Powering Up a New Video | The Friday 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?

It’s been a couple of weeks since my most recent video was released. And people seem to have responded to it really well. It’s hit all our usual targets for views and the comments have been really positive. People who didn’t know anything about the history of Monopoly seem to have found it interesting. And folks who did already know a little bit seem to have liked my retelling of it. And I can’t really ask for more than that!

Over the past week, my attention has been turning to my next video. As most of you know, I recently welcomed a video editor to the team (well, it was just me before!) and that means getting scripts together a little bit earlier than I previously needed to. So, I’ve been all-systems-go with reading, note-taking and writing!

And what’s my next video about you ask? Well, Winter is now in full swing in the UK and things are getting pretty chilly. What those of you who live elsewhere in the world might not know is that energy prices in the UK have skyrocketed over the past couple of years. While prices have been going up globally, in the UK, they’ve increased 90% year-on-year; that’s nearly a doubling!

As such, I’m going to be doing a deep-dive into Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation of the UK’s energy supply industry and how it paved the way for the energy crisis we’re currently experiencing.

And outside of work?

Although I’ve been throwing myself into writing my next video, I have managed to take a few days off for Christmas. This year, I had my partner’s family round for the big day. So, I spent most of the day in the kitchen cooking a big, big dinner. There was a lot of peeling and boiling and stirring involved but everyone seemed pretty happy!

I also played a bunch of Mario Kart and Mario Party with my partner’s brothers—which, this year, I’d been preparing for. I don’t think I managed to win any entire Grand Prixes, but I did manage to win the occasional individual race. So I guess my training half paid off.

What have I been reading/watching/listening to?

The first Christmas present I opened this year was a copy of Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India which I instantly began reading! This was a pretty good pick by my partner. Because, for a while, I’ve been thinking of working on a “History of Capitalism” project. (Whether that ends up being a YouTube video or a series of videos or something else entirely is a different question!). And, if I do go ahead and make that project, I want to make sure it takes a reasonably international perspective.

In particular, I would want to be sure to address the various cross-overs between capitalism and colonialism. One such cross-over is the manner in which Britain’s colonisation of India funded the former’s industrial revolution and development of capitalism. And, what I’ve read of this book so far provides a really detailed insight into some of the awful ways in which British colonialists sucked huge sums of wealth from India.

So, a great pick there!

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!!