Moving house is the only reliable way to find out what you actually own, and the answer is always "far less than this".

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

Software has got worse. Everything is a web page in a costume now — slower to open, does less, and it wants an account before it will tell you the time.

Olympic sports get worse as they get more professional. What people actually miss is the amateurism, and it turns out that was most of the charm.

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

What I actually miss is software that was finished. You bought it, it did the thing, and nobody moved the buttons on a Thursday.

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.

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.

Group chats replaced forums and we lost the thing where a stranger's answer from four years ago was still there when you needed it.

Self-driving is a much harder problem than anyone selling it admits. The driving was never the bit — it is the one situation in ten thousand that nobody wrote a rule for.

A cricket match that ends in a draw is a better result than most wins and this is the single hardest thing to explain to anyone who did not grow up with it.

Can we talk about the specific misery of a group chat trying to decide where to eat? Six people, all of whom have a preference, none of whom will state it first. Somebody offers a place. Two react with a thumbs up, which means nothing. One says "I'm easy!" which is a lie. The person who actually wanted Thai says nothing, because saying it now would look like overruling. Ninety minutes pass. You end up at the place nobody chose, which everyone privately rates about a six. The thing is that this is not a coordination problem, it is a status problem. Everyone knows the fastest solution is one person deciding. What nobody wants is to be the person who decided, because then the evening is theirs, and if the food is mediocre it is their fault. The only fix I have found is somebody booking it before the chat starts. Not suggesting — booking. Nobody has ever objected, which rather gives the game away: it was never that people disagreed, it was that nobody wanted to own it.

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.

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.

Weather forecasting got quietly, enormously better and nobody noticed because we only remember the times it was wrong.

Lower league football is better to attend and worse to watch, and the people who only do one of those never believe the other.

I want to defend something unfashionable, which is meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes the point of the meeting is not the information. It is that eight people are now jointly aware that they all heard the same thing at the same time, and nobody can later claim a different understanding. That is expensive and it is doing real work. The email version saves forty minutes and produces eight private interpretations, four of which are wrong and none of which surface until something breaks. Then you spend a great deal more than forty minutes finding out which four. I am not defending the recurring status meeting nobody has questioned since 2019. I am saying the calculation is not "was information transferred" — it is "did we need shared knowledge that everyone knows everyone else has", and for anything contested the answer is usually yes.

A genuine question for anyone who did science at school more recently than me: how much of what I was taught has quietly been revised? Nobody sends an update.

Open source got quietly captured by the companies it was supposed to be an escape from. Most of the big projects are staffed by people on three payrolls now, and the licence is the only part that still looks independent.

Small talk gets a terrible press, mostly from people who have never had to sit next to a stranger for two hours.

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.