Rachael McKelvey

• London to New York on waste oils
• British Baked Beans
• Who can be a billionaire?
• Now That’s What I Call…a cracking 40 years
• More Class-action for Christiano Ronaldo

London to New York on waste oils
This week saw Virgin Atlantic successfully complete the first transatlantic flight powered by sustainable aviation fuel, which is fuel primarily made from waste oils and fats, including cooking oil! The flight left from London Heathrow to New York’s JFK at 11:30am UK time on Tuesday 28^th November.

Flight100 operated by by Virgin Atlantic, but the brainchild of quite some partnership with Boeing, Rolls-Royce, Imperial College London, University of Sheffield, ICF, the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Department for Transport alongside some hefty Government funding, demonstrates that greener flight is possible. The flight has been confirmed as the world’s first 100% SAF flow by a commercial airline across the Atlantic.

This is quite some moment for the industry, who to date had only managed to launch flights without passengers on a blend of alternative fuels making up 50% of the required power. On board the historic flight was the Transport Secretary, still to my great surprise, Mark Harper who said: “Today’s 100% SAF-powered flight shows how we can decarbonise transport both now and, in the future, cutting lifecycle emissions by 70% and inspiring the next generation of solutions.”

British Baked Beans
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, but we did it anyway! The first British-grown baked beans were canned this week in Lincolnshire, the home of sausages no less.

Why is the first ever commercial crop of British-grown haricot bean so historic, because our climate is so awful they don’t usually grow here, but after 12 years of work at the University of Warwick scientists developed three new varieties of the beans seed that were bred to cope with a cold and damp climate and this harvest proves they are candidates for large scale planting and harvesting, they did however fail to crop in 2022 due to the summer heatwave, so they sounds perfectly British in that regard.

Eric Holub of the University of Warwick who helped pioneer the new beans tried some of the first cans and said “They’re tasty. They’re delicious. They’re really very edible,” with the growing farmer Andrew Ward hailed the moment of canning as “an absolute milestone” stating that “as a nation, we import too much food…to be able to produce something that we consume in such great quantities in this country, is just unbelievable.”

The British-grown baked beans are not available for sale, this is all just a test run to can, with most of the seed of this year’s crop being used for next year’s harvest, does this mean that beans will not always mean Heinz? 

Who can be a billionaire?
This week Swiss bank UBS ruined all our deluded hopes and dreams by announcing that the next generation of billionaires will get there by inheritance and not work stating that of the 137 people who became billionaires in the 12 months to April 2023 53 of them inherited their money from intergenerational wealth.

I know, you’re thinking Rachael that maths doesn’t maths because that means 84 of those billionaires are therefore “Self-made”, and yes, based on this arbitrary metric yes…but the nepo babies inherited a whopping £150.8 billion and the self-made only made $140.7 billion.

While collectively they represent a very small proportion of society at all whole, it does mark a strange moment in history, for the first time in the 9 years this report has been created by UBS that “the next generation of billionaires accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship”. The number of billionaires has jumped in reason years across the globe by 7% to 2,544 people and their combined wealth increased by 9% to $12 TRILLION, that’s four times the UKs GDP, which is obscene.

Benjamin Cavalli, the head of strategic clients at UBS Global Wealth Management, said: “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated $5.2tn to their children.”

Now That’s What I Call…a cracking 40 years
The compilation album legends “Now That’s What I Call Music” celebrated its 40^th birthday, starting out in the UK on 29^th November 1983 (oof, that’s a little too close to home for me) with the simple mission of “anthologising the biggest chart hits of the day” and I think we can all agree 40 years later with 116 editions and over 120 million lifetime sales that they smashed it. Apparently, it also means that the average household owns four Now albums…any household I’m counted in exceeds this average.

I joined the now family in the 30’s on both tape and later CD, they handily released twice a year in the summer and that Christmas, so hello handy birthday and Christmas presents for young Rachael. In the days of illegally taping the charts of the radio before CD’s and streaming and curated playlists Now That’s What I Call Music did all that for you.

There is a lot of weird and wonderful history in the Now history, starting out as a joint venture between EMI and Virgin which is how they got immediate access to the best and biggest songs of the day, the first track on the first album was Phil Collins You Can’t Hurry Love, Madonna has never featured yet Girls Aloud have made it 13 times in a row, the ultimate number of appearances goes to Little Mix (28 times) and apparently Now 43 was their first edition released on MiniDisc (whooo). It’s this stuff I get really excited about and the BBC’s music correspondent Mark Savage covers it all, in this fantastic article Now That’s What I Call Music turns 40: Forty facts about the compilation giant

More Class-action for Christiano Ronaldo
Christiano Ronaldo was served with a $1 billion class-action lawsuit for endorsing worthless NFTs as part of his promotion work with Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

The suit which has been filed in Florida argues that the football star “promoted, assisted in, and/or actively participated in the offer and sale of unregistered securities in coordination with Binance,”, the moral of this story being don’t sell Non-fungible tokens of yourself that you likely know investors will lose money on.

The world of NFTs is bonkers, the concept of the digital ownership of one of a kind verifiable asset that are tradable on the blockchain when anyone can screen shot anything with a click of an item in their pocket is just nuts, yet here we are. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, Ronaldo is still doing promotional work for Binance on Twitter, now known as X, and he joins a raft of other celebrities who’ve faced similar challenges, including Kim Kardashian who received a whopping fine in excess of $1 million last year from the SEC for similar promotional activities.

Current watch:  Mae Martin: SAP – Thankfully, nothing to do with System Applications and Products in Data Processing, if you know you know, if you don’t be thankful you don’t know. I love Mae Martin and SAP is Martin talking about how the world is a little bit mad and how that madness shapes you in ways you sometimes don’t even realise. It’s hilarious and awkward in parts but in that totally relatable way. It felt oddly comforting in its imperfections, I know it won’t be everyone’s style but the tangents the stories go on and the delay to the punchline along with the Anglo Canadian accent but I just loved it, Martin has quite a back catalogue to watch and if there is one thing I would draw your attention that’s floating around on the internet it’s the moment where Brett Goldstein comes on stage and kisses Martin…which they later went on to say in response to what it’s like kissing Brett Goldstein “I love kissing Brett Goldstein. Who wouldn’t? The jawline and forehead of a superhero, the heart of an angel” and basically that’s how we should all be kissing and be kissed just fyi.

Current read: The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper – Hallie Rubenhold – This book was incredible; I don’t know why I’ve waited this long to read it. While these women were the victims of Jack the Ripper, this book shares the experiences of Victorian womanhood, the knife edge from survival to poverty and powerlessness against constant abuse. They all lived incredible lives and the only thing they had in common was the year they died, despite the narrative around Jack the Ripper the truth about these women and how they came to be victims of a notorious serial killer. Historian Hallie Rubenhold paints a detailed and captivating picture of these women’s lives and sets the record straight, there was no commonality, they were not prostitutes, other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I couldn’t stop reading and just as I came to the end of one story I wanted to find out about the next incredible women. No greater service to correcting history for Mary Ann, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane.

Most Impactful Listen: Diary of a CEO: The Coffee Expert: The Surprising Link Between Coffee & Your Mental Health! James Hoffmann – I feel conflicted, this one should be a one to watch as much as the most impactful listen, but this is very niche. Non coffee drinkers this one should be for you, but I would understand if it’s not. James Hoffman sounds like the smoothest cup of coffee, and he could read me in a bedtime story but even if his voice is not your thing, I’d struggle if you didn’t find him incredibly knowledgeable and interesting on all thing’s coffee. James won the World Barista Championship in 2007 and posts all manner of coffee related content across social media, he has temperature probes and spreadsheets and there isn’t much he doesn’t know about coffee, without judgement. He is also an author of some excellent and beautiful books about coffee. In this episode he talks all things coffee, how he went from not being a coffee drinker to an expert, where to go for the best high street coffee, why coffee costs what it does and the best way to make it and how he learnt to communicate that passion. I looked at how I have been starting to rush through my morning coffee process and it really made me slow it down and reignite the lockdown love for the perfect brew time.