It is that almost nobody commissions building work often enough to get good at it. You will do this twice in your life. He does it every week. The information is entirely on one side, and no amount of getting three quotes fixes that, because you cannot evaluate the three quotes either. Which is why every piece of advice you get is useless. Get it in writing, agree a schedule of works, hold back a retention — all sound, all assume you know what should be in the writing. The one thing that would actually help is having done it before, and by the time you have, you are finished.

Money has ruined more sport than it has rescued. Every competitive balance measure in every major league has got worse since it arrived, and that is the table, not nostalgia.

Are smart wearables a fad?

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.

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

Every health app I have tried eventually becomes a thing I am failing at rather than a thing that helps.

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

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.