Nicky Haslam has produced his list of things that are common for 2026: Diet Coke and being thin; beards and quails’ eggs; the word “nuanced”; the phrase “no-brainer” (on the grounds that you wouldn’t call anything a “brainer”). It’s the eighth year that he’s put his list on a tea towel, which retails for about £50.

I could think of some disparaging words for spending that much on a tea towel, none of which are “common”.Still, I admire his chutzpah: he’s fashioned a class war, then waved it away nonsensically: “It’s nothing to do with class,” he told the Times. “It’s common in the sense of being universal.” (I mean, that can’t be true: if it were simply a list of things that were unlovely because of their ubiquity, you would hit “regular egg” before you got to quails’ egg.)The phenomenon – things Haslam thinks are common – started in the 00s, when he had a column in the Evening Standard called “How Common”. You couldn’t object to any line item (although there was some unease when he included “loving your parents”) because that would be missing the joke, which was “nothing means what it says”.

Yet the foundational irony was that to mind being called “common” was itself common; it was a hall-of-mirrors effect, meaning and meaninglessness collapsing into one another, into infinity.When Haslam turned his provocation into a household item, at a price you could only entertain if you had way more money than sense, the irony became crunchier – all the words were as meaningless as ever, but money always has meaning.You know those guys who knock on the door with a cloth-based array (sometimes also bin bags), which they entreat you to buy because they’re recently out of prison, and you’re never 100% sure whether that’s true, but you respect their industry, empathise with the awkwardness of their position and want to get back to whatever it is you were doing, so you say: “Fine,” and then the tea towel is £25, but you can’t back out now because you’re committed? Haslam is like the posh version of that.

He surely knows as much, and would call me “common” for pointing it out. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist