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

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.

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.

A thing about friendship after about thirty that I do not think anybody warns you about. It stops happening by default. School, university and your first job all put you in a room with the same people repeatedly for years, and every friendship you have was quietly manufactured by that. Then it stops, and the machinery goes with it, and nobody tells you because the people it has already happened to have stopped noticing. What replaces it is admin. You have to want it enough to put a date in a calendar six weeks out, and then to still want it on the night, which after a full week is a genuinely different question. The friendships that survive are not the deepest ones. They are the ones where somebody was willing to do the admin. I find that slightly bleak and also I have made my peace with it. The alternative was assuming it was about me, and it took about four years to work out that it was structural. Everyone I have said this to since has said some version of yes, and then said they thought it was just them.

Job hopping is the only reliable pay rise and companies have nobody to blame but themselves. Three percent internally, twenty percent to leave, every year, forever.

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.

Something I keep coming back to and cannot resolve, about the NHS specifically. Dealing with it is slow, repetitive and frequently maddening. You give the same information four times. You wait on a line. You are asked to confirm a date of birth by three separate people in one building. Nobody who has used it recently would describe the experience as pleasant. And I trust it completely, in a way I do not trust any organisation that has ever been pleasant to me. I think those two things are connected rather than coincidental. It has to be procedural because the procedure is the accountability — the repetition is a check, the wait is a queue somebody is being fair about, and the four separate confirmations exist because getting it wrong is unacceptable rather than merely bad for retention. Which leaves me unable to answer the obvious question. When somebody says the NHS should be "more like Amazon", what exactly are they asking for? Because I cannot tell whether the pleasant part can be separated from the part that owes you nothing.

Your council decides more about your actual week than Parliament does — the bins, the buses, whether the road gets fixed — and you probably can't name a single councillor.

The best decisions get made quickly. The ones that drag on for months usually dragged because nobody wanted to say the obvious thing out loud.

Nobody tells you that recovering from something takes about three times longer than the leaflet says, and that the last third is almost entirely boredom.

"Just be more confident" ignores that confidence is downstream of having been right in front of people a few times, and nobody can give you that. You can only be handed the room, and whoever is giving the advice is usually the one who decides who gets the room.

Everything is a franchise now and the honest reason is that an unknown thing is a risk somebody has to personally sign off on.

Nobody has ever explained to me why we accept that a phone lasts three years.

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

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

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.

Meetings are not the problem. Nobody distinguishing a meeting for deciding from a meeting for informing is the problem. Half the frustration in any organisation is people arriving in different modes and spending an hour discovering it, then booking a follow-up to do the thing they came to do.

UPI is the best thing an Indian government has built in my lifetime and it isn't close. A billion people moving money for free while most of the world still pays a card company three percent to do the same job.

Within fifty years ageing will be treated as a condition rather than a fact, and the argument will move to who can afford the treatment.

Make voting compulsory. Australia manages it, turnout sits around ninety percent, and nobody there appears to be living under tyranny.

A thing I have noticed after fifteen years of interviewing people: almost every interview process is measuring how comfortable someone is being evaluated, and then reporting that as a measure of how good they are at the job. The tell is that the same candidate performs completely differently depending on the room. Give someone a whiteboard and three strangers and you learn how they handle being watched. Give them a real problem and an afternoon and you learn something about how they think. These correlate weakly, and we have built an entire industry on assuming they correlate strongly. What makes it hard to fix is that the noisy signal is cheap and the good signal is expensive. An hour of whiteboarding costs an hour. A realistic work sample costs a day of the candidate's time and half a day of yours, and multiplied across a funnel that is a real budget line that somebody has to defend. So we keep the cheap test and then add stages to compensate for its noise, which is how a process ends up with six rounds that are each individually indefensible. I do not have a clean answer. I have stopped pretending the current thing measures what we say it measures.

Cricket is the only sport where you can go for lunch, come back, and nothing has happened, and that is a feature.

A thing I cannot resolve about giving money to people begging. The argument against is well rehearsed and mostly correct: it may fund an addiction, it does not address the cause, the money would do more good given to an organisation set up to help, and the impulse is partly about how it makes me feel rather than what it does. The argument for is much shorter and I keep finding it harder to dismiss. Someone in front of me has asked for something I can trivially provide, and every framework I use to say no is a framework I constructed after the fact, sitting comfortably somewhere else. What I actually do is inconsistent — sometimes yes, sometimes no, and the variable is mostly my mood and how much of a hurry I am in, which is the worst possible basis. I would rather hold either position honestly than keep operating a policy that is really just weather.

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.