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.

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.

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.

I've come round to thinking most productivity advice is just a way of feeling organised for about a week.

Remote work did not fail. Managers who could only manage by looking at people failed, and remote work is what made that visible. Four years on, the teams that kept it are the ones that already wrote things down, and the teams that abandoned it are mostly the ones that never did.

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.

Nobody prepares you for the phone call where your parent becomes the person who needs looking after. It does not arrive as a diagnosis. It arrives as a series of small things you decide individually not to worry about — a missed bill, the same story twice, a car with a scrape nobody mentions. Each one is fine. You notice the pattern about eight months after it started. What I was not ready for is that there is no moment where anybody tells you it has changed. No appointment, no letter. You simply find yourself doing more of the phoning and more of the deciding, and one day you realise the direction reversed some time ago and nobody said. The practical stuff I could handle. What I could not was that he knew too, and was managing it, and that both of us spent about a year protecting the other from a conversation we were separately already having.

If you could only fix one, fix your sleep, not your exercise. Nobody wants to hear it because you cannot post about sleeping.

Term limits, everywhere, no exceptions. Nobody should be able to build a forty-year career out of a job that was meant to be temporary.

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.

Every device I own wants to update itself at the exact moment I need it. I do not think this is bad luck any more.

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.

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.

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

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

Sport is the last mainstream thing where the outcome is genuinely unknown to everyone watching, and that scarcity explains most of what it costs. Everything else in the culture now arrives pre-summarised, already reacted to, and with the ending available before you start. The live unknown is what the broadcast money is really buying.

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 popular fact you know about the brain is either wrong or from 1985. The ten percent thing, left brain right brain, learning styles, all of it, still being taught by people who mean well.

Open-plan schools, hospital targets and the gig economy will look like the same idea wearing three hats — measure the throughput, ignore the thing being thrown through.

I miss being unreachable and I am aware I could simply turn the phone off, and I am also aware that I will not.

Why is every app now trying to be a social network? I want the thing to do the thing.

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

An unpopular position I hold about hospitals: the food is bad for a reason that has nothing to do with catering, and fixing it would cost more than anyone will admit. Hospital food has to be safe for people with immune systems that barely work, edible by someone who cannot chew properly, compatible with about fourteen medical diets, transportable across a large building, and hold at temperature for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the far ward. Given those constraints, what arrives is roughly what has to arrive. Every campaign to improve it treats it as a failure of will, as though somebody in charge simply does not care whether patients enjoy lunch. Then a celebrity chef gets involved, produces something excellent in one ward for six weeks, and the programme quietly ends when it meets the other three hundred wards and the actual budget. I am not saying it could not be better. I am saying that "why is hospital food bad" has a real answer, and nobody campaigning about it ever engages with the answer.

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.

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.