Vape-o-nomics 2 is Go! | The Friday(ish) Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

What have I been up to this week?

Happy Sunday! I may not have managed to get this out on Friday this week but Monday to Sunday is at least progress!!

This week has been another of what I sometimes refer to as our “changeover weeks”.

With the first instalment of Vape-o-nomics out there in the world, our focus has switched to the second episode.

Despite my best efforts, I began the week with a a bit of work to do still to tidy up the script. I had a solid first draft, but some of it was a little drier than I hoped.

I’ve therefore had a lot of long days and late nights trying to “punch up” the script to make it a bit more exciting.

It’s been a humungous amount of work, but I think it’s had the desired result.

There’s a bunch more history and capital-p “Politics” to the next one but I hope I’ve managed to make it as fun and engaging as possible!

And I’ll tell you what it’s all about next week!

And outside of work?

Around the wildness of trying to get the video together last week, my wife and I managed to find the time to make some sushi!

We’re off on our honeymoon in a few week’s time. And, like seemingly everyone else at the moment(!), we’re going to Japan.

As such, I bought my wife a bunch of sushi ingredients for Christmas.

Amid the business of our day-to-day lives, we hadn’t had the chance to actually try it yet, so we set aside a few hours on Sunday afternoon to at least try our best!

Once we’d made the rice (which needs a good amount of time to soak) and cooked up some duck for one of the fillings, sushi’s actually a fairly simple dish to make.

It took us a few attempts to get the knack of rolling it all together. But, with some help from a YouTube video and a couple of attempts, I think we did okay!

Definitely something I want to try again soon!

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

I had a couple of trips to the cinema this week, seeing both All of Us Strangers and American Fiction.

(Light spoilers for some of All of Us Strangers here).

Both of which are adaptations from books and both of which are absolutely excellent.

All of Us Strangers is largely a film about grief. Love too, perhaps. But largely grief.

On the one hand, it’s an incredibly human, character-led relationship drama. But, it explores this through an incredibly theatrical devices in which the protagonist has lengthy conversations with visions of his dead parents (or perhaps something more than visions, the film never worries too much about being explaining itself).

It was really exciting to see a film which takes a slightly different approach to storytelling; and particularly one which does it so well.

The whole thing is joyous but also gut-wrenching and beautiful. It’s one of those where I sat in my seat staring at the credits for a long time when it finished, soaking it all in!

That brings us to the end of this week’s edition of the Friday Update. I hope you’ve found it mildly insightful.

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!