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.

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

Being the person in the group who organises things is a thankless job and it is always the same person, and that person is usually tired.

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.

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.

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

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

Calling it phone addiction misses it. Most people are bored at work, and the phone is the only thing that isn't.

T20 made Test cricket better, not worse, and the people who say otherwise have not watched a fourth innings run chase lately.

I have started saying "I don't know" out loud in meetings and conversations and it has been quietly transformative, which I did not expect.

There is no book everyone ought to have read, and the list is always suspiciously full of whatever the person making it was assigned at nineteen.

Most people do not actually want a shorter commute, they want the commute to be the last unclaimed part of their day, and those are different things. When I moved fifteen minutes from the office I was delighted for about a month and then quietly miserable. It turned out the forty minutes on a train had been the only time nobody could reach me. Not leisure exactly. Just uninterrupted. I read more in that year than in the three since. Everyone I have said this to responds with either violent agreement or complete bafflement, and I have not found a pattern in which. It might be about whether you have people at home who need things from you the moment you arrive. I am not romanticising it. Standing on a platform in the rain is not contemplative. But I notice that the people who successfully work from home have all invented something to replace it — a walk, the gym, a stupidly long coffee routine — and I do not think that is a coincidence.

Most people would be happier with fewer options. Ask anyone who has spent forty minutes scrolling and then rewatched something they had already seen twice.

Test cricket is the only sport where the boring bit is the point and I will not be taking questions.

unpopular opinion but most "food deserts" are actually time deserts. the shop is there, people are working two jobs.

Nobody has ever said "we should document this properly" and then documented it properly.

Renting is not throwing money away, and I say that as somebody who spent eight years feeling ashamed about it. You are buying the ability to leave.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Everyone I know is on their phone in bed and everyone I know is tired. I am not saying it is causal. I am saying it is a hell of a coincidence.

Index funds have made markets less efficient — half the money in the room is now buying without an opinion about anything.