Every restaurant is too loud now and I refuse to accept it is just me getting old.

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.

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.

I cannot do a phone call any more and I genuinely do not know when that happened.

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.

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

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

Antibiotic resistance is the slowest emergency we have and being slow is the entire problem. Nothing that takes thirty years to arrive ever gets a budget.

Subtitles on, always. I don't care that it supposedly means my hearing is going — I catch about a third more of what is actually said.

Sat down and added up the subscriptions. Seventy one pounds a month, and I could name four of them.

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.

Football was better without VAR and I will not be moved on this. You cannot celebrate on a three minute delay.

Every organisation says it wants honest feedback and has exactly one person who gives it, and that person is always halfway out the door.

I have stopped believing any product review I read and I do not have a replacement, which is a genuinely new situation.

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.

Nothing is allowed to be medium-sized any more. Everything is either a phenomenon or it failed.

Here is what I think happened to local news, and it is not really about the internet. The classified ads were paying for the journalism. Not the news, not the subscriptions, not the advertising in any form readers noticed — the small ads at the back, cars and jobs and flats. That was the margin, and the reporting was in effect a loss leader that made people pick the paper up. When classifieds moved online they did not move to news websites. They went to dedicated sites that did that one thing well and had no newsroom to fund. So the subsidy vanished, and what vanished with it was the only economic reason anybody had ever paid a person to sit through a council planning meeting. Nothing has replaced it, because nothing was ever paying for it directly. Local journalism was funded by an accident, and when the accident stopped, we discovered nobody had ever been willing to buy the thing itself.

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

Lending money to family, and why I have stopped. I have done it four times. Twice it came back, twice it did not, and the two that did not are the ones that changed things — not because of the money, which I could afford, but because every subsequent conversation had it sitting in the room. The advice everyone gives is "only lend what you can afford to give away", and I think that is right about the money and wrong about the relationship. What you cannot afford is the asymmetry. They know. You know they know. There is no amount small enough to be invisible once it has not come back. What I do now is give a smaller amount and say it is a gift, out loud, once. It has cost me less and I have not lost anyone over it. It also feels slightly dishonest, because I am managing the relationship rather than helping, and I have not worked out whether that matters.

Local elections are the only ones where your vote plainly matters and they have the lowest turnout, which I cannot square with anything.

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.

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.

Everybody under thirty-five I know treats owning a home as roughly as likely as winning something, and talks about it in the same tone.

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.

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