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A friend of mine once apologised to me for a biscuit. We were in her kitchen, she took one, and she said — genuinely, unprompted, to another adult who had not asked and did not care — “ooh, I shouldn’t.” Then she laughed in that slightly strained way people do, and ate it, and I

My mother could not tell you where I was between about nine in the morning and whenever I got hungry. Not vaguely — genuinely could not have told you, on most Saturdays of my childhood, which of about four fields I was in. This wasn’t neglect. It was the standard arrangement. Everyone’s mother didn’t know

I had a bad night’s sleep in March, and I know it was bad because my watch told me so at 6:40 the next morning, with a score, in red. The thing is, I’d woken up feeling perfectly fine. I’d have described it as a decent night. But then I saw the number, and within

There is a man at my gym who has been doing the same workout since at least 2019. I know this because I have been going to the same gym since 2019, at roughly the same time, and in six years I have never once seen him deviate. Chest and back on Mondays. Same order.

If you have ever been genuinely depressed and someone has suggested you go for a run, you will know the very particular flavour of rage that produces. It’s not that the person is wrong, exactly. It’s that they’ve missed the entire nature of the problem. Depression is not a shortage of good ideas. You already

The physio said twelve weeks and I remember thinking that sounded fine. Twelve weeks is a season. I’d done longer breaks than that by accident. What she didn’t say — what I don’t think they ever say, possibly out of kindness — is that twelve weeks was the timeline for the tissue. The timeline for

I once worked out how many hours I’d spent sitting in front of a screen for money. I stopped when the number went past twenty thousand and started feeling strange about it. Twenty thousand hours is more time than most people spend on anything voluntarily. It’s more than I’ve spent with most of the people

There’s a moment, usually somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, when a person plays a game for the last time and doesn’t know it. Nobody announces it. There’s no final whistle. You just move city, or the five-a-side group loses two players and never rebooks the pitch, or the season ends and the WhatsApp group goes

A man with visible abdominal muscles told me last week that seed oils were the reason Western populations are unhealthy. He said it with total conviction, in a well-lit kitchen, holding a jar of something. The video had 400,000 likes. He might be right. I doubt it, but he might be. The problem is that

My uncle is seventy-three and can carry a full sack of compost from the car to the back garden without putting it down halfway. He has never been inside a gym. He has, as far as I know, never used the word “protein” in a sentence. He walks the dog twice a day, does his