Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that was waving to the person behind you, sorry.

We’re getting deep into Issue 28’s chrysalis phase and the latest sign that the cocoon is ready to burst is that we have a winner for Issue 27’s photo contest. There was much to be admired this time round – some lovely snaps of horses, photos of famous landmarks, old wine cellars, beautiful views and relaxed holiday trotters – but there was one snap that felt most in line with the issue, whose subject gets a brief mention in the upcoming issue and struck a chord with the sinews of Britain and Ireland’s moral fibres of which The Fence is orthopedic-surgeon-in-chief. We speak of course of Tim Walker’s excellent picture of the issue at the Sycamore Gap.

Many thanks to everyone who submitted and in doing so sprinkled excitement, wonder and mirth throughout the opening section of this otherwise dour mailout. We look forward to the next bout that begins the second 28 flies through your front door. Remember: the winner takes home a bottle of Bollinger Champagne.

We’ve printed out another ten codes giving readers 25 per cent off a year’s subscription, which applies to print, digital or gift numbers too. Just enter the code LRB25 at the checkout and you’ll get four issues of the UK’s Only Magazine for the price of three pints of continental lager in a west London gastropub. It really is a stunningly good deal.

Sign Up for the Year

Till then, we have some lovely newsletter pieces to keep you going. In fact, it’s something of a bumper edition. Let’s get it going.

The Art of the Deal

After much hinting and foreshadowing and ankle-showing, the cover story from the latest issue is now online, and with a fresh coda too.

Phin Jennings spent six months working on this investigation of Stuart Semple, an artist who was hailed as ‘the Basquiat of the noughties’ and now operates as a provincial huckster from a studio in Bournemouth.

We’ve been absolutely delighted to see this article ‘blow up’ on different bits of the internet over the weekend, and we hope that people will continue to broadcast the story far and wide. It’s available to read here.

Many people have said nice things about the article, but our favourite one so far is ‘the definitive obituary of the nu-rave movement’ which is not what we were shooting for when we first started working on the piece.

If you have any memories of encounters with Stuart, or anything else you’d like to share, do email us at editorial@the-fence.com.

Six months of reportage and a few barrages of legal letters add up. If you value this type of journalism, and you’d like to see more of it, please do subscribe to the magazine today.

The Fence’s Carbuncle Cup 2026

We have worked and you have waited, and finally, we are delighted to present the 2026 Carbuncle Cup, crowning what we believe to be the very worst new building in Britain built in the past two years. The judges chewed over the nominations. These are the nine buildings shortlisted for The Fence’s 2026 Carbuncle Cup – and there you will find the winners. And, if you are particularly granular in your thinking and would like to understand the behind-the-scenes process more closely, why not watch the Channel 4 coverage by Kiran Moodley of the judging process? We offer our warmest thanks to the architects and engineers who made this project possible, as well as our marvellous judges. As is clear from the numbers on the video below, people really care about bad buildings.

On the Soho Round

Very sad news that our neighbours on Archer Street, Soho Parish School, are poised to shutter owing to declining pupil enrollment. The last school in Soho, children have been taught on the site since 1699, and the current building dates from 1884.

To our ears, this might be more of a harbinger of the ‘death’ of Soho than, say, whether another Simmons bar can open till 2am or whether some private equity-backed restaurant chain can have tables outside on the street, for free. We look forward to the Mayor of London’s next sassy tweet on the subject.

The OG Ted Maul

We’re sad to hear of the death of Roger Cook, whose work we have celebrated in newsletters past. The man made investigative journalism accessible to millions and confronted the UK’s top villains, laughing in their face.

Yet those of us born after the fall of the Berlin Wall find it difficult to watch his work and not immediately think of Chris Morris’ Brasseye, a lodestar for this publication among others.

It’s a similar situation to Craig David, who wrote, produced and sang one of the greatest British albums – ever – at the age of 18, but say his name, and you think of Leigh Francis’ impersonation of him as an incontinent Yorkshireman with a pet hawk.

David’s reputation has risen again, and quite rightly too. We wonder how the future generations will acclaim Cook’s works. Here’s one of our favourites, and indeed the first one he ever did for ITV.

Captain Calamity

Nine years ago, a bus driver called Oliver Salbris stopped a woman from meeting her death on Putney Bridge. Knocked onto the road deliberately by a passing jogger, the woman’s head came inches from a bus wheel, but thanks to Salbris’ quick reactions, disaster was avoided. Salbris has never been properly rewarded (should he not get some sort of medal?) and the identity of the jogger has never been established, despite the offence taking place in the centre of London in broad daylight. That was until yesterday.

The Daily Mail reported that the police had arrested a 44-year-old former British Army officer with links to European royals who currently works as a private banker, which suggests they really, really want to identify the alleged ‘Putney Pusher’.

It is pretty easy to identify who the person in question is, and the same name is being floated around the internet, and it’s a name that is connected to an offence from 13 years ago that is similar to the bus incident. Who will be first to publish? Not us…

Helen of Deal

A Reuters report from 2012 announcing the girl with the most beautiful face in Britain has resurfaced to the fascination of the world, in part because it is always fascinating to see beautiful people, and in part because of the wayward metrics that were used. Florence Colgate was 18 and working at Middle Street Fish Bar in Deal two evenings a week when she won the Superdrug competition, which took a formula for attractiveness devised by a set of researchers – who were presumably noble in their motivation to examine young women’s beauty – as its basis. ‘Researchers who’ve studied attractiveness say, on a perfect face, the distance between pupils is 46 per cent of the width of the face from ear to ear – Florence’s is 44 per cent. The distance between the eyes and mouth should be a third of the length of the face – Florence’s is 32.8 per cent.’

Interestingly enough Florence Colgate – what a name, by the way – now works as a personal assistant at a hedge fund.

Life Is Fabulous

Some things age like fine wine. Others, it has been jokingly remarked, age like milk. It is hard to think of something sufficiently worse than milk to describe how this 2007 episode of The Fabulous Life Of… looks in the cold, cold light of 2026. Zoomed in to avoid being taken down, but still all too visible we present: Billion Dollar Wall Street Ballers, The Fabulous Life of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Mystery Man of Venice

For fans of the various strange figures of Instagram we keep tabs on –you are our favourites, dear reader – we had an interesting update from the enigma that is Andrés Alsina Aristegui.

If you recall at the start of the year we came to you hoping for answers as to his origins. The man is listed (by himself and several stray online blogs) as a legendary designer, model and writer, but his Instagram suggests a mind far weirder. Further investigation brought no elucidation. Recently, he shared this distressing reel, a story about meeting Cate Blanchett and reminiscences of his Basque grandfather which somehow begins with ‘here kitty kitty kitty’.

Our hopes were briefly raised this week when he posted that a blog was publishing a ‘conversation’ with him. We eagerly clicked on only to be disappointed with around 500 words that only seemed to throw down four more mirrors and turn the smoke machine on to full blast. Indeed, the whole ‘conversation’ only features three quotes from Andrés, totalling 19 words, the longest of which is: ‘Venice is a dramatic city which echoes humans in that both are dying.’

We once again plead for further information on this man who frankly seems to be taunting us with this video ‘explaining’ who he is.

Goldsmiths Strikes Again

Things continue to go from bad to worse at the once venerable London university. Already in decline, recent staff protests have seen an increasingly ludicrous state of affairs set in. In response to teacher action, the university apparently decided to suddenly lock all professors out of their own accounts and emails, leaving students confused as to why they were getting left on read by their educators. It’s all rather a shame for a university with quite an interesting legacy, which has housed not a few reputable scholars over the recent years – Mark Fisher and David Graeber spring to mind. This is especially the case if some of the fees are being spunked down the drain in the name of ‘rationalisation’ and, ironically, budget cuts – a mooted £5.35 million spent on consultancy and legal fees. It holds a personal touch for us, as the university is home to a very old student mag indeed and, in the end, we are always on the side of mags.

In Case You Missed It

How to react to bad news.

Luqman Saeed writes from Belfast in the LRB.

A head-cam-equipped cyclist nearly runs over Michael Gove.

Welcome back Peter O’Hanraha-Hanrahan.

Nominations are open for the 2026 Tiny Awards, given to the most beautiful website of the year.

Toby Harden and Jack Dulhanty head back to ‘Bandit Country’ in South Armagh.

Remembering Sonny Rollins and that time he broke his heel and kept on playing the sax.

The documentary that covered Lily Allen’s attempt to open a shop in 2012.

An interesting article about European defence policy from Edward ‘Luttdog’ Luttwak.

Katy Waldeman discusses the Granta debacle in the New Yorker.

And Finally

Have you heard Al Pacino’s Cockney accent? He produced it for a film called The Local Stigmatist, which despite being set in the dog-racing milieu of east London, seems to have been filmed and produced entirely in America. You could watch the whole thing – and if you have, please do write in to give us your review – but the opening is not very auspicious. Pacino seems to be wearing a sort of 1910s Ellis Island-inspired outfit, but, then again, maybe is also doing an 80s nod to Withnail & I? Lots to interpret here. Of course, the main subject of intrigue is Al Pacino doing an English accent, which mutates freely over the isles and then into several contiguous continents. Beneath the ‘Reception’ heading on the film’s Wikipedia page is one sentence: ‘The movie was not a critical success.’

As true fans of the great actor, we prefer his work as a fictitious brand ambassador for Dunkin’ Donuts in Adam Sandler’s film Jack and Jill.

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That is that for this week. Do remember to scoop up a cut-price subscription or a single issue here. Remember that all pitch emails are to be sent to editorial@the-fence.com and everything else to support@the-fence.com. If you enjoyed this newsletter – which we are trying to make juicier in content – do drop a ‘like’ or a comment below. ‘Häagen-Dazs’ has no meaning in any language, and is a completely made-up word, invented in 1961 by an ice-cream maker called Reuben Mattus.

All the best,

TF

Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that discovered Atlantis four years ago but chose not to tell anyone. Even as the weather turns cold and wet again, things over here do not slow down, Issue 28 begins its inch-by-inch march to your doormats and already there are whispers and murmurings of a new beast on the horizon known only by its shadow and the name ‘29’.

Dear old 27 is still making its global tour at the moment and this week was spotted riding the Amtrak and surveying a truly picturesque, genuinely babbling brook. And will you gaze upon this immense haul of magazines that one reader has treated themselves to?

We have printed off another ten tokens with the code LRB25. This will give you 25 per cent off all subscriptions, print, digital, gift, whatever. So you can get four magazines of the highest quality that will entertain and delight you for the year, all for the price of a pack of Malboro Lights from a central London convenience store. So do sign up quickly.

It's a Steal

Some very exciting news to relay. William Boyd – truly one of our nation’s greatest writers – will be in the fiction slot for the upcoming issue. With regards to this publication, he has this to say: ‘A coolly beguiling and bracing magazine. Clear-eyed, droll and shrewd. Just what we need in these complicated times we live in.’

If that doesn’t encourage you to sign up then we don’t know what will.

A Balm for These Times

This week we’ve got a funk legend in full Celtic armour, but first it is time to report back on this week’s callout. That’s right, we have the cheapest bottles of wine available in the country.

Calling All Plonkers

It has been a truly fascinating week seeing all of your nominations for the cheapest bottle of plonk around our great nation. We set the bar at what we thought a reasonable, but likely clearable £20 from the Chelsea Arts Club, but we were deeply impressed with some of the efforts from you dear readers that limboed beautifully under that marker.

We did, helpfully, get some suggestions to check out this underground proprietor known as Wetherspoons but this felt a little obvious and little like cheating if we’re honest. We also got several recommendations to buy wine in supermarkets which is distinctly not the point, and some who resented the ‘London-centric’ nature of our search for the cheapest house wine in ‘the capital and the country’. As anyone who has existed in and outside the capital will remember, however, there tends to be quite a sharp price difference when you get well inside the M25.

With all that said, here is the list of wonderfully cheap plonk and with it some great ideas for your next evening meal out. We begin in Uxbridge, with a nicely placed £17.95 bottle from a French bistro called Martin’s Place, this one notable for its deliciously antiquated interiors and a per glass price of just £4.95.

By bottle, however, it is beaten in price and possibly quality by Mark Blacklock’s recommendation of Coarse, an eatery in Durham, that offers not just a wine, but a wine pairing for a mere £17.50. We can certainly beat that for price, but per ratio, this may be the critics’ choice.

The last to round out the list before the sub £15 club is Fukuoka, a Japanese number with a bottle for £16.99, Queen of Sheba in Kentish Town for dead on £15 and matching that – and setting up a theme to come – is Pinto’s Portugal in SW8.

And indeed if you want really cheap wine, the cheapest in London at least, look for the laminated menus and look to Portugal. We crown our joint winners of cheap London plonk as Pinto’s Portugal and Three Lions Portuguese both coming in at £14 though we must note that the Three Lions offers £14 for a ‘jarro’ whose undisclosed mililitreage may make it a false pretender or a rightful queen in pure drop-per-penny terms.

But the capital is fundamentally unable to compete outside of itself on this front. We feel it highly likely that many sub-14 house wines decorate many corners of this isle that haven’t been turned up in a mere week’s search. But we do have definitive proof of one which is TF’s official cheapest house wine in the country, at least for now. We’re in Nottingham, it’s the Bonington and it is just £12.50. Unreal.

Enjoy the Silence

Now we have a message from our dear friends at The Quietus

Compared to The Fence, The Quietus is a veteran of independent publishing, with our mission to keep Black Sky Thinking about music and culture now enduring since 2008. ‘Enduring’ is the word for it too – it increasingly feels as if all of us are comrades fighting some deranged rear-guard action against AI slop, tech platforms, and all sorts of pivots to formats that are simply never as good as the reading of words. We’re convinced that the fragmentation of culture, and the power of the algorithms, make the role of the critic more important than ever. We’re very aware that most people don’t have the time to go searching for music, new and old, like we do – our job is to do the work for you. So this includes a recent essay on Stanley Okorie, the Nigerian singer whose sweet voice soundtracked the Nollywood film industry; our antidote to the algorithm newsletter Organic Intelligence, guiding our readers to, for example, the US west coast underground of the early 00s, or Radical Traditional, our column on the best of the innovative, politicised contemporary folk scene. For more senior readers, we’ve also pointed out why Tom from The Good Life was actually a massive prick. Like The Fence, we’re 90% funded by our subscribers, and are currently running a sale with 35% off our top subscriber tier, in which members get monthly bonus essays, podcasts, newsletters and playlists to run alongside our editorial. You can find out more and sign up here.

Hold the Onions

To celebrate the recent launch of Eric Schlosser’s landmark title Fast Food Nation as a Penguin Classic, we invited him for a burger at Dover Street Counter in Mayfair, which critics regard as serving the best burger in little old London town. And Schlosser – a man of immense charm – found it to be absolutely delicious. His book is truly one of the greatest non-fiction titles in recent history, and we talked at great length about the project that has taken him decades to report, the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (a term Schlosser coined). His latest dispatch from the facility known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is very much worth your time.

To the Victor, the Spoils

Some of you may remember our Christmas fundraiser where the top prize was a meal for two and a night’s stay at Osip, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Bruton. Last night saw chef Merlin Labron-Johnson on the podium at the National Restaurant Awards after coming second. And it was great to see our friends at Luca on the list too.

Getting Fizzy With It

There are a few slights that you can aim at our pints correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh. You might ask why a man who purports to despise Arsenal FC makes his home off the Holloway Road, for one. But you cannot question his devotion to the futurity of the pub. A rather grating article has done exactly this, suggesting that Jimmy’s love of the boozer is rooted in nostalgia for a ‘fading way of life’.

Jimmy’s coverage has led to a turnaround in fortunes for some of the boozers he’s featured on his channels, like the King’s Head in Finsbury Park or Quinn’s in Camden. Moreover, wet-led or at least drinks-focused pubs – the type that Jimmy champions – are opening all around the capital, like Moylett’s in Clapton or the Hand & Marigold in Bermondsey or the relaunched Mother Red Cap in Archway. We could go on.

Writing about pubs is not a new thing (ask Geoffrey Chaucer, among others) but our own coverage of the humble boozer, led by Jimmy, has seen national publications realise that the British public wants to read about their most beloved institution. This weekend sees our next pub jaunt, in which we travel to the constituency of a widely despised politician to see if they’ll join us for a few jars…

NTS Scot-Funk Warrior

We greatly enjoyed NTS’ latest musical round-up of one of funk’s strangest characters, Jesse Rae, AKA The Scots Funk Warrior. Rae was a St Boswells boy who caught the funk bug and moved to the States in the ‘70s. After some time working as a gigging musician he literally bumped into Parliament Funkadelic and Bernie Worrell – two funk legends – in a hotel lift. Worrell and Rae hit it off in particular and became close friends, and so the Scottish king of funk had his big connection in the industry. He soon began releasing his own singles and, along with them, self-directed music videos of the highest quality. We give you one featuring Worrell here and if you really like it, NTS’ whole show on the man can be listened to here.

Good Innings

The daughter of Lord Mountbatten, Lady Pamela Hicks, died this week at the age of 97. She was interesting for several reasons, and only one of them is that she apparently earnestly wrote a memoir titled India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power. It covers the period she spent in the country when her father was made the last viceroy of India in 1946, dispatched to engineer and shape the independence movement that was emerging in the region. We haven’t read it – unclear if she gets into the nitty gritty of that transfer of power and what it entailed. Still, she was the last of her kind, and her undeniable sheen made us think of Andrew Hunter Murray’s imaginative faculties summoning the glamour of the real and fictional barons of London in Issue 18. ‘Barons: we imagine them as rural land magnates, shagging the wives of their miserable villein tenantry or bullying King John into signing Magna Carta. Newsflash, House of Lords-heads. There are modern, urban barons too.’

In Case You Missed It

Sean Dyche wishes his daughter a happy birthday.

Brazil baptised their plane to the World Cup.

There’s only one comic book hero this world needs, and it’s Fr. Fresh.

In the most political NBA finals yet, Mamdani extended a DJ’s set because the Knicks won and Donald Trump was ill received at Madison Square Garden.

What people did before Instagram saves.

The Biblical diet.

TF legend Séamas O’Reilly’s infamous encounter with Mary McAleese has been made into an animated short film.

How can you not be entranced by Saverio, the feline mayor of a Tuscan village?

The Norwegian football team’s intensely homoerotic photoshoot has us puzzled.

Jeremy Corbyn celebrating his birthday at an Eritrean restaurant on Holloway Road.

And Finally

The former de facto First Lady of New York Sandra Lee made her name as a TV chef and personality through the principle that recipes need only be ‘semi-homemade’. Or, to put it another way: Lee got famous by devising colour-coordinated dishes that could be arranged from pre-made parts. However, even for the high priestess of a cut and paste job, there are limits to what you can do with only store-bought foodstuffs, and so much of Lee’s oeuvre consisted – perhaps also because of her ten-year marriage to Andrew Cuomo – of vodka-based cocktails.

There are some wonderful examples of her clutching bottles beneath an ironed and blonde face on YouTube, but her forays into multi-coloured martinis are best of the lot. She mixes her blutini while wearing a cobalt matching set, complete with headband, staring at the camera with a smiling and total confidence that ‘cocktail time is the best time of day.’ Her kitchen is something that could only be described as a symptom of something terribly wrong, and it is where Lee announces that the drink ‘will be perfect for my tablescape. Just wait till you see the patio!’ It is, like said kitchen and her glasses and her napkins and her eyeshadow – blue.

But don’t let this put you off. The blutini could be good. Try it for yourself: one part vodka, two parts vanilla vodka and a splash of orange liqueur. ‘They dye it blue,’ remarks Lee, looking at the bottle of liqueur a little sadly. ‘I do not know why.’

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That’s that – do send all technical emails to support@the-fence.com and all over bits to editorial@the-fence.com. Snap up one of those cut-price subscriptions while you can and we look forward to joining you next Tuesday. The Caesar salad was invented in Mexico.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows a grand doesn’t come for free. There is a brief lull in proceedings as we have sent Issue 28 to the art team, who are adding the daubs and dashes that make it look beautiful.

In the meantime, Issue 27 continues to be seen in places high and low, receiving praise from a man known as the ‘Shoreditch Sketcher’, riding on a horse called Flossie, walking among the Lake District’s lambs, on the lookout in Canada, attempting some risible meta-banter and well-positioned at the lido.

Some of you may have seen this rather wonderful advert that we have taken in the London Review of Books. Now we printed off 50 of these tokens giving 25 percent off for a year’s subscription and there are only a handful left. Enter LRB25 at the checkout and you’ll get that bona fide discount, and that applies across the board, and to gift subs too.

It’s a bit of a London special today, and on that note, do sign up for Capital Letter – our most recent outing was possibly the best one yet, and crowned the coolest new bar in London, and had some things to say about an old friend of this newsletter, Hugh Corcoran. Let’s get on with it.

A Dance to the Music of Time

Francis Boulle’s energetic campaigning for Rupert Lowe’s Restore party has made us take stock of what the original(ish) cast members of Made in Chelsea are up to now. Jamie Laing – who is a legend, by the way – is making some of the best short-form video content in the country while also featuring on a show on parenthood commissioned by Disney. Ollie Locke has been evicted from his home yet claims his toddlers have to travel by private plane after being ‘scarred’ by flying economy. Spencer Matthews is sober and runs ultramarathons. Binky Felstead got blasted by a baker after asking for free cake in return for an Instagram post. Ashley James is a feminist activist. Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo married the ‘equity punk’ and Brewdog founder, James Watt. Andy Jordan runs a clothing brand based in south Devon. Victoria Baker-Harber’s husband, Inigo Philbrick, was arrested in Vanuatu after going on the lam for a multi-million-dollar art fraud. We could go on.

It’s all very much like a great Victorian novel, and speaking of which, Dolly Alderton, whose career started as a story producer on MIC, is the showrunner on the upcoming Netflix production of Pride and Prejudice, and the trailer does look very good indeed.

Calling All Plonkers

Thank you to everyone who has written in to tell us about the cheapest bottle of house wine in the country. We have shared the appeal on Twitter here – you can send in your entries to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll share the results next week. It seems that ‘Little Portugal’ is the place to go for those in search of some cut-price vino…

Jennifer’s Body

Last week, we revealed that Alain de Botton is on the dating apps, which prompted Chris Coates to write in to remind us of the 1,400-word ‘thought experiment’ published on de Botton’s website entitled ‘Jennifer Lawrence Is My Girlfriend’. While the website is no more, the Wayback Machine is, as ever, your friend.

After that, you might enjoy Chris’s own musings on the Botmeister’s erstwhile publication.

The Bigger Splash

We were not alone in being moved by the plight of the swans on Hampstead Heath, who it seems are finally being left alone by the marauding basics who insist on sharing their pond. The Heath engenders strong feelings in those who live nearby and revel in its glories. Its 850 acres have provided a pool of inspiration to our writers, from Bron Maher’s infamous dispatch to Isobel Thompson’s reported feature on the Travelling Showmen who have made the Vale of Health their home for over a century.

On that note, we should add that we are looking for big, juicy stories for Issue 29 and Issue 30 – do have a read of the pitch guide here and send through your best ideas to editorial@the-fence.com and we will reply to you there.

The Hunting Call

The latest dogpile by bloodthirsty journalists on the benighted Soho Society gives us reason to bring up Francisco Garcia’s outstanding feature on the dwindling band of residents who call our neighbourhood home.

We will resist taking a favourite hobby horse for an extended gallop, but those radio hosts looking to book in Michael Kill as an objective voice on the capital’s nightlife would do well to engage with this article here.

That Politician’s Nothing but a Diminutive Boy!

We have greatly enjoyed following the short-lived political career of one Sadisu Buba Mahmud. Known locally as ‘The Wonder’, he recently shot into the spotlight during his campaign to become a member fo Nigeria’s House of Representatives in the northern state of Kaduna. He proved himself a canny social media operator, and his Instagram quickly racked up followers – he has almost 10,000 today.

There was, however, one big, big reason for this sudden interest in a local politician which was the fact that he is small, small, small.

Mahmud had always claimed that his stature was nothing unusual. He was, he said, simply a 30-year-old man with dwarfism. Recent reports by People’s Gazette have revealed the truth is, as ever, more simple and more strange. Mahmud, an official candidate for the incumbent Nigerian President’s party, is a 16-year-old boy.

The revelation has forced the little guy to withdraw from the race, though he made clear in his official notice that this was ‘not a sign of weakness, but a sacrifice for the greater good of the party.’ He may be young, but he clearly understands politics well.

But perhaps this strange occurrence was not as unlikely as it might initially seem. As some astute observers have pointed out, underage voting is a big problem in Nigeria, particularly in the north. It is quite routine for adults to introduce teenagers and children to the ways and means of electoral fraud early on and, indeed, Mahmud could not have gotten as far as he did without the help, or the full direction, of a few ambitious and fully-aged political actors. The story of the ‘The Wonder’ is then a striking, but not fully unusual in a country whose elections remain troubled by ‘irregularities’.

We can be thankful, however, that the whole affair has left us with this bizarre interview, some great Nigerian journalism (which proves writing in this country is unbelievably, unnecessarily dull) and some truly phenomenal photos.

Burning Cash at the Wah Wah Hut

Unless you’re Taylor Swift, it’s tough times for touring musicians, what with Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis. What motivates bands to take to the road? For her third article for us, Sarah Haque followed her fiancé’s band, Fickle Friends, across the country, and dug out some key statistics about how the bus keeps the wheels rolling – it’s available to read here.

Strategic Realignment

It’s gruelling working in marketing, and even more so when you’re meant to be selling a shirt that just went viral on FourChan for being worn during a beheading. This is what we thought of when we saw the Arsenal social media this week. This week was good, sure, but remember what happened in 2017? Front-page news showed the attacker on London Bridge wearing a pale blue training shirt. Needless to say, Arsenal has since changed the design.

One of the problems is that terrorists are often quite switched on to what will do numbers on social media. The other is that they’re frequently teenagers from London, which means they dress well and look great. Well-dressed and good-looking terrorists became a problem for the people of Primark and Stone Island in the same year when a young man was beheaded in Woolwich. The attacker was wearing a beanie and a puffer from the two stores. Both items were very in vogue at the time, apparently.

In fact, the marketing teams were seemingly so overwhelmed by terrorists wearing their clothes in the 2010s that they had to stop making specific interventions and instead now adopt a cover-all approach: when Googling to see screenshots of specific videos – for research purposes only – AI just throws up a statement that each brand is anti-hate, which is all very well but we do still want to see the jihadi wearing Nike Shoxx.

Nike even had to change their entire ‘Just Do It’ slogan after a video went viral of a suicide attempt which used the catch phrase urging action. It has now adopted the more philological ‘Why do it?’, which was justified as an invitation to ‘a new generation to reflect on their motivations, embrace the risk of failure, and find meaning in the challenge of starting.’ The same advice could be meaningfully offered to young extremists. Just do it, as they say.

In Need of an Alibi

If you attended the parade this weekend in a terrorist-associated shirt and now need an iron-clad excuse for your behaviour, perhaps you can cover your tracks by suggesting it was a stroll born purely out of your side interest in psychogeography. Happily, that would also make you squarely interested in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s psychic exploration of the city via the London Psychogeographical Association. ‘To a particular type of counterculturally inclined fiftysomething, the LPA is one of the great lapsed European vanguards, London’s answer to Dada and the Surrealists.’ They also surely enjoyed the chants lifting from the streets of north London on Sunday.

In Case You Missed It

Peter Hessler remembers his paper route in early 1980s Missouri.

Zack Polanski inadvertently explains how journalism works.

Congratulations to the legendary Peter Geoghegan.

Sophie Calle discusses her taxidermy collection.

Memo to Americans: please stop being ‘into’ football.

That being said, this Arsenal x Tom Hiddleston link-up is a veritable war crime.

A refuse collector tells all.

A dog shot a woman in Nebraska.

The best cycling documentary of all time.

Meet some homophobic horses.

And Finally

‘Never have I seen one woman in whom every social grace was so lacking. Did I say she was primitive? I retract that. She’s feral. I’ve never spent a more physically destructive evening in my life. I am nauseated.’

This is how Elaine May’s character , Henrietta, in A New Leaf (1971) is described by the man who apparently wants to marry her. It was the first film directed by, and also starring, May. She is a wayward botanist heiress opposite the fussy playboy Henry Graham, played by Walter Matthau. At the start of the film, Henry realises that his debonair penchant for finer things has resulted in fast-approaching bankruptcy, and so he resolves to seduce Henrietta in pursuit of her fortune – antics ensue. It is a delightfully simple plot that makes much of May’s lopsided glasses, as well as Matthau’s ill-contained rage at his social debasement. It is probably also the film that May is now best known for, and one that everyone seems to continue to love.

But in her early career, May was better known in relation to Mike Nichols as his comedy partner, both on stage and later on television. They were so beloved for their Broadway show and comedy albums that in the late 1950s that GE Refrigerators hired them to do a series of adverts, allowing them to fall into a wonderfully mercenary tradition that was paved by Orson Welles with frozen peas and now is continued in damper, more depressing way by Gary Lineker with crisps and Helena Bonham Carter with sofas. The May-Nichols adverts are not very easy to find online any more, but there is still one to enjoy here.

Perhaps such skills in charm are best demonstrated by the televised sketches that got them hired. A particularly excellent example is their sketch transposing a Brief Encounter conversation onto an interaction between dentist and patient in the requisite old-timey British accents and fascinators.

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Well we’re off to dreamland over here for some well earned R&R as some big events loom. We hope you have enjoyed this faithful intellectual footstool that we proffer each week. If you need to get in touch there’s two ways to go about it: editorial@the-fence.com and support@the-fence.com. If you can’t work out which to use, you need to reduce your ChatGPT usage.

Do remember to subscribe to the magazine, it really is good and that discount won’t last much longer. Like seriously, if you like reading this we have no idea why you don’t read the thing we work much harder on, but who are we to judge? Anyway, Ringo left The Beatles’ trip to India early because he ran out of baked beans.

All Best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that believes brightness is returning to the firmament. We hope you’re handling the heat and we are certain you are chomping at the bit for some high-flying newsletter wrastlin’. You’re in the right place.

Issue 27 is, miraculously, nearly ready for its close-up at Studio Mathias Clottu. We are really excited for this one and, although it’s a bit like your mum telling you how smart and handsome you are, we do genuinely think this will be the best one yet. It has the longest and most ambitious investigation we have ever run and a ‘Facts’ section almost strong enough to return meaning to the word in a post-truth society.

It makes it a truly ideal time to take that leap and subscribe to the mag here. At just £31.99 for a whole year of print magazines (£36.99 for print and digital) it really is an absolute steal.

Get That Mag

And wouldn’t you know it the photo contest among those subbed up is nearing its run in phase and the entries are remaining strong. The mag has been spotted in England’s Switzerland and living the lush life in the gardens at Chatsworth before doing a Paddington and running off to Peru. It’s also been on the ferry over to Ireland, taking in the sunshine and visiting a scene of rural destruction. By the time it got home it had just enough presence and decorum left to blush correctly at this wonderful praise from the legendary Miranda Sawyer.

Elsewhere, this newsletter’s smarter and more decent sister Capital Letter is being got ready for you all this Thursday. We’ve got a notes on an illegal rave, a conversation with Jeremy King and advice on where to find the best gigs and theatre in the capital this fortnight. If you live in London you will be lost without it.

Get That London

So, time for the meat and drink. We’ve got some great news about our investigations correspondent, updates on Tony Morris and Chinese state visits. Wagons roll.

The People’s Republic of the Hundred Acre Wood

China has been going hard on the state visits of late. The year kicked off with Starmer and more recent months have seen Putin, Trump and the world’s most enigmatic leader bar none Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić. It’s a sign of China’s increasingly assertive role as the U.S. Ouroboros seems to have lost its tail and has begun tying itself in knots. Much of the work done in front of the cameras was a succession of leaders doing their best Basil Fawlty and not mentioning Taiwan, but if you’re craving a deeper read, Sam Chetwin George’s analysis of China’s position for Foreign Affairs was an insightful one.

As is natural for us however, all these swirling questions of international diplomacy remind us of three things only. First, the incredible work done by many in China to portray their leader as Winnie the Pooh thus making the character a proscribed symbol in the country. Second, this truly brilliant comic triple take Mao Zedong did when meeting Henry Kissinger’s rather tall wife. Third, the legendary and truly bizarre opera Nixon in China which we link below. Presuming you don’t have an hour to watch its first act to hand, we jumped you in at the moment Air Force One lands in the Middle Kingdom.

In Vino Veritas

The debate about parliamentarians getting pissed continues to drizzle its way in the nation’s conversations. It goes without saying that we think it’s great that MPs can get drunk at work – it’s one of the things that makes this country great, and looking through the drinks menu at Stranger’s Bar has encouraged us to undertake a singular mission: to find the cheapest house wine in the capital, and also the nation.

In the lead so far is the house red at the Chelsea Arts Club, which is £20 only. We dread to think how many bottles they go through a week. Just think of all those plum-lipped ‘painters’ sozzled on Portuguese plonk. But we reckon there must be places in the country that are cheaper still. Send all entries to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll report our findings next week.

For the Love of the Game

We do recommend olde worlde documentaries on this newsletter and we’re going to segue from that and recommend a book that was published a few decades back. If you’re involved in the publishing or magazine world then you will devour Emma Tennant’s Burnt Diaries, in which she records her life as editor of Bananas, a literary mag that featured original work from Ian McEwan, ‘Jimmy’ Ballard and Angela Carter. It’s a wonderful portrait of 1970s London (particularly Notting Hill) and is loaded with top-tier gossip, such as when Emma goes to her brother’s stately home to steal a photo of a topless Princess Margaret, which she plans to sell to the tabloids to fund her magazine. You can get a feel for her wit and insight in this interview here. If anyone has any memories of Bananas (named, quite unbelievably, after a Woody Allen film), then we would love to hear from you via the usual channels.

Man Bust Case

We are delighted to confirm that our investigative correspondent Cormac Kehoe has prevailed. The defamation case brought against him by the Italian businessman Claudio Di Giovanni was, happily, thrown out this week. This is a great relief to us all and not least Cormac, who was sued personally for £250,000 in libel damages alongside publisher Mill Media Ltd over his excellent – and, crucially, not libellous – reporting for The Londoner on Di Giovanni’s property arbitrage scheme. Wonderful news and well done to everyone involved.

We are especially thrilled that Cormac is no longer short a quarter of a million pounds. If you want to take him out to lunch or for some pints or even buy him a herd of bison, his email is ck@the-fence.com.

Seething with Jealousy

Cannes is now coming to an end, which means that the producers of the world are wrapping up and returning home from a brief spell on the artificial beaches of the South of France. For the hopefuls who wish to join their ranks next year, perhaps they might consult our insider’s guide to getting a film made from Issue 19. ‘Could I – a two-time feature film producer and 20-year veteran of the industry – offer you any advice, perhaps?’ You are in luck. But, be warned that the silver screen is not always a pretty picture: ‘When I was starting out, I nearly got the support of Sheffield-based Warp Films (credits include Submarine, This Is England and Four Lions) for my debut feature, but was subtly warned off the deal by their production executive Mary Burke (subsequently a commissioner at the BFI) who, without explicitly saying so, suggested that I might soon find myself forced off my own film. Not everyone in the business is as considerate of newcomers.’

My Typical Sunday

Okay, here is something big. This week we learned that Alain de Botton is on the apps and seeking dates in London. Love is a skill, not a feeling.

Broomhill in Berghain

‘I am a lone drinker, a serious lone drinker. I use alcohol to loosen up the inner connections between my unconscious and conscious mind and thence concoct an audiovisual piece; so a pub crawl is completely out of the question. I hope that doesn’t stymie the whole idea. All the best. Tony’

Congratulations to the inimitable Tony Morris, who at the age of 73 has just played a set at Berghain. Here’s some excellent footage of his song ‘I have a strong streak of the bourgeois in me’ as part of that set.

Morris was a character who fascinated us ages ago, when we put him in the final section of this very newsletter. When Rory MacNeish offered to interview and profile the man for us, we couldn’t have been more pleased and made it the rather wonderful opening salvo of this issue just gone. It’s now up on the website for all to read.

Five or Six or Seven or Eight Under Lime Street

For Issue 27, TF alumna Lotte Brundle got back in touch with an old flame to get to grips with the last unreformed industry in London. ‘I wasn’t exactly expecting a reply to my out-of-the-blue request to catch up with an underwriter, except perhaps a “who?” or a “please fuck off”, so I was pleasantly surprised when a message from Ben popped up on my phone. “I don’t work as one anymore, does that still make the cut?” It did.’ Over £9 pints Lotte found out about the liquid lunches that oil the business of insurance underwriting. Happily, the piece is now online and available to be drunk down in full.

Ex-Girlfriend FC

It is likely that you are currently experiencing a comedown from the events of Sunday night, which is only natural, of course. However, if you would like to keep rinsing the glory, options are available. You could go back to Chris Milton’s piece in Issue 12, asking why football fans sing such a strange array of songs. ‘Unlike the ‘smarter’ music of Bach, Wagner, Miles Davis, Brian Wilson or Lady Gaga, which use increasingly elaborate additions and extensions to ‘sex up’ the basic elements of the Pythagorean monochord, these anthemic sporting numbers pare it back to its first principles and thus find a perfect synergy with the primitivism of sport.’ Anne Hathaway’s choral interpretation of the gooner chant captures this musical perfection well.

It is also possible that you guiltily and slightly unduly indulged in a bit too much in that aforementioned primitivism in recent days, and are in need of a counter tempo. In which case, we might recommend Rosie Hewitson’s account of scintillating dyke drama undergirding the entirety of women’s football from Issue 18. As part of her findings, she plays against a club called ‘Ex-Girlfriend FC’, which is ‘so named because it was founded by two erstwhile partners. Their main shirt sponsor is a lube brand.’

Or, if you are in more of a watching mood, all the footy talk couldn’t help but remind us of a rather interesting and strange documentary called Battlecentre. Leo Regan made the film about a group of evangelical Christians in London. One of its more interesting vignettes is with some hyper-religious Millwall fans, caught between their desire to be righteous before the Lord and their desire for a bust up on a Saturday afternoon.

In case you missed it

What is the meaning of Zack Polanski?

The stunt pilot hunting Ukrainian drones.

Steve Rosenberg’s diary from April 1986.

The British scaffolders’ support group.

Animated Russian advice on how to release your inner rat.

James Roscoe has abruptly left his role after filling in for Peter Mandelson last year for reasons that are not yet clear.

The most relaxing clip you’ll see all week.

Granta’s elliptical musings about AI.

The Martha Graham technique.

And Finally

‘It’s Christmas,’ reasons the man in the video. He is muscling into a fight on an estate in London between a flasher and a resident telling him to fuck off and to put his clothes on. The pair stare, dazed, at the mediator and then start again: ‘Okay, hear what I’m saying, cos I was having my fucking breakfast, cos I’ve gone downstairs, the guy’s in the corner, yeah–’ Suddenly, the man intervening is telling them to calm down because his dad has just died, at which the titular character of W*NKER sympathetically smiles and puts a kindly hand to the other’s shoulder. The resident is outraged. What seemed a straightforward case of telling someone to fuck off has devolved into a negotiation with a clueless onlooker. When the resident says that he was getting involved because the man was flashing, the intervener says, ‘My dad used to do the same thing’. He then repeats, ‘it’s Christmas!’ No one is wearing clothes to suggest that the scene is set in December and, in fact, the W*NKER is wearing hi-vis.

This is one of the more recent videos by burnermunde, an account that has been filming and putting out circular and apparently staged conversations in east London over the past year. They are filmed from a zoomed-in vantage point and placed beneath dreamy music, which together give a kind of gently disengaged quality that belies the wry and funny tone. Shot on the street, in parks and on estates, the videos capture pleasingly incomprehensible discussions punctuated by gemeralds of outstanding dialogue.

The most viral example so far is a discussion about vaping opened by someone who keeps a photo of Rishi Sunak as the background of their burner phone. He squares up to one man: ‘Are you a vape virgin?’ The group discusses the possibilities and virtues of the different vapes available. Peter Paneer, the man antagonising, shows off the various features available of the vapes that he seems to be selling, although not everyone is impressed. ‘My cousin from Calgary has that in Canada,’ shrugs the accused vape virgin. Peter is not dissuaded, demonstrating the maths that justify the product. He pulls out the burner phone again and opens the app. ‘You like calculators?’

The reason these videos are so enjoyable is that they are done well. It is an old-fashioned sort of YouTube offering; it’s a video that has been carefully made and intended as intelligible only to particular segments of viewers. There’s a quality that is somehow reminiscent of those early clips from in 2005, and it’s this that people seem to get from the videos that have been appearing every few weeks of late. Burnermunde will probably get a slot on Channel 4 soon. In the meantime, here are a few more to enjoy, and pretend were made for you and you alone.

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And now, the end is here, and so you face, a week of waiting. But don’t you worry, that next Tuesday will come round swiftly and, as we may have mentioned, there’s another fine newsletter that will be available to all in just two days time. And if you like these newsletters so much, do think of buying an issue, or even better a subscription, at this link here.

Until then, all messenger pigeons should be directed to editorial@the-fence.com and all small street urchins with urgent requests for help should scamper rapidly to support@the-fence.com. Otherwise, we’ll see you in a week’s time.

All Best,

TF

Good morning, I hope you’re all enjoying this glorious Bank Holiday weather. Issue 27 has proved a massive hit with readers, with much praise for Sophie Heawood’s debut column in particular.

Issue 28 is about to be sent to design and will be published in the first week of July. Within the flatplan, we have the most ambitious feature The Fence has ever run, truly international in its reportage. There is an investigation into organised crime in London that has taken Cormac Kehoe to uncover. Clive Martin returns to our pages and we have a great ‘insider’ piece from the private equity world. While I have to be somewhat imprecise about the details, I can say, definitively, that this will be the best issue yet.

It has been a pleasure to see legends of the magazine world acclaim our work recently, and to see the latest issue being snapped around the world by you all. The Carbuncle Cup ‘winner’ will also be announced in the first week of June.

We will be reaching new heights with our summer issue, and I hope that you will consider taking a subscription so we can keep taking things further and further. We are looking to increase our scope and reach, but can only do so with your support.

Sign Up for the Year

It is a real treat to have you all as readers, and I’m wishing you all the best for the rest of the weekend. There will be a conventional ‘Off The Fence’ landing on Tuesday. Until then.

Warmly,

Charlie Baker

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter for sore eyes.

This week, Issue 27 was seen enjoying several much-needed holidays: first on a beach in Vietnam and then on a beach in Malaga. It then made its return from abroad, popped by Selfridges, pleased the fishes, flew to Vienna and, finally, rode the subway up to Harlem.

It's Time to Sign Up

It’s fantastic to see. Our inbox remains open to the finest photographs available via editorial@the-fence.com or social media, and, as ever, there may well be a bottle of something excellent in it for you.. You can find your show copy of choice in the nation’s favoured and most civilised institutions – WHSmith and Waitrose, among them – as well as in slightly more subterranean corners. All places of purchase are eligible. However, the best place of purchase is, of course, in the form of a print and digital subscription, which you can do thanks to the large, orange button just this way south. This is a particularly opportune time to take the plunge, as we are currently stringing together the new issue and tightening it into shape. Let’s get it going. Let’s do it. Subscribe today and make us all very happy.

Subscribe

We’ve also enjoyed the fanfare over the announcement of the return of the Carbuncle Cup this week. Submissions on Twitter have been especially eye-popping. Don’t miss out on the chance for some good old-fashioned audience participation. Why choose one, when you could do it all? Sometimes, more is more. In the meantime, enjoy Phin Harper’s video showcasing the many terrible buildings this great city has to offer, and all done in an enviable moquette skirt.

Capital Letter had an enjoyably bitchy outing last Thursday, where we crowned Otto’s as the most vulgar restaurant in London. There’s lots of good stuff there for you all to get stuck into. Sign up here.

Let’s get it going, it’s a bumper edition this week.

Let’s Get Together and Feel Alright

London’s double demonstration bonanza was many things: a logistical nightmare for the Met, an ‘interesting’ flashpoint for political commentators to ‘analyse’. But best of all, it was host to some of the most hilarious nonsense we’ve seen in a good while, mostly thanks to the fact that, whatever qualities you may want to invest him with, Stephen Yaxley Lennon is not a good music booker.

There was this horrendous performance for one. But the act that caught our eye was one Rikki Doolan, a pastor/musician, whose hits include You Are God Alone and Unchained (Na, Na, Na). He took to the stage in a fetching faux-paint splotched Union Jacket and delivered some of the words waves of audible sound to ever reverberate through the universe’s many atoms. His rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone was so bad, it led to ‘Tommy Robinson’ cutting the mics early and shuffling them along – something of a theme for the afternoon, as Robinson cut off some speakers who threatened to breach hate speech laws which, just recently, have expanded to implicate event organisers as well as speakers.

Doolan is, in many ways, unremarkable for this ilk of far-right semi-celebrity. He has a small YouTube channel he fills with divisive clickbait, a website that doesn’t work and a weekly livestream. His Companies House record is a little more interesting though, as the staunch opponent of migration and globalism was a former co-director of Farming Zimbabwe LTD, a mixed farming firm registered in the UK whose dormant accounts in 2022 showed a total asset value of £1.

It capped off a rather strange showing at the stop the boats big top, which included this on-the-fly manifesto delivered by a refreshed looking Yaxley-Lennon. But it is a serious difficulty for right-wing organisers who want live musical acts at their events. Many famous musicians don’t want to get involved in politics for fear it will damage sales, and those that do tend to sit to the left. The Republican National Convention was thus graced with this awful performance from Kid Rock and Reform UK’s party conference had, Dame Andrea Jenkyns doing whatever the hell this was.

To be sure, there is more than enough potential for the intermingling of cringe music and politics across the isles – Z. Polanski and Hannah Spencer proved that recently in Trafalgar Square – but by God, this really took the biscuit.

The Dean Street Comedown

One of the most enjoyable pieces we’ve published for some time is now available on the website. Fonie Mitsopoulou spoke to a number of former staffers and lifelong members of The Groucho Club, perhaps London’s most controversial club, and unearthed previously unreported details about the Soho late-night standby. It’s an absolute crackerjack of a piece, dripping with gossip and anecdote. Read it here.

Tell Me About It

It’s tough work out there in the political hack trenches right now, fielding 50 WhatsApps a day from peers, friends, and family asking one thing: what is Wes Streeting really like?

One insider writes, ‘the thing about Wes is that all he has ever wanted is to be PM, which means he’s pretty boring gossip-wise… which is a red flag in of itself.’

Rodney’s in Trouble

If you want to know what the people of London, England, are really thinking about the current government, might we suggest visiting an orgy? Bron Maher went to a sex club in Issue 21 to get the people’s thoughts on party politics. At Stark Bollock Naked, Bron spoke to a selection of men, including Connor, who wanted ‘greater investment in the NHS and social care – and he was not alone.’ Later, when Connor was unsteady on his feet, Bron ‘accompanied him to the bathroom and then back outside, strolling naked arm-in-arm like a Victorian couple promenading in Regent’s Park.’

Now We Sip Champagne When We’re Thirsty

Somewhat unbelievably, our ‘personals’ section in Issue 28 is now full to bursting, and we are already anticipating our invitation to the very first TF reader wedding. But if you would like to appear in the next issue, we have space in Fencepost, and this time out, we’re asking: what was your most memorable birthday? It could be for entirely pleasant reasons, or it could be a less fortunate memory. Either way, do let us know on social media or at editorial@the-fence.com.

Alphabet Bar on Beak

While it has many other deficiencies, creating little oral histories is one of the few unalloyed benefits that social media has brought us. One particularly enjoyable account is ‘90s London’, which we have been fans of for years, and is finally getting the recognition it deserves. Here, there’s a celebration of a pub called The George, which was on D’Arblay Street and pumped house music all night long, and a prompt to readers as to which other boozers in the capital stretched the legality of their license. It all makes for rich reading in the comments, and demonstrates that the saturation point for 90s nostalgia is, for now, some way off yet.

His Majesty’s Pleasure

King Charles III made a splash this week in the House of Lords, even if it was one slightly dampened by the spectre of other dramas unfurling. Nonetheless, he looked quite dashing, which is always a good thing in the face of dissent and disaster. In Issue 16, Jimmy McIntosh explored His Majesty’s adventures in urban planning at Poundbury, the settlement that marked ‘a return to tradition, a reaction against estate modernism, the wet dream of a thousand Quinlan Terry fanboys and internet edgelords.’ The pubs turned out to be less than ideal, but nonetheless worth a write-up. ‘On entry, it seemed we’d found the answers we were looking for. Look, there’s an avuncular landlord wearing a Union Jack bowler hat!’

Illicit Access

The time is now if you live in London and enjoy snooping through other people’s letters. There’s Lucian Freud’s note to Caroline Blackwood currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery, which declares ‘I miss you so much I have quite forgotten what you look like’ while simultaneously presenting her the bill from a shared lunch. Then there’s John Keats’ letters to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, which are now on the market. Or, there’s John Cairncross’s letters to Gloria Barraclough at the National Archives, which show a secretive side to the fifth man that perhaps we already were aware of. Of course, the problem with letters is that more often than not, they make for rather dull reading. Michelle Taylor realised this when leafing T.S. Eliot’s offerings in Issue 13. Yet, ‘even in reading Eliot’s most workmanlike letters, we get something like a secondhand thrill of the archive, a little trace of the pleasure in illicit access.’ She trawled through the archive in search of something special, and against the odds, she managed it.

In Case You Missed It

A mechanised flock of flamingos.

The sculptor Michael Dean’s Palaeolithic bread.

That the cold weather this week was decreed by German saints.

James Butler on the national revulsion for Labour this week.

Wonderfully strange names stumbled upon in a forgotten cemetery in Appalachia, including Goth, Meta, Bonnie Bell and Tilf.

We’ve found the best new game going: LinkedIn or Interpol?

All cooking shows are over. All we will ever need now is the scransitvan.

Advice on how not to check if your lighter is working.

And Finally

He was the grandson of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell and descendant of former US President William Howard Taft, but in 2009, Kendall Myers – and his wife – were arrested on charges of state espionage.

When he died this week of complications related to prostate cancer at the age of 88, he had already served fifteen years of his life sentence. He provided classified information to the Cuban government over the course of nearly three decades, not only in the form of stolen memos or documents, but also in the systematic memorisation of vast amounts of data, which was eventually recounted to the Cuban government via a short wave radio – and even personally to Fidel Castro in 1995 in a four-hour meeting at Castro’s house. Eventually caught by an undercover US agent working to narrow down the leaking information, Myers apparently asked how things were at home, and if the agent would send the couple’s love to his intelligence officer in Cuba. By that point, Myers had already retired, and in the final meeting with the US agent, Myers said: ‘We really have missed you. You, speaking collectively, have been a really important part of our lives, and we have felt incomplete.’

His wife, Gwyndoline Myers, worked as a bank clerk, and helped prepare the stolen information for meetings with intelligence agents across Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Trinidad and Tobago. Gwyndoline got out of prison in 2015 for her collusion in her husband’s crimes. They had met at university – a period during which Myers took a four-year break to work as a Czech translator in West Germany – before they moved to South Dakota. There, they seemed to enjoy a softly counter-cultural life, growing a small patch of marijuana and taking an interest in the growing possibilities of solar panels. In photos together, they look totally at ease. They show a slim man with a white moustache in various polo shirts; she has fine hair and an elegant face. In later courtroom sketches, they look older, but generally similar.

There are other curious threads to the story, including that the Myers were apparently not only motivated by a devotion to the Cuban communist party, but also a disillusionment with the treatment of the UK by the US in Bush’s America, as described in comments made during a press conference to The Times, who described him as ‘a senior State Department analyst’ with a ‘specialty in UK politics.’ The same piece quotes the convicted criminal and former Labour MP Denis MacShane referring to Myers as ‘little rat’. An accusation always doubles as a confession.

All these years later, the couple’s dispassionate commitment to contravening the security of their native country still bewilders, and is nonetheless almost viscerally State Departmentcompelling. There is very little by way of explanation of the precise details of what was leaked and the effect it had available online, but ten years ago, a state department counterintelligence officer called Robert Booth wrote a book detailing his work uncovering US espionage, including on the Myers case. You can hear him talk about the couple here:

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Good golly Miss Molly, that was a fun time. Remember that all technical questions are to be directed to support@the-fence.com and everything else to the editorial address. Do buy a subscription if you like what we’re doing here. The London Tube is so old that early passengers were able to take the train to watch public hangings. Until the next time.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter of no little merit. We’ve got two big announcements today to share with you further down the line. There really is a lot going on and it is all very exciting.

Issue 27 continues to be seen in all places fashionable: seeing the Goyas in Madrid, over vast snowy plains in Canada, toting around London in the sun, waiting for the bus in the same capital, alongside some masterpieces at the NG, at the Geldeston Locks May Day Festival and on the Camino de Santiago.

There is an enormous blow-up copy of Issue 27 in Selfridges on Oxford Street. It really does look amazing and it is part of the MagCulture takeover, which you can see here. While the rest of the country sinks into the mire, our nation’s department stores are fiery with both vision and efficiency.

Please do keep the photos coming in on socials and to editorial@the-fence.com, and you can win a sparkling prize. Issue 27 is stocked in WH Smith, Waitrose and Waterstones – all the big hitters – and if you can’t see it in your local outlet, do raise a complaint.

But the most reliable way to get the magazine is, of course, to subscribe, and thank you to everyone who has joined the merry throng lately. There are some incredibly juicy pieces on the way, so we really appreciate everyone pledging their allegiance at this moment in time.

Subscribe to Our Brilliant Magazine

Our London-centred ‘vertical’, Capital Letter, continues to expand. This week, we’re crowning the Most Vulgar Restaurant in London, and also have some fascinating insider information on the production that everyone in theatreland is talking about: Gary Oldman’s direction of Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court. You can sign up here.

On the Vitruvian Tip

We’re delighted to announce that the Carbuncle Cup is returning after our first outing in 2024, and will be running on a biannual basis from here on in. Since we last awarded the prize to the Lime Street redevelopment in Liverpool, a number of terrible buildings have been built – and we need your help identifying them.

Please send all nominations to editorial@the-fence.com, with a couple of lines explaining why the construction offends you – it goes without saying that this can be for reasons beyond mere aesthetics.

A longlist will be raised in early June, at which point our judging panel will choose a winner. The panel comprises:

Cath Slessor, the former editor of the Architectural Review, who is acting as chair.

Phin Harper, sculptor and critic.

Bertie Brandes, screenwriter.

William Pelham, co-founder of The Fence.

Lucy Watson, commissioning editor at the FT.

Lev Bratishenko, who works at the Cosmic House.

We have some few nominations to get you thinking. Cath has gone for Angel Square by AHMM, ‘A dreadful, sterile replacement for David Rock’s swaggering Pomo masterpiece, which, while it too had its detractors, actually made an attempt to turn the corner. In urban terms, it’s a wonderful site, presiding over the junction of City Road and Islington High Street, beckoning people up the hill – a gateway to Islington, in fact – so should have presented an opportunity for something much more than a glum glass box, with horrid ceramic ribbing details which are going to age like milk.’

Phin has opted for the cruise ship-like warehouses erected in Wigan, much to the outrage of local residents, while Lev has chosen Google’s Platform 37, a ‘loveless smear’ from Thomas Heatherwick and friends.

So, your eyes duly insulted, please do send your nominations through to editorial@the-fence.com – the buildings do have to be constructed in the last two years, and in the United Kingdom, mind. We look forward to hearing from you.

The Life of Reilly

Congratulations to TF legend, Séamas O’Reilly, on the publication of his first novel, Prestige Drama. The reviews are coming in and they are, quite unsurprisingly, are glowing. Those who enjoy sinuous prose and incredibly amusing jokes – which we believe to be a great many of you – should buy a copy here.

Bring out the Banns

We are bringing back our personals section for the next issue, so if you’re looking for love or want to meet a like-minded person, do get in touch via the usual channels. Amazingly, there were four separate dates last time we ran this section, and this time out, we want to be invited to the wedding.

Elect Me Not

We hear there was something of an election the other day, but we haven’t read or heard much about it. Unrelatedly, this week’s rock was pleasant and roomy. We enjoyed our stay very much and you can book your stay there via this link.

Emerging, however, we did note a few interesting things. First of all was that remarkable pantheon of characters that local election candidates offer up to the humourist. Lamentably, much focus has come onto finding out which candidates are bastards and all the horrible things they have said over the years. That local politicians are at least 30% bastard is not, in our estimation, new or interesting information. Instead, we were excited by the candidacy of one Topo Wrensniwiro, an actor who has notably appeared as Master Hamir in the Marvel screed Dr. Strange.

Wrensnirwiro is a man of many talents, as his LinkedIn makes clear. These days he spends his time as a maths and ESOL tutor as well as campaigning in local politics. But there is a remarkable depth to the man. He apparently volunteers at a Quaker homeless organisation as well as for something he describes simply as ‘marriage care’. He is also a prolific ‘participant not spectator’ in karate (as a black belt), chess, tennis, table tennis, badminton, marathon running and outdoor swimming, all while ‘embracing Abrahamic religions’ while ‘seeking his own Theology’. He is also a morris dancer. It is truly a shame that such a renaissance man did not fail to secure a seat and join the nearly 1,400 of his new Reform Party brethren.

He would, of course, make a phenomenal addition to Issue 21’s fantasy football team of Britain’s strangest politicians, possibly as a right back. It’s a strong team, perhaps led in star power by the peculiar habits and vanities of the Thatcherites. There’s Norman St John-Stevas’ inimitable decision to correct David Frost’s description of his shirt as ‘purple’, insisting instead that it was ‘crushed cardinal.’

I Am a Meme, a Meme I Am

The latest piece from Issue 27 is now up on the website. Laura Beveridge spoke to three real-life versions of an online trope: Nick, 30 ans.

‘A symbol of a disaffected middle class too well-off to receive welfare but squeezed by rising taxes, it paints a grim picture of a broken social contract.’ But other options are available, and Laura found this out when speaking to the ‘Nick, 30’s’ of Britain. One, who opted for an apprenticeship with the civil service, ‘enjoys yoga and hiking.’ Another works in corporate law, ‘clocks in 12-hour days, eating all three meals at his desk, leaving at 2 or 3am.’ Different strokes…

Sean Dyche Joins Instagram

Recent times have seen some notable new additions to the world of Instagram, probably none better than Fence contributor Werner Hertzog. A new gladiator has entered the fray however is football manager and imagistic hard man Sean Dyche. The current state of play is hopeful, with his opening gambit looking like a misguided solo album, caption ‘A good place to start’.

His new social presence reminded us of a recent trip we made to the pub that is named for him, the former ‘Princess Royal’ in Burnley was re-named ‘The Royal Dyche’ in 2018 after he led the club back to European football. It is a truly bizarre boozer, boasting a raked seating area called Little Longside, designed to ape the Burnley stadium for optimal pub football watching.

Canapés and Chardonnay

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner investigation continues, proving the continued relevance of our reporting on the event’s security risks. A few years ago, Joe Fattorini followed a friend into the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to understand the inner workings of the worst dinner in America.

Slipping past two US Secret Service agents with self-conscious modesty and deference, they encountered Pamela Anderson, a man wearing cowboy boots with a tuxedo, a general, Salman Rushdie, Larry King and the cast of The Hills. Following a successful dinner with a varied crowd, Fattorini dishes out some advice for anyone who wants another crack at The Don: ‘The Secret Service are suckers for a pair of patent-leather, barathea silk-trimmed, Jermyn Street shoes.’

Ejected from the System

Two Sudanese asylum seekers are currently challenging Shabana Mahmood’s changes to Britain’s right-to-remain rules. We previously covered the collapsing system that asylum seekers are ferried through in the UK in Issue 23, written by an anonymous clinical lead working in an asylum hotel in the north of England.

Our insider laid out the chain of bureaucracy that an asylum seeker must navigate in order to gain the right to remain. But the difficulty, it turns out, arrives when you become a citizen. ‘The real kicker for anyone in the asylum system is what happens at the end. Our government might grudgingly accept your asylum claim’, but when they do, ‘you don’t get a letter congratulating you. You get a letter saying you have 28 days to vacate the accommodation’ and ‘you finally realise: after the right to remain comes the hard part, the one that nobody had really told you about.’

In Case You Missed It

The inside of a Woody-Allen-themed AirBnB.

The Frenchman who invented a philology prize and awarded it to himself.

The assistants running the Met Gala.

Nearly four years after the incident, a court ruling has given us easily the best headline of the week.

Some medieval updates to your lexicon.

Aardman’s happy birthday to David Attenborough.

Britain’s most prolific TikTok alcoholic.

And Finally

Recent months have seen a return of a legend to the platform that dominates this section of the newsletter, a legend we realise you may not even know about, or perhaps came across once, and promptly forgot all about. YouTube is once again a platform for the banalist man covering the bizarre: Tom Scott.

For the uninitiated, Scott is one of the oldest going consistent YouTubers there was, and his series called ‘Things You Might Not Know’ was the kind of thing the platform was really made for. One man goes out to locations around the world to find and talk about strange and unusual things. There’s the man who built an office in a lift, or a float-through McDonalds or indeed the unbelievably unassuming but highly dangerous stretch of water in Yorkshire called The Strid. He has his fair share of historical curios too, with tales of unexploded ordinance and microcosms of the Cold War.

For those of us with curated algorithms, he was something of a stable constant. Then, two years ago, after ten years of publishing a video every week on location he stopped, leaving behind a wealth of material and a series of excellent memes from his extensive travelling to odd places (have a look at this classic, and these well-edited masterpieces). But now, he’s back. Making a new series where he has travelled to every county in England and filmed an interesting story in each one. For those who love a nerdy watch or need a new thing to fall asleep to, we cannot recommend it highly enough. He’s already broken a 142-year-old bell and just recently got in a really very small boat.

He does have one great sin, which is making a video praising Stuart Semple’s pink, though that does give us another reason to remind you how good Phin Jennings’ piece in Issue 27 is, so perhaps it’s a benefit after all.

*

Well, there it is. We do hope you enjoyed this week’s brabble offered up by us Scurras and Ultracrepiderians and that this snoutfair missive has awoken you from your zwogger. And if you’re confused by the previous sentence, we now know you don’t peruse the links section properly and can confidently pronounce you a cumberwold, a mumpsimus and a snollygoster who would probably groak at their own grandmother during her final meal on this godforsaken planet. Complaints as to this insult should be sent in to editorial@the-fence.com, and if you wish to receive a brick through your window in response, but have recently changed your address, do reach out to support@the-fence.com. The on-screen brain matter at the end of Blue Velvet is not fake as David Lynch insisted on real human brain.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that revels in the month of May. Do remember that this mail-out is cooked fresh to order every week; we are not spamming your inbox, so do make sure that your email is not going into that dread folder.

When we find the time, we might ‘collab’ with some enterprising vineyard making English sparkling wine for our quarterly prize for the best photo of the magazine out and about, but for now, the winner takes home a bottle of Bollinger for their efforts, which really is needlessly generous on our part.

The competition for Issue 27’s champagne is positively electric. The magazine has been spotted near a nudist beach in Barmouth, punting alongside the Cherwell, paying tribute to London’s best kebab shop, enjoying the sunshine in Milan, alongside some cut-price Haribo at Paddington Station; it’s been spotted next to some deeply questionable characters in north London, with a friendly horse, achieving praise from the wonderful Marina O’Loughlin, napping with a very handsome cat and preparing to take Colditz Castle. At the moment there is also a bit of a TF festival all over Soho as the magazine is plastered outside a number of select venues, which really is a pleasure to see.

This is the fastest-selling issue ever – but we are still at a bit of a key juncture where we need as many of you as possible to subscribe, as that is how we keep the show on the road. A subscription to the print magazine remains agreeably affordable, but if you’d like to sign up for a year, and are currently at school or university and would like a discount code, do drop an email to the editor at cb@the-fence.com and we will indulge you there.

Subscribe Here

Elsewhere, Capital Letter, our London-centred newsletter, continues to grow, recently topping 3,000 wonderful subscribers. Its latest outing has a reviewette of Simpson-in-the-Strand and The Macbeth among other treats. For now, however, we turn ourselves to the coming of spring.

J.I.T.G Means P.A.R.T.Y

The May Day bank holiday has been officially rung in, we hope your hangovers are treating you gently. We made the trip down to ‘The birthplace of British motor racing’ and home to the May Day processions of Jack in the Green. We were there for the latter, a traditional May Day celebration that got going in the late 18th century. It had a number of dips and revivals over the years, with a small Deptford procession happening each year. The Hastings affair is the real deal, however, having been rebirthed in 1983 and growing stronger every year.

This year’s festivities were, as usual, a feast for the senses and a treat for any practised people watcher. What is it, for example, that leads one to become a committed morris dancer? Who makes all their costumes? Just how many pints has that elderly chap dressed as a shrub had for breakfast?

What was notable to us, however, was the way this event evidences that extensive presence of hippies, young and old, who flocked in their many thousands. There are those sporting their ‘83 original tour merch and ZZ Top beards in a positively Ottoman attempt to assert their elder status. But they are matched in number and perhaps surpassed in energy by a younger, queer tranche of folk-lovers. Whatever form they take, though, the British hippie is very far from dying out, and Hastings’ West Hill was heaving with them and their ways, which, it turns out, make for a very good party. The costumes were excellent, and the traditional ‘slaying of the Jack’ was quite a sight to behold, a kind of soft-core version of The Wicker Man. As the flurry of torn and thrown leaves died down and the hills cleared, the fete’s announcer reminded everyone to ‘count the number of children you have left and compare it with the number you arrived with’ before pointing the many proponents of gentle parenting to the found children tent.

The procession’s growing popularity also speaks to Hastings’ post-lockdown popularity as a London satellite state, with more and more disaffected capital dwellers heading down to the seaside. One can easily see the appeal for those interested in leaving the madness of London behind while simultaneously wanting to avoid living in Brighton. It has, however, produced a degree of local tensions, which in turn have given us our favourite acronym for the week: FILTH (Failed In London Try Hastings).

All the same, we can’t help but recommend these festivities to the forward-planning among you, not least for the phenomenal fisherman’s museum, which is possibly the nation’s best collection of stonking old-timey names including Alfred ‘Biddy’ Stonham AKA The Tub Man, who used to perform acrobatic tricks in the harbour on his paddle-driven tub.

Executive Tier

One of the greatest team efforts that The Fence have ever run is now available on the website for you all to enjoy. Our Cringe Century lists the 26 most embarrassing moments of the British 21st century, and it features Alistair Campbell, David Moyes, ‘Captain Tom’, Victoria Beckham, Meghan Markle, Lady Hale and more. Read the whole thing here, and do let us know if we missed something out…

Losing Your Grace

Many issues animate the editorial team of this magazine, and one of them is the futurity of sheep farming in the south-east of Ireland. So in the current dispute between the estate of Lismore Castle – owned by the Cavendishes – and their tenant farmers, we are very much Team Tenant. In this interview, Thomas Fitzgerald, whose family have been herding sheep in the Knockmealdowns since the 1600s, talks about how he won’t be able to continue to farm with the proposed rent hikes.

The Cavendish family, headed by the Duke of Devonshire, own Chatsworth in Derbyshire, one of the world’s greatest private art collections, and are reputedly worth just under a billion pounds. Recently, in a bid to restore the cascade at Chatsworth, they received £4.5 million from the National Heritage Lottery Fund (i.e. the taxpayer).

The heir to estate, the Earl of Burlington, is now overseeing negotiations with the Fitzgeralds and the other sheep farmers. Burlington is obviously a political animal – he has permitted women to become members of Pratt’s and even did an Instagram grid post in the heady days of 2020 for Black Lives Matter. But does he think that his tenants’ lives matter? We will be watching this story closely.

RooneyMania

Tim McGrabhann’s short story about one young man’s encounters with a generationally singular writer from Issue 27 is here. Mari Kealy is the most successful graduate of her and Jerome’s creative writing masters at a certain Dublin university, where ‘Dissenters not easily dismissed as pale, male and stale could only be considered bitter or jealous, since nobody who knew her had a bad word to say about her: and nor did Jerome, not even after she’d told him he’d have to leave.’ It’s a magnificent piece of writing which we really do commend to you all, but it really is best appreciated in print form.

Purchase A Tactile Marvel Here

Radical Young Woman

Certain publications are entering ragebait territory with their coverage of ‘political’ young women. Our own coverage of radical young women is, by contrast, very subtle and totally watertight. Bertie Brandes started it all in Issue 24 with gusto: ‘The very concept of a femcel (especially one with my face) is far too regularly derided and invalidated.’ She has a point. Why ladle dreary concern for young women when we could all just relax and take a sunnier view? There is so much to be optimistic about. As Bertie says, ‘femcel sits between incel (involuntarily celibate) and volcel (voluntarily celibate), existing as it does in a class of its own. That class being made up of judgemental and indecisive, not to mention phenomenally dressed, lithe and soaking wet women.’

Down to Earth

This week Kemi Badenoch made yet another shrewd observation. She noted that Nigel Farage was not ‘down to earth’ following the news that he failed to declare a £5m donation that he received before becoming an MP. For reasons that remain unlikely to be clarified, political donors and donations never seem to go to plan. No one understands the business better than Henry Dyer, who in Issue 22 wrote a speculative guide identifying which Tory donor successfully campaigned for the grouse-shooting exemption baked into the COVID-19 ‘rule of six’ distancing guidelines. Henry put his bets on the then-Queen Elizabeth. ‘Here’s something a lot of people don’t really know about the Monarch: she fucking loves shooting. Like some sort of mad fictional scientist, she has a secret farm of Labradors which she breeds away from prying eyes on her Sandringham Estate.’ It’s a convincing line of reasoning, but perhaps you know something he didn’t. Do write in with any further intel.

Pablo’s Hippos

The tale of Colombia’s hippo population is a well-known classic. For those who are unaware, the animal is entirely non-native there but was first brought over by Pablo Escobar in 1981 for his private menagerie, which is the kind of strategic decision-making that made him such a household name.

When Pablo was finally brought down, his hippos proved a challenge. As a phenomenally dangerous animal, the authorities decided it would be too tricky to capture them, so they just decided to leave them be. After all, there were only four of them. Well, a few years later, they escaped from the private zoo, and suddenly there were 16 hippos in Colombia. Then in 2014 they were counted again and wow, look at there were suddenly 40 of them, how droll! There are now over 200.

Fortunately, they have not proved too deadly to local people, but their ecological footprint is far from neutral as an invasive species. Many efforts have been made to control them, including ambitious plans of chemical sterilisation. But the newest – and silliest – proposition comes from none other than the incredibly rich Ambani family. Anant, son of the family’s patriarch Mukesh Ambani, has apparently taken a liking to the lumbering beasts and wants to bring 80 of them to his private animal sanctuary in Gujarat, which is already some 150,000 creatures strong, and features a jacuzzi for elephants, among other things.

Three-hour Mum

Lots of people are pretending to be cross this week because Emma Grede, the woman who started a jeans company with Khloe Kardashian, has described herself as a ‘three-hour mum’, meaning that she only spends three hours with her children. There are several important stones left unturned in this story. The most crucial is that no one seems to be asking what time frame those three hours are spread across. The people want clarity with the numbers. Also important – why has this person suddenly emerged as a lifestyle guru, when her defining role was being a sort of ghost-business-partner to a minor cultural figure? The outrage will all blow over soon, but while it’s in the in-tray, let’s take it as an opportunity to return to Tanjil Rashid’s short story in Issue 24 about a pair of parents-to-be. There’s no discussion of the number of hours spent with the baby, but there could have been. The conceptual link is strong for those invested in connection.

In Case You Missed It

The story of the New York gallerist associated with Roy Cohn, who tortured young men.

Muhammad Ali drops in on the set of The Sopranos.

Trainspotting is being made into a musical.

Ed Caesar’s piece on Jonathan Swift’s last joke is a delight from start to finish.

Courtside pictures of James Goldstein are nightmare fuel.

And Finally

A wonderful new update to the BBC Archive has been made, with a new episode of Man Alive following the arrival of a young woman in a 1965 flat share.

‘Girls. Tall girls, short girls, fat girls, thin girls, ugly girls and pretty girls. Tarts and floozies, nymphomaniacs and gangsters’ moles. And nice girls, respectable girls, upper-middle-class girls with good manners and impeccable accents,’ goes the opening voiceover. He does not clarify which of the categories the documentary subjects slot into.

Instead, the film follows four girls living in an ‘unloved’ patch of North Kensington, who, ‘like most girls,’ are said to ‘shuttle between dull work and an equally dull private life.’ We see scenes from home, on the street and at work, each one carefully made up and studiedly casual in her performance of a typical day. One of the best moments is the interview that leads to the adoption of the final member of the flat, involving discussion of mealtimes and the hushed wonder at the fact of having enough hot water to fill consecutive baths for all four girls. ‘Marvellous,’ nods the new girl. There is something so marvellous about the programme that it has somehow captured everyone’s imagination. We asked several people if they had seen it and was told by one young woman, simply, ‘Yes, I took screenshots on my iPad for haircut inspiration’.

The women are shown funnelling toward the ultimate goal of marriage, speaking to one another and to their lacklustre boyfriends in strangely sedate, muted tones. Bleak as it now seems, there’s something oddly fascinating, even faintly appealing, about it. Aspirational might be too strong, but it certainly compares favourably with some other uploads from the archive. A particularly bad example is an interview about the arrival of the podcast in 2004, described as being ‘enjoyed by a growing number of internet enthusiasts’, which, 22 years later, describes every single one of us.

*

That is that for this week.

We look forward to joining you soon. Do remember that all pitches go to editorial@the-fence.com and everything else goes to support@the-fence.com. Chris Martin’s great-great-grandfather invented British Summer Time.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that folds down neatly into your armrest.

We hope the second day of the working week is treating you gently. As for ourselves, we are entering some truly exciting times. We have some huge investigations and stories on the way for you, many of which will be featuring in this very newsletter, and another of which is the biggest and deepest piece of reporting we’ve ever done. There has never been a better time to subscribe to the magazine, and yes, we say that a lot, but somehow it’s always true. To the nearly 700 of you who have signed up to this mail-out over the last fortnight: welcome, we promise you gold is on its way.

Subscribe Today

We’re loving all the pictures of the magazine we’ve seen coming in from our wonderful subscribers. Do keep them coming to editorial@the-fence.com for a chance to win a very nice bottle. The major transport hubs of Victoria and Stansted were sporting black and orange very nicely, the latter in full triple threat. As ever, the magazine is a true lover of nature, cheering up disgruntled cats, saluting some horses in finery and breathing in the fresh spring blossom. It was also pictured watching the latest trends and then recovering on something a little more old-fashioned. Its final act of the week was to hop over to New York and meet the one and only Patrick Radden Keefe. A good week to be sure, though a good wisteria is hard to beat.

There’s a lot to get around to this week, including exciting raids on Scientology buildings and podcasting nuns. First, however, we’ve been noticing some interesting online activity from the subject of Issue 27’s lead feature.

Colour Us Tickled

One of the pieces we’re most proud of from the latest issue is Phin Jennings’ piece on Stuart Semple. Phin started writing with us over on Capital Letter, giving us some great stories from the art world. Then, we worked on something bigger. Stuart Semple, a man who has spats with more famous artists for being ‘colour hoarders’, is somehow an ambassador for the charity Mind and, according to many former employees, was far from an ideal boss. People have loved reading it in print, and we were getting all excited for when it would go online for more eyeballs to feast on.

But it seems someone has been anticipating us and may even be keen to muddy some waters. Can you guess who? Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down in over-description with these sorts of things, so allow us to present a series of facts, none of which bear any relation to each other whatsoever. Do not read between any of the non-existent lines that might appear in your mind.

Having been in touch with Stuart Semple in March, The Fence drives boldly ahead with its investigative work. On the 16 April, Issue 27 was launched, and what a wonderful moment that was too. On 18 April, Stuart Semple published a Substack piece called ‘On The Fence About Money and Art’. Five days later, Stuart Semple published a Substack piece called ‘On The Fence About Leaving London’. Prior to April 2026, Stuart Semple had never used the phrase ‘on the fence’ in any of his Substack articles. This newsletter, as you may know, is called Off The Fence.

In neither piece could Stuart’s opinion about either of these topics be described as ‘on the fence’. In the first, he concludes about money and art that, ‘Until we stop measuring art by the same yardstick we use to measure profit, we will never get it’. In the latter, he writes ‘To the London-centric… the very idea of not being there is backward, provincial, and lesser than… Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not’. So why the titles? We have no idea. Incidentally, search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving the visibility and overall performance of websites and web pages in search engine results pages.

Following this constellation of unconnectable dots, we present two quotes from Phin Jennings final piece on Mr Semple. ‘Working in Semple’s studio involved maintaining fake Twitter accounts to boost his posts.’ ‘Outside of Bournemouth, Semple is better known as an indefatigable publicist than an artist.’

When we put the more serious allegations to Semple, he served us with a legal letter – but our reporting bore out the veracity of our claims. If you value what we do, please do support us by becoming a subscriber today.

Build The Fence

She Walks in Beauty

Our Instagram account really is looking tip-top at the moment, and we have even unleashed the full entry for our latest ‘146 Questions’: this time, one of the Belfast-based knob-twiddlers Bicep are in the hot seat – we’ve published all the questions Matt McBriar could answer in the allotted time, and everything he couldn’t. Would you back yourself to have escaped from the Great Fire of London in 1666?

Tsar Nicholas II

Some of you will no doubt have come across the ‘Nick, 30 Ans’ meme, which spread from French Twitter to informing UK government policy in a matter of a few years. But what do real-life Nicks of the age of 30 really think about their taxation burden? Laura Beveridge spoke to a trio of them in the latest piece from Issue 27 to go online.

Maybe the Kids Are Alright

The fates of Gen Z, let alone Gen Alpha are a source of constant anxiety and mindless moral panic from some of the country’s less interesting outlets. But all of us have a tale or two that have made us slightly nervy. Our most recent synapse-tingler was hearing tales of small children pinch-zooming books, confused by the paper’s unresponsive touch. But one of the most consistent trends cultural historians have observed is that for basically every generation (barring the one currently in its infancy) things the one below it has going, or is going, to the dogs. Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be so hasty.

The Yoof’s obsession with Subway Surfer and virality has recently coalesced around a common enemy of humanity – Scientology – in a rather brilliant fashion. The famously weird and secretive sect has seen many of its buildings, most especially its LA headquarters, raided by teenagers doing Scientology Speedruns. The goal is simple: how fast and how far can you get inside the HQ? Can anyone find Lord Xenu or indeed Shelly Miscavige, the wife of the Church’s current head, last seen in 2007?

It’s actually a rather old subgenre of YouTube content which mostly began with this man who has been a long time opponent of the cult to the point where his mere presence outside the building causes all of the hawkers to rush inside and turn on the special window tinting. If you get even a twang of sympathy watching these, we’ve put a link to Going Clear below.

In our estimation, then, this is a wholly good thing. Unlike many other examples of tawdry, exploitative ‘pranking’, ‘scientology runs’ benefit from picking a target which is well-merited. On top of this, the whole thing feels perfectly designed to damage the image Scientologists are so keen on. For a long time they have attempted to pursue a dual strategy of aping respectable organisations and cultivating a sense of possible fear and backlash for those who oppose them. Neither of these narratives are well served by having a group of sweaty young ‘uns running around your offices in Jesus cosplay blaring airhorns. Indeed, the effect seems to be damaging enough in the Scientologists’ estimation to cause them to entirely remove the door handles to their building.

So perhaps the A to Z of new generations is not so bankrupt after all, they’re off their screens, making real, physical change and interacting with people face to face, if at a slightly quicker pace than we might have anticipated. Are Gen Z having terrible sex lives? Do they all think anyone over 53 is old? Are young women angrier than ever? We’re not sure, but either way, they aren’t getting on board the cruise ship to leave Teegeeack any time soon.

How Do You Know Liz Truss?

We just put Sophie Heawood’s inaugural column and the story of a memorable date with a younger man from Issue 27 online to clamorous response, with Dr David James saying ‘this is one of the best things I’ve read in a magazine for quite some time.’ It is behind the paywall now, so do sign up for a digital subscription if you would like to find out what all the fuss is about and also peruse the archive. Sophie writes, ‘He had lied about his height on the app, though unfortunately for him, I’d gained a couple of inches too, in the shiny black heels that I’d put on over sheer stockings. Even though I was at home on Gloucester Avenue and not going anywhere.’ But not going anywhere did not save the writer from several unwelcome questions, including that of what kind of wine she wanted to drink and also why Liz Truss kept texting her.

Major Winters’ Mid-Life Crisis

Many people have got rather upset with Damian Lewis’ latest album release, which finds the actor gesturing in what appears to be the Ingestre Road Estate car park while wearing a coat with no shirt and an iced-out pair of loafers. From where we’re sat, there’s something really rather wholesome about it – unlike this excruciating intervention on the Manchester City-Arsenal game from Tom Hiddleston.

Internet Alters

Podcast-laughing has now seeped into every corner of public life. As you might have already seen, one with 157,000 followers on TikTok by a group of Catholic-Dominican sisters based in Michigan that started in January has captured the imagination of the American side of TikTok and is now making the rounds here in the UK. The sisters give advice about the usual things – prayer, devotion, Christ – and also more atypical subjects – anxiety, dating, cooking – in such an appealing and apparently innocuous way that young women are being persuaded of the allure of a vocational life. Much talk abounds of the draw of joining the sisterhood, with soft-focused clips of the nuns extolling joyful living. It’s an advertisement for Catholicism only matched in success to when The Sound of Music came out. With two recording studios and a handy poster of St Francis of Assisi in front of a mic for guidance on optimum pitch levels, it’s not very clear how much time is being spent on the religious side of things. But young women in the UK are enraptured, nevertheless: ‘could I just do a year or two?’ asks one commentator. Similar musing has made its way into real life, a young friend of TF confessing, ‘I’m so close to doing it.’ This seems a bit concerning. Another says, ‘Yeah, just seems great, no job, no responsibilities, just hanging out.’ The podcast calling works in mysterious ways.

Bad Underdog

As the government continues to pickle itself in Peter Mandelson’s vetting brine, we’re reminded of another case of confused loyalty: back in Issue 20, John Phipps met the Drogheda historian bent on rehabilitating Oliver Cromwell. Phipps describes how the author of titles including, but not limited to, Cromwell Was Framed and Drogheda FC: The Story So Far ‘has been waging his lonely war for over a quarter of a century, never shrinking from his original contention and never moving from his beloved hometown. Phipps met Tom Reilly when he was in the process of putting on an exhibition of the ‘provocative historical relic’ of Cromwell’s death mask, and finds something almost charmingly quixotic in Reilly’s crusade. Reilly’s choice of subject is an unusual one, given that local placards still declare ‘CROMWELL DRANK DROGHEDA BLOOD’.

In Case You Missed It

Caity Weaver asked 555 people what the best free bread in America is.

The Guardian investigated the crypto-tycoon bankrolling Reform.

Peter Hitchens’ short-form video debut is everything you want and more.

Sharon Osbourne got herself banned from Mascara Bar.

We did feature Robbie Williams in last week’s links section, but this video of him performing Limp Bizkit’s Rollin’ in a German stadium is extraordinarily compelling.

An important wake-up call.

And Finally

There is a very old-fashioned brand of British comedy which, to us, is really rather wonderful. Old relics like The Goon Show or the songs of Ivor Cutler are greatly enjoyable. Not all of this work has aged superbly of course, but that doesn’t mean a dig through the old light entertainment archives can’t produce gold. Two such nuggets were Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who formed a musical duo around their surnames and became much like a British alternative (and precursor) to Tom Lehrer.

They have many songs worth a whimsical listen: The Gas Man Cometh, The Gnu Song, The Beadstead Men and the Hippopotamus Song. A personal favourite of ours is the truly silly Wompom Song. Part of the joy is them as a duo, two old friends, one a polio survivor, separated by the Second World War and reunited by the desire to play stupid, amusing songs for the masses.

There is a rather nice short documentary about the pair, who are about as quintessentially British as we can imagine. A wonderful mixture of wit, outright silliness and rather touching self-depricating humility, which occasionally spills over into outright sincerity, as in this eulogy to closing train stations as a result of the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. As enjoyable as the watch is, no one summed up their act better than Flanders himself, so we leave you with his words.

‘I must say, wandering around things seem to have come to a pretty underpass here in England while we’ve been away. It’s small wonder to us that satire squats, hoof in mouth, under every bush. The purpose of satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cosy half-truth, and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.’

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That is that for this week. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, please email support@the-fence.com, and if you have a pitch or a photo of the magazine, please email editorial@the-fence.com and we will attend to you there. Do buy a subscription if you’ve enjoyed this newsletter – it will make you very happy. The Daily Mail sponsored Amy Johnson’s flight to Australia.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter recently found in an archaeological dig in Turkey. There has been great excitement about Issue 27, and we are delighted with all the kind words, which have been expressed in person, via text message and on social media. It seems like you all agree with us: it is the best one yet.

Buy the Best One

To celebrate the issue, Snake Denton has recounted his time as a Soho paperboy in video format, and the whole thing has been shot brilliantly by Reuben Adaer Davies, and features a brief cameo from our neighbour, Missy Flynn. Watch it here.

The photos have been absolutely flooding into us and we are just giddy with joy. We have to begin with this wonderful picture of the last contest winner, Hugo Gye, who looks phenomenal with his prize. A reminder at the start of this photo contest season that there is a real, tangible, fizzy prize to be won with your weightless, digital works of heliography.

The issue has of course been seen glamourising shop shelves in Berwick Street and in Hertford, but it has already been making some increasingly ambitious ventures. It dipped its toes into the world with a visit to the National Gallery, and then off to the Royal Court, before making its way down to the bicycle enthusiast’s Tweed Run to witness a penny farthing in action.

It then got stuck into some really good stuff in Henry VII’s wine cellar below the MoD as a guest of Nicholas Morgan before a mad, bleary-eyed dash up to Hadrian’s Wall – in a suitably gorgeous, and now limited, tote bag – to witness the growth of new life at the Sycamore Gap. It then hopped over said wall and said hello to one of its featured subjects, Mr Tony Morris.

A tiring journey to be sure, so it recouped with the help of some furry friends who have pursued its pages in manners traditional and modern, with Fonie Mitsopoulou’s piece on the Groucho attracting particular attention.

It then settled down to a cup of coffee (decaf) and a bit of Camus and to hear some rather wonderful praise from Ian Leslie and another legend of the long read. What a cultured and capricious little thing it is.

It Really Is That Good

Gossip Rag

The WhatsApp wires that power British journalism have been shivering with pleasure at one particular story that concerns a major British political figure. Who’s going to be the first to report it? (It won’t be us.)

On the Ropes

The arrest of Daniel Kinahan in Dubai provides the opportunity to revisit Ed Caesar’s outstanding feature on the Dubliner. Even up until his arrest, the cocaine kingpin was intimately involved in boxing, and it will be fascinating to see if there is any degree of accountability for anyone involved at the other end. Some of you will remember Tyson Fury – now painting himself as some sort of Morecambe Ozzy Osbourne with his fly-on-the-wall Netflix show – grovellingly thanking Kinahan for ‘getting the deal over the line’ on a planned fight with Anthony Joshua. That showdown never came to pass, and in all likelihood, never will. But we are sure that we will hear more about this story, and soon.

Send Us Your Best

The inbox has been deluged with some tip-top pitches of late, and there are still a couple of spots left on the flatplan for Issue 28. We’re looking for a really fun feature (when are we not?) and something really newsy in the ‘facts’ section. If this sounds like something you might have in your locker, then do have a read of the pitch guide here, and wing through an email to editorial@the-fence.com, and we’ll take it from there.

Can’t Knock the Culture Hustle

The latest issue contains an investigation that anyone who has been involved ‘in the game’ will recognise to be a superior piece of reportage. It concerns the artist, Stuart Semple, who went from being lauded as the ‘Basquiat of the noughties’ to operating as a provincial huckster from a studio in Bournemouth. Speaking to over a dozen of his former employees, Phin Jennings paints a picture of an artist who refuses to acknowledge that their 15 minutes of fame are spent, and who has left a wake of unpaid bills and furious collaborators in his wake.

Naturally, Semple has been responding to the allegations detailed within the piece in his own inimitable way– witness his latest Substack post here – but do buy a copy of the magazine to get the full scoop on the Dorset Osho.

Issue 27, Please

Whining and Dining

The chainification of perfectly good restaurants continues to peeve everyone. In Issue 25, Ian Trueger cuts into the belly of the problem. Speaking to over 25 industry insiders, Trueger charts the events and people that granted PE ‘access to much vaster reserves of capital’ and ‘invited [the industry] to spread its legs at the table’. The piece, which you can read here, takes turns with some of London’s most distinguished restaurateurs to talk shop. Margaret Henderson of Rochelle Canteen, Daniel Willis of Luca and Jeremy King of The Wolseley float the appeal and risk of being bought up.

In Case You Missed It

Ed Campbell rides his hobby horse.

Two stupid tweets from the week as the Madlanga Commission is derailed by a stuck tissue and the Prime Minister transforms into the Road Runner.

‘Aristocrats’ at play or a bunch of Zone 2 insurance brokers on a PR freebie? Either way, it’s the most infuriating video of 2026.

A fun piece about owning and firing guns, from Paul Theroux.

Robbie Williams remembers taking MDMA, via the iPhone notes app.

The tale of the Ceefax striker.

And Finally

Recent small-scale news in the US has seen a return to the public eye of a long-forgotten stoner icon: Afroman. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, almost certainly his one hit song Because I Got High.

Since that brief, Grammy-nominated rise to fame, Afroman drifted out of the limelight in a very contented manner. He chose to release music every now and then online, moving to Adam’s County (population c. 27,000) to pursue a quiet rural life. This remained the case until August 2022, when his home was broken into and raided by the local police using a warrant that alleged kidnapping and drug trafficking.

Officers tore through his home, breaking his door and his gate, disabling his security system and seizing $5,000. What they found was precisely nothing at all. Most outrageous of all of their non-discoveries were the purported kidnapping victims, who police sources had alleged were in the basement of Afroman’s property, which, upon their close inspection, revealed itself to be just as much of a bungalow from the inside as it looked on the outside.

Afroman was understandably miffed, and reached out to the police to ask whether they would be willing to repair any of the damage they caused and to ask about the whereabouts of some $400 of the seized cash, which was missing when it was returned to him. So far, so usual for the American policing system.

However, blessed with a talent for stoner-comedic rap and a collection of CCTV footage of the raid, Afroman saw the unpleasant situation as a perfect opportunity. He got into the studio and penned a series of wonderfully silly songs and accompanied them with the aforementioned footage, releasing them onto YouTube. The first of these was the directly titled Will You Help Me Repair My Door.

This would be swiftly followed by other bangers such as Lemon Pound Cake, a song which fixated on a brief double-take by one of the larger officers when he passed by the appealing desert on Afroman’s counter. The officer himself was swiftly nicknamed Officer Pound Cake by Afroman producing a series of similar nicknames such as Licc’em Low Lisa and perhaps the best track of this recent oeuvre, RANDY WALTERS IS A SON OF A BITCH.

For Afroman, this was an opportunity to take the mick and also earn some cash back to repair his gate and door, given the lack of police willingness on that front. For the officers in question, it was an act that caused “humiliation, ridicule, mental distress, embarrassment and loss of reputation”, words that felt slightly rich in the irony given what they’d just done to a man whose only response was to produce a few comedy songs in response. All the same, seven sheriff’s officers proceeded to sue Afroman for invasion of privacy.

One of their three claims was dismissed outright. The other two made it to trial, where a jury acquitted Afroman in full and the officers had to sit and listen to all of the songs in full while Afroman sat draped in a custom suit made of U.S. flags. Some of the court footage is truly bizarre. It’s one of the most remarkable pieces of litigious backfiring we’ve seen in recent times. Since the trial, Afroman’s streaming numbers are up 500%. Well played Sir, well played.

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That’s it for this week, and we’ll be back with you on Tuesday hence. If you have any technical questions, please do email us at support@the-fence.com. Everything else is to editorial@the-fence.com, and please do keep winging through the photos of the mag to that address. The Dalai Lama is frightened of caterpillars.

All the best,

TF

Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s heard the good news. As per our special Sunday bulletin, the new issue is with the world, with the times and with you, our beloved readers. As they conclude their national and international journeys to your doormats, we do hope you enjoy what we’ve been cooking up.

Issue 27, Please

But a new issue means time for renewed generosity as the photo contest re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-opens! Here is the magazine with a rather imperious cat, on a scale, at the pub with a pint and with a delicious bar of chocolate, which is all very cheering to see. We will be accepting all entries that feature the mag, but this time round, we thought we’d add a special, bonus theme. We will be paying special attention to snaps that are taken in the United Kingdom and Ireland. You don’t have to follow that to win, the outside thinkers are The Fence’s friend, but it never hurts to toe the party line. The winner will receive a bottle of Champagne as long as they’ve managed to spell editorial@the-fence.com correctly (or to tag us on social media). That’s where you send the photos. A reminder that the new issue is also being stocked in Waterstones, every single remaining WH Smith and everyone’s favourite supermarket, Waitrose. The print renaissance is happening. Words on pages are down with the kids. And so on.

Magazines for Me, Magazines for You

It’s also worth noting that we’re now officially in gap-filling mode for the new issue. At the moment, we’ve got a few cavities to tend to: two open slots in Etc, a short story and a strong insider piece for Facts. If you’ve got something that could help fill them, we’d love to hear from you. As always, our pitch guide can be found here, and our office door can be knocked at editorial@the-fence.com.

But more pressing matters clamour for attention, with a quick look Stateside.

Eric Adams: Epilogue

We enjoyed the profile of the ex-NY mayor Eric Adams in the recent issue of n+1. To our eye, it contains perhaps only one error – suggesting Eric Adams’ time in the limelight is completely finished. Will he be a regular occupant? No. But if there is one thing the man is exceptionally good at, it’s doing ridiculous and illegal things that garner attention. And the latest trick this devil (from one of the lighter circles of hell) has pulled is becoming officially Albanian.

To long-time Adams observers, the move isn’t a total surprise. The man was known to enjoy a foreign tour becoming renowned for his liberal application of a crowd-pleasing formula that ran along the lines of ‘New York is the [INSERT CITY NAME] of America’, something which Adams is on record as believing applies to Athens, Kyiv, Seoul, Islamabad, Tel Aviv, Zagreb, Lima, Mexico City, Dublin and Istanbul. It would have been a quite lovable trait if it didn’t involve, as much of Adams’ mayoralty did, copious graft and corruption. The engine room of Adams’ jet-setting was, of course, free airline tickets, traded for favour that only the Big Cheese of the Apple can offer.

But if there was ever a place that captured Adams’ heart, it was Albania. On three separate occasions as mayor, Adams presided over flag-raising ceremonies and introduced the city’s first Albania Day parade. Indeed, Eric Adams loved Albania so much that he managed to pass it down to his son (stage name Jayoo), who gave this inspired performance on the country’s version of American Idol.

Adams’ citizenship is the feel-good ending to a long romance no one really understands, needs or asked for. And yet somehow, it’s rather touching. Perhaps best of all, it has brought about a civil war among Wikipedia editors who are fighting over whether Adams’ page should now officially describe him as ‘Albanian-American’. For now, the anti-Albanian faction seems to be out on top. For now.

Singhs and Roundabouts

When Sarah Haque was a small child growing up in Bangladesh, she was called ‘Bideshi’ – or, foreigner – by friends and family. A term of endearment, the nickname was eventually shrugged off when she arrived in the UK. In the piece included in our latest issue and now online, she tots up her rolling mental scorecard of Britishness and Bangladeshiness. ‘Second-gens and beyond have a superior kind of citizenship to mine: implied, non-negotiable. Whereas I have silently weighed up my Englishness for years’.

Autobán

On Sunday, it was announced that Viktor Orbán had been ousted as the Prime Minister of Hungary by Péter Magyar. It is astonishing news and a long time in the making. In 2022, in Issue 11, John Merrick looked into the stunning appearance of an unlikely magazine, Hungarian Conservative, on UK newsstands. Filled with writing ‘splashing out screeds on the usual centre-right fare of freedom, family and tradition, much of which was written in a somewhat jumbled Hunglish’, the now-defunct publication was funded by some questionable characters and groups. Yet, as Merrick puts it, ‘If this seems to amount to a shadowy, unimpeachable network of dark money and cultural soft power, then do not fear too keenly – that description may oversell its impact. Orbán’s popularity is teetering.’ Four years later, Merrick’s assessment finally came true.

You can read the full piece here.

By, Beigel, By

Those of you who read Capital Letter will know that we love the 24-hour Brick Lane Beigel Bake, alongside the reason why US labour laws make the American ‘bagel’ worse than the original. Given this, it was pleasing to see the legendary shop get a very pretty treatment from the video-culture folks at Nowness. Take a look at those beigels, and subscribe to Capital Letter while you’re at it.

Home Stable

Congratulations are in order to Harry Shukman, who has been named the Sunday Times’ Writer of the Year 2026. The winning loot was his undercover investigation of choice individuals, including Britain First, Holocaust deniers, neo-Nazis and a Silicon Valley-backed race-science organisation. It is always wonderful to hear good news from friends of TF. Before Harry went headfirst into the far-right pool, he took TF undercover with practitioners of conversion therapy in Issue 5 in our very first investigation. He looked into the True Freedom Trust, a charity seeking to ‘help people handle their same-sex attraction, to reconcile that with their faithful Christian living and actually to be a faithful Christian without sinning within their same-sex attraction’. Well done, Harry.

You can read the full piece here.

Vauxhall, Cross

In the spirit of true log-rolling, we were delighted to see Patrick Radden Keefe shout-out this very publication alongside some other newbies in an extended interview with Longreads. A reminder that London Falling really is the book event of the year – just read this review from Craig Brown for further confirmation.

Head of Ops

In other news, the arrival (advent?) of a new Archbishop of Canterbury means a look back into previous TF coverage of past and problematic archbishops of late. In our January 2025 online edition, Miles Ellingham and Cormac Kehoe investigated Justin Welby’s troubled history. They asked: was Welby the worst Archbishop of Canterbury since Thomas Arundel? Perhaps. The evidence is marshalled through a look at his conversion through the evangelical organisation Charismatic Christianity, his first job at a French state-owned oil company and his failures relating to John Smyth’s abuse of children. Keeping things holy, we also turn back to our reporting of a legacy of deceit, fraud and suicide at the heart of the Church of England. Tim Wyatt followed the story of Martin Sargeant, a man with wayward taste in luxury goods and a mysterious rise to the top of the Diocese of London. Once he started as, among other things, a fixer in the Church, he went on to make spurious and false allegations against various members and colleagues. Wyatt reported in Issue 23 on the allegations – and the devastating outcome of the spool of lies.

In Case You Missed It

Faye Curran on the CIA ‘torture queen’ turned life coach.

That dancing Hungarian politician in full.

The focus of Issue 27’s very first piece continues to deliver pure gold on his Instagram.

Is it because of the Homers?

Childhood cornish sheepracing looks as good as it sounds.

Jimmy ‘Pintlord’ McIntosh’s latest video on the Holloway Road is very good and worth paying for.

And Finally

Who doesn’t love the Wu-Tang Clan? Someone probably must do, but it isn’t us. And though we usually enjoy them for their musical talents, we love one of them (RZA) for a particular instance of the exact opposite. In a slightly bizarre crossover with Guitar Centre, RZA agreed to drop by and cook up a beat for them on the fly. For those who aren’t deeply versed in the rap world, this is a bit like Brian Cox agreeing to come round and shoot an on-the-fly monologue for a crossover with Rymans. But the best part of it, is that a man responsible for some of rap’s most famous beats absolutely shits the bed in real time next to some dweeb from Guitar Centre who has to act like what he’s hearing isn’t a total trainwreck. We promise you, you don’t have to care one jot about rap to enjoy this one – any student of online video cringe can enjoy it.

You’ll notice the video has been re-uploaded through non-official channels because Guitar Centre pulled it out of pure shame. Why they thought to upload it in the first place, we’ll never know.

The real shame of it, is that it gives a bad name to a brilliant thing. At its best, beat-making can be a great thing. Fortunately there’s a classic YouTube series called Rhythm Roulette that can showcase how the good stuff gets done. It’s a simple premise: take a good producer, blindfold them in a record shop, make them pick three records out and then get them to sample them. It’s a kind of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy/Pimp My Ride set up for hip-hop nerds.

One of the best out there is 9th Wonder’s episode which features a truly phenomenal reinvention of a country record and Wondagurl’s quiet demonstration of her technical skills.

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There’s no more newsletter, there’ll never be any more newsletter. Until next week, of course! And, indeed, there’ll be a newsletter of a totally different style and flavour in just two days when another stellar edition of Capital Letter comes your way – do remember to sign up here. If you’d rather email us instead, do use editorial@the-fence.com or support@the-fence.com, but really reading Capital Letter will be much more interesting. That’s all for now folks, all that remains is to remind you of the wisdom of Mr David Lynch: Keep your eye on the doughnut, not the hole. Lightning comes out of the sky and up from the ground at the same time.

All the best,

TF

Good evening. This is Charlie, the editor of The Fence. I’m writing with the good news that Issue 27 has landed, and should be reaching subscribers tomorrow, having been dispatched from our new distribution hub in East Sussex on Friday. We’re very excited for you all to read it.

Buy Issue 27

At the heart of the issue are three outstanding features. The Groucho Club is London’s most infamous club, a lodestar of Cool Britannia. But a recent slew of scandals has led to an exodus of members, and the future of the Soho institution looks decidedly rocky. Fonie Mitsopoulou has spoken to a number of insiders, and dug up some astonishing new details about the Dean Street grand dame.

About 15 years ago, Stuart Semple was one of the hottest artists in the country, but has since become known for attention-seeking gambits, such as changing his name by deed poll to ‘Anish Kapoor’ and suing the Estate of Yves Klein. In an investigation that has taken months to report, Phin Jennings has talked to over a dozen of Semple’s employees and collaborators, who paint a picture of a failed art prodigy turned provincial opportunist, who runs questionable businesses and fails to pay staff, all while marketing himself as a champion of the underdog, sticking it to ‘the man’ from a Bournemouth studio.

Pam Hogg’s name will be familiar to anyone who enjoys reading about other people’s parties. But while she loved a night out, Hogg was also a brilliant fashion designer, whose talent was never fully realised commercially when she died at the end of last year. Lauren Cochrane asks Hogg’s friends, peers and collaborators what stopped the Queen of Paisley from becoming a global fashion brand.

Elsewhere, we have fiction from Tim MacGabhann, interviews with Bicep and Tony Morris, dispatches from the ‘Legends Gala’ at the Natural History Museum and the insurance mens’ pubs on Leadenhall Market, another peerless piece from John Banville, columns from Sophie Heawood and John Niven and we finish with the ‘26 Most Embarrassing Moments in the British 21st Century.’

This Magazine Sounds Pretty Good to Me

Since its first iterations, I have always seen The Fence as being very much within the world, rather than a reaction to it. So I’m particularly pleased that we now have bespoke print adverts in the magazine. In Issue 27, there are two ads, both designed by Studio Mathias Clottu. The first is with the podcast, How Long Gone, and the second is for Farringdon’s finest restaurant, Luca. If you’d like to work with us on a future issue, do email me at cb@the-fence.com and we can take things further.

The magazine is now stocked at Waitrose, Waterstones and WH Smith, so it’s all happening on the retail front. As ever, we absolutely love seeing photos of the magazine out ‘in the wild’, so please do send those through to editorial@the-fence.com and you can win the Champagne prize (which is a literal Champagne prize, not a metaphorical one).

Hoping you’ve all had a lovely weekend, and wishing you all the best for the upcoming week.

Warmly,

Charlie

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter with its nose to the grindstone. The Easter Bunny truly did visit over the bank holiday: the first copies of Issue 27 are here, and we’re launching the issue on Thursday, and subscribers will be getting their copies on Friday.

Of course, now 27 is manifest, we begin to lay its successor on the chopping block, so do send your choicest cuts and viands to us on editorial@the-fence.com and remember that our guide remains in its usual spot.

Today, we’ve got an interview with Patrick Radden Keefe, whose new book, London Falling, is launching tomorrow. To see we’re excited would be something of an understatement. The original magazine piece, published in the New Yorker, proved such an inspiration to us that we published a ‘London Noir’ issue in the summer of 2024, which you can get a flavour of with Clive Martin’s walkabout feature ‘West End Confidential’. That issue has now sold out, but everyone who subscribes to The Fence’s print magazine today will receive a complimentary digital copy of Issue 20.

Sign Up Today

Let’s get on with it – here’s Patrick in conversation with the editor, Charlie Baker.

From Dorchester to Deptford

London Falling is, it goes without saying, a masterpiece. A novelistic study of parenthood, a portrait of the Anglo-Jewry, a fine-drawn sketch of teenage braggadocio, it also has perhaps the finest work of non-fiction about the London criminal classes, a milieu best known for their cinematic representations in Sexy Beast, The Long Good Friday and the various guilty pleasures that Guy Ritchie proffers.

The book tracks how a privately educated 19-year-old, Zac Brettler, came to be found dead on the bank of the River Thames, outside the luxury Vauxhall flat where a certain Verender Sharma had been in residence.

Sharma was a legendary ‘face’ in the London underworld, known as ‘Indian Dave’, a prolific extortionist and nightclub security ‘consultant’, who had been credibly linked to at least one homicide. He had, over the decades, worked alongside many of the country’s most infamous villains, all with nicknames straight from central casting – Gary ‘Tyson’ Nelson; Micky McAvoy, Dave ‘Muscles’ King and Andy ‘the Cornerman’ Baker (no relation).

Speaking to Keefe last week, I was fascinated to understand how he managed to penetrate the dark, dangerous London underworld.

It wasn’t easy to speak to fellow scribblers. ‘Apart from Michael Gillard, whose newsletter I subscribe to, and the late Duncan Campbell – the loveliest guy – there weren’t many journalists with the connections and expertise.’

And the police weren’t particularly helpful either, with Keefe speaking to 30 serving and former officers, hoping to find some copper for whom Sharma was a ‘white whale’, the one who got away, but that just wasn’t the case.

What made the difference was court reports, specifically relating to David ‘Muscles’ King, who was murdered, overwhelmingly likely on Sharma’s commission, in October 2003. In a process that took months, Keefe finally received PDFs of transcripts from a separate trial, which helped establish that Sharma had got the nod for the King assassination from none other than Mickey McAvoy, one of the architects of the Brinks Mat robbery of 1983.

The tabloids have been reporting on this story for over four decades, so it’s an astonishing scoop for Keefe to land, and one of the big reveals of the book.

Over visits to the UK over the last two years, Keefe interviewed many of Sharma’s fellow criminals, including the terrifying Andy Baker, who, among other ventures, was involved with running the door at Embargo, a Chelsea nightclub known for hosting Prince Harry and others over the years. As Keefe says, ‘There’s a fascinating intertwining between the licit and the illicit worlds in London. We’d like to think of these worlds as very discreet, but they intermingle the whole time.’

When the New Yorker long read dropped in February 2024, there was considerable consternation in the UK press about why the story had hitherto gone unreported. Why this happened – and how Keefe came to the story – are well-covered in the book, but there was one ripple in the British mediascape that the book details for the first time.

The former BBC investigative reporter, John Sweeney, had in his possession a photo of Zac’s corpse on the riverbank, which he broadcast to his 250,000 followers on Twitter the very day that the article was published. Zac’s father, Matthew Brettler, asked Sweeney to take it down, but he was refused, with the veteran hack replying that ‘it was now in the public domain.’ (Sweeney deleted the photo and apologised.)

American journalism is much better-resourced, with publications paying much more money and giving more space and time for features to be reported in-depth. What advice is there for young British journalists looking to score their first big byline?

Keefe advises that you attend inquests, ‘which are reserved for deaths that are unexplained or unnatural. You’re not always going to get a good story, but it’s a good place to start.’

Any other tips? What other London worlds are under-reported? Real estate, Keefe says. ‘There’s good stuff being done there, but there is space for more. You could take Ed Caesar’s approach to his Witanhurst piece. Start with a mysterious property that people are coming in and out of – and you’ve got a premise for a story.’

We look forward to seeing many of you loitering outside a gloomy north London mansion soon, and we trust that you will buy a copy of London Falling.

You can follow Charlie on Twitter here.

Our Man in Moscow

There’s a cracking read in the LRB on Christopher Steele, the former spy and author of the dodgy dossier about Donald Trump. Within the piece, Steele’s various ‘assertions’ and peripatetic business career are made to seem rather less sturdy than the Democratic Party was led to believe when they commissioned the infamous report. Within the business intelligence community in London, Steele’s reputation has been in freefall for years.

Steele’s lust for lucre is not exactly news to those of us working in the content mines. The former MI6 officer was approached for brief comment on a media project recently, and his representative mooted a four-figure sum to the production team. When this offer was countered, his agent replied: ‘Please. Christopher has school fees to pay.’

The Body of Christ Is a Labubu

In the meantime, the reading whistle can be whetted with Tommy Gilhooly’s latest venture into Soho, where he speaks to young people discovering God, published online this week. Fascinatingly, a lot of them are a lot more hardcore than their elders (or at least their millennials), going for the full kneeling and wafer-on-the-stuck-out-tongue shebang.

It digs into the strange world of the Challoner Club, ‘CatholicTok’ and the young Catholics who are pro-Benedict (yes, that’s right pro) and anti-Francis. It’s a great read and another reminder, if you need it, that Alex Christian is a phenomenal illustrator.

SAS SOS

Meanwhile, following news that Australia’s most-decorated living soldier has been charged with alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, we look back into the TF archive to coverage in Issue 5 of the Special Air Service (SAS). In Issue 5, we published an article written by a former Major about the troubling freedoms permitted to soldiers in the SAS. As described by the anonymous author, SAS recruits have ‘passed “selection” and [are] able to munch girders and slaughter enemies while opining on lacunae in Kant’s moral reasoning.’

The end of that piece commended Australian special forces commander Major Graham Adam Findlay for noting the damage done by ‘self-righteous entitled pricks who believed that the rules of the regular army did not apply to them.’ Would that his words had come sooner and been better heeded.

You can read the full piece here.

Up on Pendle Hill

Longtime readers will recall that in December of 2020, we raised more than £10,000 for St Matthew’s Church in Burnley, after a memorable appeal on the BBC from the vicar, Father Alex Frost.

Last week, a member of the editorial team was in Burnley, and stopped in to see Fr Alex. While St Matthew’s is flourishing, has the town recovered? Sadly, Father Alex believes that things have got worse, and is particularly worried about the pernicious influence of ketamine on Burnley’s young.

Do put away your preconceptions on the subject, and have a read of this article here, and this podcast, to delve in further. What is regarded as a fashionable party drug in the capital is having a devastating effect elsewhere.

It was a delight to see Father Alex again, seen here above the town.

In Case You Missed It

The lore-dropping art of Irish mothers.

The latest update on the stellar work of the Japanese ambassador to Jamaica.

A very Telegraph-coded listicle: the best church in each English county.

On that note, here is our editor-at-large, the Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, discussing the growing religious energy in Britain’s body politic with Jonathan Sumption and Tom Holland, hosted by the Spectator’s Lara Prendergast.

And Finally

We recently had the pleasure of watching a rather wonderful documentary – narrated by Laurie Anderson – about the female pioneers in electronic music called Sisters with Transistors. You can watch the trailer, to pique your interest, here. Two figures stood out in our minds and we’ve spent all week just itching to tell people about them. What a happy chance that the sign-off to this newsletter is so well disposed.

The first of these is Wendy Carlos, a true trailblazer and individual in many ways. She was very early to the rise of electronic music. She studied music composition at Colombia and soon found herself fascinated with it, assisting Leonard Bernstein in an evening of electronic music and soon after meeting one Robert Moog, the man who gave his name to the synthesiser that proved a huge leap forward for the artform. You can see her demonstrating how to use it here.

But Carlos is much more than just a composer. She is, for example, a successful photographer of solar eclipses, whose work has been published several times by NASA. She also underwent, and later openly discussed, her gender transition, which began around 1968 under the personal care of Harry Benjamin, the author of the seminal work The Transsexual Phenomenon was the first to treat transness as something to do with how the body functions, rather than as a psychological issue.

She later spoke about these experiences, and many others, in an interview with Playboy – whose published some actually quite phenomenal writing at the time – but for years afterwards she was much shyer about public appearances. Indeed, one method she used to disguise her transition were the striking, and entirely fake, sideburns she sports in the above video. Carlos would also win one of the stranger lawsuits we’ve come across related to the topic – Scottish artist Momus wrote a song called Walter Carlos which included these lyrics:

And when travelling through time is possible

Wendy can enter a wormhole

And go back to the future to marry Walter

A few baroque summers earlier

A couple of models of Moog back in time

Carlos sued him, and ended up winning a $30,000 out of court settlement. Momus would make up the money by offering to write 30 custom songs for people, at a grand a pop.

The other figure is Wiltshire’s own Daphne Oram, a co-founder of the legendary BBC Radiophonic Workshop that, in better times, provided us with such classics as the Doctor Who theme tune and all the sumptuous sound effects in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Oram herself was behind the electronic parts of the Dr No soundtrack, though she was never credited for the work. There’s a great bit of archive footage of her explaining how she sees electronic music, and if that isn’t enough, there was a whole radio documentary about her titled Wee Have Also Sound Houses. Happy listening folks.

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That’s it, the last newsletter released under the powerful aegis of Issue 26. 27 beckons: ominous, imposing and carrying jokes about Penelope Wilton. We are all very, very excited. There’s not much else to say except to hit you emails akimbo at the death: it’s editorial@the-fence.com and support@the-fence.com. Their functions are deeply eponymous. Simon Bolívar was buried in a borrowed shirt.

All the best,

TF

Good Afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter capable of looking behind the horizon.

We hope you have those watches set, the new issue draws nearer and nearer. To push that new-issue fever through the end of the thermometer, we are prepared to declassify a trio of pieces: Lauren Cochrane, senior fashion writer at the Guardian, remembers the life of legendary designer Pam Hogg; Will Kaye tells of how his first flat in London was cuckooed by drug dealers; John Banville and his daughter Ellen Quinn Banville pay homage to a legendary Dublin eatery. And, of course, John Niven and Sophie Heawood have their first pieces in the mag. We told you, this one’s a pearler.

There are no new photos of 26 to speak of, and that is indeed well, because we have our winner. There were some very strong contenders: we greatly enjoyed this fine feline who was indeed ‘On The Fence’, as well as this beautiful scene from Britain’s 5th best county (Cornwall). The unnerving mystery behind this photo intrigued us for some time, until we conclusively proved, and can now reveal, that it was actually taken in Telford.

But the cream of the winter crop was, as so many of the best things are, made in China. Hugo Gye’s photo from the Forbidden City in Beijing is simply a beauty and proves definitively that The Fence is more interesting and beautiful than the ancient palaces of China. If only Matthias Clottu could have designed them too.

We’re also taking inspiration from our American brethren who are nearing the end of their annual college basketball phenomenon known as ‘March Madness’. Predictably, the name is nonsense, as its most important games happen in April. In this spirit, we offer a final few March discount tokens. MARCH20 at the checkout will give you 20 percent off a subscription, that’s print, digital or both. But we have only printed ten of these, and this deal will end at midnight tonight, so do snaffle them rapido.

April Absurdity

Well then, let’s get into this, shall we? We’ve got some great viewing for you this week, alongside a look at the latest addition to the modern trend of performers becoming statesmen that Ronny ‘Teflon’ Reagan made so cool all those years ago. But first, we begin with a tribute to a real friend.

Style on Style on Style

It is a real shame, no, a genuine disaster, to see The Face shutter its doors after a second coming. Not only was the format, tone, identity and very name an inspiration for The Fence, but they were possibly the very first UK publication to give a tip of the cap to us, commissioning our editor and the editor-at-large to write a dispatch from Frieze Week in a ‘TF-off’, which comes with a superb set of photos from Alexander Coggin.

Many favourites from our own pages appeared there too, as have many staffers over the years. Under the aegis of the charming and talented (and, yes, very handsome) Matthew Whitehouse, it published brilliant pieces from across the British Isles and beyond.

It should have prospered, not least in the current necrotic mediascape. Why it failed to flourish from a business standpoint, we are sure will be covered elsewhere, and in due course.

But for now, we want to raise a glass to all those involved with The Face, and wish them the best with all future endeavours.

Doing the Civil Unrest Skank

The ongoing situation in Iran will be dominating our news feeds for the foreseeable. But the Fencey eye is keen and irreverent, so we’ve been paying attention to Nepal instead. Why? Because they have just elected and now sworn in a new PM, Balendra Shah, a man who has been a part of the Nepali underground hip-hop scene since the early 2010s.

The social and political themes of his music lead to a run for Mayor of Kathmandu, which he won as an independent in 2022. The next breakthrough moment came with Nepal’s Gen Z protests in 2025. Organised online, they were youth-focused and led, and part of a new global phenomenon. Morocco has its Gen Z 212 movement, the number a reference to the country’s area code, and similar uprisings have been seen in Bangladesh, Kenya, Indonesia, Philippines, Timor-Leste and the Maldives.

They seem to be surprisingly effective. In Morocco, the country’s still-influential king, Mohammed VI, came out to pressure the government to address the problems of poor healthcare and youth unemployment that drove the movement. Likewise in Kenya, the protests led Kenyan President William Ruto to veto the highly unpopular finance bill that sparked the unrest.

None, however, can be seen as more initially successful than those in Nepal, which actually brought down the reigning government and the elections that have swept Balendra Shah to power. Perhaps part of the force of these protests has been the genuine risk involved for its participants, who have not baulked from violent unrest including rioting, arson and stone throwing. Morocco’s protests saw 3 people killed, 28 injured and over 400 arrests among the protestors, with over 300 security personnel injured alongside them. Nepal’s protestors suffered more heavily, with over 2000 injuries and 76 deaths reported.

It’s quite a stark comparison to the footage coming out of the most recent wave of the ‘No Kings’ protests and the recent anti-far right protests in London. These affairs drew large crowds and boisterous atmospheres but a notable lack of conviction. There was footage of protestors forcing open the gates to an ICE detention facility only to sort of stand around outside and then move back when the bully boys turned up. Likewise, the ‘House Against Hate’ event in Trafalgar Square (ft. MC Zacky P) feels a world away from burning cars in the streets; basically an excuse to have a good time in the name of activism. We need elaborate no further on this dance re-enactment of the shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

This is not a TF call for armed revolution, but from a pure performance review standpoint, you’d have to say a few lessons could be learned from the hardier set of protestors around the world. You can see this in some incredible footage of Nepal’s protests which actually come from a YouTuber called Harry Jackson, who simply happened to be travelling through the country when it all kicked off. His footage and conversations are absolutely fascinating, if not especially fun.

So which way will Nepal’s new MC PM take them? A lot of people have been quick to see the move as positive, shaking up a corrupt party system and bringing in an anti-establishment candidate. But the picture is not so clear. One of the better pieces on it was actually penned by a writer who featured in our own Capital Letter not too long ago, one Norpell Wilberforce. As he points out, the crushing of the traditional parties at the ballot box has not removed two of the key power brokers in the country: the army and the police.

And Balendra Shah looks like an unlikely candidate to contain them. He is an inexperienced figure, and during his tenure as Kathmandu’s mayor was criticised by domestic and international watchdogs for using excessive police force to evict informal squatters and street vendors. Observers should watch whether he will make transparent the large-scale infrastructural contracts that previous administrations gave to the army. Indeed, Nepalis may come to see the departure of Sushila Karki, the former interim PM, as a sliding doors moment when they lost a more experienced, redoubtable candidate. You can read Norpell’s full piece in The Wire here.

Whatever his premiership produces for Nepal, Balendra Shah’s election has placed him in a unique category of Premiers who have released post-election singles. Please, no one show this to Kier Starmer.

Nice Nice, Very Nice

The very nice people at It’s Nice That have just this morning published this piece by Olivia Hingley about… US! Talking to our editor and art director they have dug into what makes The Fence, The Fence. Basically, it’s a good amount of clever thievery which we’re very proud of indeed. The piece is full of insights into where all sorts of our trademarks come from which we’re sure will interest you. And they say some very sweet things about us too, we’re blushing.

It might perhaps encourage you to keep supporting this mag, given it is so lovely (a peer reviewed opinion). If you’ve been teetering on the edge of buying a subscription, why not teeter off of it? The recent print semi-revival is driven solely by support and interest from people such as yourselves and, as the newsletter has already had to lament, the continued operation of good magazines is never a given. Those tokens are so, so active right now.

Be Sweet To Us

How to Get on in Society

Speaking of cool and stylish offices, we are absolutely transfixed by the engagement videos coming out of the Sheerluxe hub. Here, they celebrate the fourth set of pending nuptials this very year, and with coffee and an unopened bottle of Lady Bamford’s rosé wine. Do you know anyone who has worked at the SL offices? We are all ears at editorial@the-fence.com.

King of Saxony, Bird of Paradise

‘Why does the van need maintenance?’

‘Because we put 30,000 miles on it.’

‘Why did we put 30,000 miles on it?’

‘Because we’re trying to find as many birds as we can.’

‘Why are we trying to find as many birds as we can?’

‘That I don’t know.’

So begins Listers, a bizarre and fascinating documentary on the extremes of birdwatching. It’s not a word usually associated with ‘extremes’ of any kind, which is why this is such a brilliant topic. Two brothers going around the states, going to all lengths to achieve what is known as a ‘big year’ in birding circles, an effort to see as many US birds in one calendar year as possible. If your eyes are tiring of the regular media parade, this is a welcome break.

In Case You Missed It

An excerpt from a 1926 edition of the Baltimore Sun.

This 1974 Japanese TV show had a villain for one episode called ‘Starfish Hitler’.

An interesting perspective on the ‘Middle East crisis’ from Cambridge Professor Andrew Arsan.

The New Yorker interviewed John Lithgow.

Big Narstie does Tai Chi and speaks Chinese.

And Finally

In the coming issue, we’ve had a think about some so-called ‘endangered species’, types of people and things you just don’t see these days. And though they couldn’t fit into the piece (for reasons that will become clear when you receive/buy your copy), old-school vaudeville variety acts have got to be on there as either ‘Critically Endangered’ or ‘Extinct In The Wild’ (to use the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s official categories).

Of those acts, Frank ‘Cannonball’ Richards has got to be one of the most incredible. Frank’s talent was simple: you could hit him as hard as you like, and he could take it, seemingly without any serious pain or damage.

The peak of Richard’s prowess was his infamous cannonball trick (yes, that is where he got the name from, although a source close to TF’s grandad said he also loved jumping into swimming pools), where he would simply stand in front of a cannon and take the full force of a 47-kilogram cannonball. Insane. This was a stunt recreated by Preston Lacy for one of the Jackass films. Crucially, however, where Lacy did it once for the cameras, Richards was doing it twice a day at the peak of his career. He limited it there because apparently doing it three times a day would have been ‘too painful’.

When he wasn’t getting walloped by a device used to blow up ships and castle walls, he wasn’t exactly relaxing either. Other more standard stunts included getting repeatedly punched in the stomach by all of the day’s best heavyweights, such as Jack Dempsey, having troops of people jump on his belly, and taking sledgehammer blows to his solar plexus. Predictably, taking all this punishment took its toll on Richards in the end. Just kidding, he died aged 81, having been born in 1887, a year when the average life expectancy for newborns was in the mid-40s. They just do not build them like that any more.

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Well shit, piss and all things Swiss, that’s the end of another week’s events from our vantage point. Do remember to score one of those last remaining cut-price subs as we won’t be repeating the offer for months, if not years. As ever those email addresses are editorial@the-fence.com for editorial needs and support@the-fence.com for support needs (non-emotional unless it’s urgent). Mumbai was originally seven islands before the completion of a series of land reclamation projects in 1845.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s been written today on an iPhone, as we’re at Studio Mathias Clottu, sending Issue 27 to print, proofreading with pencils in hand. Is it the best one we’ve ever done, you ask? Yes, it definitely is, a veritable slammer of an issue, and we look forward to telling you all about it in due course.

This is your last call to make sure that your address is correctly updated on your account on our website. If you’re not yet a subscriber, there is a final sprinkling of tokens giving you 20 per cent off a year’s subscription, that’s print, digital or both. The code is MARCH20 – this generous offer will not be repeated soon.

Sign Up While You Can

Capital Letter sprinkled some Haslam energy with its latest outing. What are London’s coolest restaurants? You can find out here.

And will you look at this, The Pub, our beautiful book about the pub, is in prime position at Piccadilly Waterstones, in what the booksellers should really call ‘the banter basement’. What a joy.

To business, albeit with a shorter outing.

Back on the Beat

James Sharp is one of the remaining court reporters in this country. He recounts an average day here – which includes an encounter with a former Arsenal footballer with a short temper.

A Bigger Splash

We’re absolutely delighted to see John Banville’s outstanding feature on his days as a subeditor syndicated in Harper’s. It’s the second time we’ve had the honour – the first time was a few years back, in Issue 11, when Jamie Fewery wrote a cacklingly funny insider view on the 50 Shades of Grey mania.

Six Years On

While many of us have tried to memory-hole the pandemic, others are not so fortunate. Ted Monroe writes beautifully here about living with Long COVID as a young man, and the trials that brings.

It’s a Dog’s Life

In the splashiest fashion news since Johnathan Anderson’s Dior debut Vogue (high fashion publication) is suing Dogue (canine fashion publication) over trademark infringement. Dogue, whose most recent issue featured a Bichon Frisé sporting a Gucci print collar is being accused by Vogue’s (whose April issue stars Doja Cat in Saint Laurent suiting) publisher Condé Nast of clearly trying to confuse consumers with their logo, which they claim is ‘obviously intended’ to suggest a relationship between the two. Olga Portnaya, the creator and EIC of Dogue, is gamely taking on the fashion behemoth despite her far smaller operation with 25 issues to date and a circulation of less than 100, as the 37 brand publisher claims Dogue is ‘likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably’. As Portnaya’s lawyer David A. Makman told the NYT ‘My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models’, continuing, ‘I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference’.

In Case You Missed It

Sean Penn is given an ‘Oscar’ made of rail metal by the Ukrainians.

Al Purdy reads his poem ‘At the Quinte Hotel’

Andrew O’Hagan is obviously very, very good on Prince Andrew.

And Finally

You all know that we have a special fondness for words, text and the physical act of being in pubs, but these clips from an old Sky One programme called Britain’s Toughest Pubs are objectively stellar. The first takes place on the Isle of Man in a pub called The Heron, which bills itself as a bastion of pro-Manx (i.e. anti-everyone) sentiment. It’s a seriously hard boozer. There’s a bloke with a ‘Love/Hate’ knuckle tattoo ala Do The Right Thing (or originally Night of the Hunter for all you film neeks out there), and the patrons hatred of ‘come-overs’, those moving to the island for work, is fierce, matched only by their nostalgic longing for the punitive wonders that were worked by the birch before ‘some do-gooder in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights stopped them doing it, and that’s where all the trouble started’.

The Sky cameramen’s work may not be high art, but they knew their job well on this one. As a local tells us his thoughts, we have a close up of what may be the world’s flattest, tiredest-looking dog, gently stepped over by a drinker on his way for a piss. One local’s self-description of the Isle of Man as ‘72,000 alcoholics clinging to a fucking rock’ is excellent work, and would have made our Ceremonial Counties list if the island’s Manx population weren’t as fiercely anti-everyone, but there we are.

Perhaps even better is their dispatch from the Granite City from a place called Peep Peeps Bar. It is a misleadingly cute name for a small bolthole located very close to a local redlight district. It’s a place that’s all about its landlord, Chris Cummings, one of those special old-style publicans who are fundamentally happiest when there’s absolutely no one in their pub. There are signs reading ‘no cheques changed, even good ones’, and everything has been left exactly as it was when Chris first started. This includes a drinks board which he refuses to change the lettering on, preferring instead to remind inquirers that ‘there’s nae Babycham, there’s nae fucking wine… what a heap of shite.’

Needless to say, this wasn’t Sky’s most PC piece of programming, and the respective hardness of the pubs has likely been amped up for the cameras and heightened in the edit, so take that in your stride. All the same, both clips are fundamentally compelling viewing.

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That’s that for this week, and we’ll be back with a full-length outing for all you freeloaders next Tuesday. Remember that there are some discount subs to be had here. Between the years 2015-2022, only 28 children in the UK were given the name ‘Nigel’.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows how to have a good time. We continue to wade our way through the editorial-design-flatpan puzzle matrix as the push to bring you the shiny next issue of The Fence enters its final furlong. We hope you have taken up the poll position by your letterboxes and are getting ready.

Despite all of this busyness, the business of The Fence rolls on: we have now joined LinkedIn. Do please join us there. LinkedIn is known for being a mediocre platform full of peer-pressured self-promotion; we have plans to brighten it up a touch and (hopefully) unseat our Australian rivals. And speaking of social media, we have just posted our most popular post in some time on Instagram.

We’re glad to see that readers are continuing to flock to Nuneaton with the issue, given how lovely the sea is there at this time of year. This is the last chance to enter the competition; we will announce the winner of the fizz next week!

And, just because we are so generous, we’re rolling out a few more tokens for subscriptions to the mag. If you are weighing up whether to go for one of these, as we suspect a few of you might be, let this be your sign from the universe. Enter MARCH20 to get a full 20 per cent off at checkout. There are only five of these newbies minted so do move fast, and remember they apply to print, digital and gift subscriptions.

Twenty's Plenty

Most excitingly, after over 130 people applied for the role, we’re delighted to welcome Rachel Dastgir as our new editorial assistant. Exciting times.

This week, we have a history of Oscars no-shows and some stories you might have missed from the ongoing ‘situation’. But we get the ball rolling with a short piece about a master strategist.

He Loves a Cadbury’s Creme Egg

Gerry Adams is back in the High Court this week in defence of a claim brought by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, injured respectively by the IRA bombings at the Old Bailey in 1973, the London Docklands and Manchester in 1996. Acting for the claimants – who are seeking £1 each in ‘vindicatory’ damages – Anne Studd KC said their focus is ‘to prove on balance of probabilities that [Adams] was so intrinsically involved [in the IRA]’ that he was ‘as culpable for the assaults giving rise to these claims as the individuals who planted and detonated the bombs.’

Adams is on a reputational run of form, having defeated the BBC in a 2025 libel action (represented by Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Paul Tweed – Hi again Paul!) concerning an allegation that he sanctioned the killing of MI5 informant Denis Donaldson in 2006. The current High Court case offers Adams further reputational vindication, with the chance to lay the ‘ad nauseam’ IRA membership question to rest once and for all. Adams has always maintained a separation between the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’, distinguishing his role in the republican leadership as purely political.

Post-Good Friday Agreement, Adams has cultivated a fluffy image in the social media age culminating in The Negotiator’s Cookbook – a recipe book co-authored with prominent republicans Ted Howell and Pádraic Wilson – and My Little Book of Tweets, featuring a selfie of Adams and a goat on its front cover. Online, Adams recently announced his support for the English rugby team, and also entered a competition to win a Stone Island jacket.

Nevertheless, a polished media persona does not always translate to the witness box, as was apparent from Adams’ oral testimony in the criminal case against his brother, Liam, convicted in 2013 of raping and sexually abusing his daughter, Áine, over a six-year period beginning when she was just four years old. In a notably bizarre interaction during Adams’ cross-examination, Judge Philpott observed that he was taking notes, prompting Adams to claim he was ‘doodling’, to which Philpott instructed, ‘It would be better if you don’t.’ Adams then admitted, ‘When I say I’m doodling, I have written down one or two bits, yeah.’

During cross-examination Ms McDermott QC sought to establish that in an interview for UTV’s Insight programme in 2009 – in which Áine exposed her father’s abuse – Gerry lied that his brother Liam had left Northern Ireland after the family confronted him in 1987 about the abuse and lied that Liam was ‘out of [his] life more or less for about the next 15 years.’ Accordingly to Ms McDermott QC, save for a few short trips to Spain, Liam remained in Northern Ireland; kept in contact with Gerry; stood for nomination as a Sinn Féin candidate in 1997; lived with Gerry for six weeks in 1998; worked at youth clubs in Gerry’s constituency from 1998 into the noughties; and confessed his abuse to Gerry in 2000.

Ms McDermott QC put it to the witness that – while he had spoken to the police about his brother’s abuse in 2007 and 2009 – he did not report the specifics of Liam’s 2000 confession until just four days before he provided oral evidence to the Crown Court in April 2013. In an interview that year, Áine – who refers to Gerry as ‘The Beard’ – claimed her uncle ‘wanted to obtain a court injunction with my help to stop the story’ of her father’s abuse. ‘He said he needed to make sure it didn’t get into the press to protect me. Looking back, he was buttering me up. It was all about PR and his own image.’

I Couldn’t Possibly

Sean Penn deferred accepting his Oscar on Sunday to Kieran Culkin, preferring to be in Ukraine, according to sources at the NYT. Although said sources didn’t elaborate further, Penn is known to be prone to activism as well as vocal supporter of Zelensky’s, to whom he gave his last Oscar so it could be ‘melted down’ for bullets, naturally. Brad Pitt also missed it in what’s become a pattern for the actor, who spent the 2017 Oscars ‘holed up creating a sculpture’ in L.A.’s Frogtown district, not wanting to disturb his flow, having been ‘at it for nearly 10 days’.

Penn’s absence got us reminiscing about previously standout Academy no-shows. Marlon Brando comes out of the gate as the most notable – correctly assuming his Oscar was a cinch for The Godfather, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to reject it on his behalf in protest of Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans and to draw attention to the ongoing standoff at Wounded Knee. Lesser known instances include both Anthony Hopkins and Eminem missing out on the fanfare because they were asleep, Paul Newman as he was wearied by it all after seven nominations and Michael Caine due to a scheduling conflict with filming of Jaws: The Revenge, saying later, ‘I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible.’

He Ran Iran

The current war on Iran, as with all big political stories these days, is developing at lightning speed, which means you may well have missed some truly fascinating aspects of the conflict. One such item concerns the sudden death of Ayatollah Khamenei. Speaking to Gideon Rachman at the FT, Sir Simon Gass, a former UK ambassador to Iran, pointed out an unusual factor in this death. During previous attacks on Iran, Khamenei was moved to a bunker, as happened in June last year. This was notably not the case this time round.

Exactly why this is the case is hard to tell. One line (that paints Khamenei in a gleaming light) is that he simply refused to do so, apparently saying to his security detail that if ‘you can provide safe shelters for the 19 million citizens of Tehran, then I am ready to leave my house and move to another place.’ Though the credibility of this is not rock solid, Gass was willing to suggest that a version of this might be the case. Khamenei was, of course, 87 and rumoured not to be in the greatest of health, and Gass suggested he might have made a conscious decision to call time on his leadership, knowing the value of being ‘martyred’ for the regime’s symbolism and certain of his son’s ascension to his vacant seat.

Inevitably, this is not an easy story to be sure of, but if it is the case, the Americans’ miscalculation about the efficacy of ‘decapitating’ the regime may have been even greater than it first appeared. The US is getting embroiled in another seemingly disastrous war in the Middle East and The Simpsons’ Ayatollah joke still works.

Call me a Cannonball

We’re delighted to have Naomi Wood in the fiction slot of the current issue, and her piece is one of the more inventive and amusing ones of recent vintage. Naomi is the author of quite a few books and an associate professor of creative writing at UEA so you can trust that you’re in good hands. It’s now available on the website for you all to enjoy.

Archive Jewels

Congratulations to Natalie Berry, whose cover story from Issue 22, ‘In The Shadow of the Mountain’, has been longlisted by AIPS Sport Media Awards, having already been featured by longreads and listed as a finalist in the Banff Mountain Book Competition. It’s a truly incredible story about a mother and son who were avid mountaineers both of whom would sadly meet their end on separate expeditions, 24 years and 100 miles apart.

It reminds us of the many great pieces floating around our archive which you should absolutely read or re-read as the agonising wait of the new issue reaches its apotheosis.

How about our own editor-at-large’s piece on the charms, and money-laundering capacities, of the Czech spa town Karlovy Vary? We might also recommend any one of these three excellent pieces from around the UK: a dispatch from an anonymous clinician in an asylum hotel, a profile of The Rose Hotel in Dalston and another anonymous work by a working-class escort and their London clients. And, in bringing up sex, we have to mention David Whitehouse’ s truly insane story of his time working for an early sexting service on the day of 9/11. It was the busiest day they ever had.

On Box Hill

Rolling Stone’s UK offshoot is known for its late payments of freelancers, as Private Eye and others have documented. The publication is part of Stream Publishing, which also publishes Attitude magazine, and is located, we recently learned, in the non-metropolitan environs of the Surrey Hills, in between a paintballing complex and a business called ‘Pigsty Racing’.

We have been told that the magazine mini-empire is headquartered there so as to be convenient for the CEO, Darren Styles, who, judging from his Instagram feed, seems to be having a jolly old time in the country.

Castletown Diaries

It’s that day again: a global excuse to get drunk all in the name of a vaguely remembered Catholic saint and do all sorts of stupid shit like dying an entire river green. There is definitively nothing interesting to say about St Patrick’s Day. But, it is a chance for us to recommend more of Francis ‘The Viper’ Higgins’ work, so here it is, a video titled, simply, ‘st. patrick’.

Mi Casa, Su Casa

With the holidays around the corner you might want to check out Clanmark.

It’s a private marketplace for people who trust each other, somewhat like a clan. To join, you need to be sponsored by two existing members. No strangers, no scams.

Among other things, there are stunning small and large holiday homes, at prices cheaper than elsewhere. This is because you deal directly with the owners: no agents are involved.

To join, head to clanmark.com/signup. If you don’t know anyone on there yet, you can request co-founders Luke Birch and Remy Astie as your sponsors, and they’ll let you on as long as you say please.

If you haven’t planned an Easter break – or a post-April getaway – now’s the chance.

If you would like to place an advert with us, please contact cb@the-fence.com for further details. There are 60,000 eyeballs reading this newsletter, would you believe it.

In Case You Missed It

‘Bengali Gordon Ramsay.’

We recall N+1’s editorial on LLM’s which takes aim at the bots and those who write about them.

If you want to feel dropped into the middle of some NYC chaos, look no further.

An Italian raver goes out in style.

Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown plays the singing violin in ‘Leftover Blues’.

A 1985 large-scale gymnastics event in a strange display of Czechoslovakian propaganda.

And Finally

We’ve checked. We really have. As far as we can tell, this built-to-scale cat town, now with a functioning metro, is not AI. Which means we can happily recommend it to you here.

This is the work of Xing Zhilei, a Chinese man who has spent the last few years steadily expanding a project that puts Britain’s model villages to shame. Alongside the recently opened subway station, he’s built jewellery stores, a McDonald’s, a cinema, a snooker room and a garden paradise. The home he has built for his cat also has running water and a functioning cooker.

What marks Xing’s work out is the scope and scale of the creativity. By all means make a shop, make a house – those are gimmes. But a subterranean level of tunnels functionally moving water around to house a hamster and his dojo? To think that up and then build it is exactly the kind of nonsense this section of the newsletter was designed for.

So who is the man behind this excellent use of life’s brief spark? Currently, his online footprint (outside of his own content) is strangely limited. Online statistics trackers place his estimated earnings within the sharply defined boundaries of $37K - $586K a year, so we can safely say he earns an amount of money. His original idea was to build a mini-home for his young children. Having done that, and going predictably viral, he got a good reason to carry on when his wife opened up a pet shop. Xing seized on the opportunity and built a similar home for the cats (Mr Nice and Ting Hao) in the shop.

There is something rather wonderful about this piece of generational online content being both not AI-generated and also made by someone with a relatively limited online presence beyond said content. Perhaps there is a link: how many potential cat towns have we lost to the cold hyper-stimulating embrace of the doomscroll? We’re certain it would have claimed many a redoubtable freak, from the baked bean merch collector to the railway vicar. We’re glad this one slipped through the net.

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Aaaaaaaand breathe out. Another week comes to an end, by our reckoning. We do hope the coming days treat you nicely before we meet again. A reminder of those juicy discount tokens and that we are always reachable on editorial@the-fence.com, or on support@the-fence.com if your problem is technical. Every human who has ever lived would fit in the Grand Canyon.

All the best,

TF

Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s twice-fried and then coated in sugar. We’ve spent the week finalising copy and perusing the flatplans and initial designs for the oncoming storm that is Issue 27. We’re really excited about this and as a fun, entirely pointless and indecipherable teaser, here are all of the writers initialled and slammed together: RMIWSHJBEQBLBAJNWKSHLBLCFMPJAELLHTM. You’re welcome.

The issue has been spotted as ever all over the shop. It was seen in sunny ‘Nuneaton’, and protecting Albion’s shores and also in WH Smith in Wimbledon, would you believe it.

We are entering last chance saloon for the photo contest, any picture with the mag out and about and sent into editorial@the-fence.com could put you in the running to win a lovely bottle of something sparkling.

The impending issue reminds us to remind you to subscribe, not least because the magazines are set to go from strength to strength. Our two new columnists – John Banville and Sophie Heawood – are getting stuck in from 27 on, and Cormac Kehoe’s investigative work – who’s just become a Tenacious Journalism award winner – is soon to give us scoops on scoops on scoops.

We have printed another ten tickets, giving you 20 per cent off for a year’s subscription. All you need to do is enter the code MARCH20 at checkout. It applies to print, digital and both, and to gift subscriptions too. Only ten available.

Sign Up Quick

This week we brighten the spotlight on a nasty classical music gossiper and celebrate the return of a northern hero.

Out of Joint

Classical music is a world that does seem willing to ‘hold space’ for elders with incredibly sharp tongues. We heard tale recently from some hardened concerteers about the brutal words that came with their early training days.

One cellist remembered his Russian teacher fondly for asking him – at the tender age of eight – the following question: ‘Tell me what’s best. Should I fall asleep when you play, or should I kill myself? At least with the latter I wouldn’t have to hear you play again.’ A pianist recalled his teacher (also Russian) asking him the deeply un-PC question ‘David, why are you playing like a spastic?’ before turning to the child’s mother, sat next to her on the sofa, and saying, ‘Don’t you agree?’

And yet this world was recently at the heart of an overlooked Beeb scandal involving the comically named Norman Lebrecht. He’s long been an arch-nemesis for many musos who detest his gossip-font Slippedisc which boasts a supposed two million visitors a month. Needless to say the fire behind the sophisticate’s Daily Mail is much the same as the fire behind the regular Daily Mail: scandal, polemic and sleaze. Headlines include ‘Name an Italian symphonist – go on, just one’; ‘An orchestra chairman parades his prejudices’; ‘Colorado pianist kills three’; and ‘How Andris Nelsons told musicians he’d been sacked’, which was appears to be just a screenshot of the email Nelsons had sent to his colleagues.

It is a truly bizarre WordPress cesspit including amongst itself an agony aunt column (occasionally misspelled agony aun’t) which Lebrecht places in a ‘Daily Comfort Zone’ section. It contains strange advice and stranger quips. One such column, correctly advising someone not to try and prevent their ex coming to their school, ended with the strange note that ‘life is full of strange things’ and that the complainer should be glad that ‘at least you aren’t cousins’. Thanks Norman!

The recent fallout came with the BBC’s decision to hire Norman to do a series of high-profile interviews for Radio 3, a station he’s been broadcasting on and off with for 25 years. One of the stars he was set to talk to was Yuja Wang, a brilliant pianist who frequently draws ire from classical music’s near non-existent coterie of reactionaries for her audacious outfits. Lebrecht, predictably, is one and these, and has written some truly vile copy about Wang over the years including this piece for The Critic.

When Wang decided she’d rather not speak to the author of such a piece, he emailed her personally to say he was ‘surprised and disappointed’ and that he thought she was ‘a serious person’ but would now ‘revise that opinion’. Wang then promptly posted the email to her Instagram and Lebrecht no longer had a gig at the Beeb. It is a long-overdue decision, and will hopefully give Lebrecht time to focus on his busy schedule at Slippedisc where he frequently publishes up to eight articles a day, all written by himself.

Chillin’ on a Villain

Who here remembers James Stunt? A ludicrously colourful figure, who gave bombastic interviews, the former Mr Petra Ecclestone claimed to be crime lord Terry Adams’ godson. But was there any truth to this particular morsel? Michael Gillard has the whole story, and it brings together a cast of characters very much like a Guy Ritchie caper – press barons, mobsters, heiresses, etc. After you’ve read it, do dive into the feature he wrote for us in Issue 12, concerning a civil service mandarin with a taste for BDSM.

Bring out the Banns

As some of you recall, we measured up the heights of male journalists back in Christmas 2023, for no particular reason other than we thought it was quite funny, not least to cut down some of the heights. Well, the tabulator herself, Róisín Lanigan, married one of the entrants, Jacob Furedi, this past weekend. As Róisín writes, ‘negging works’ – one of the happiest moments in The Fence’s seven-year history.

Our Beau at the Ball

Sex clubs are not quite what they used to be, that is they are increasingly popular, just a little more mainstream, and, according to Karl, founder of Klub Verboten, the sex isn’t as complex as it used to be. Dan Beaumont – DJ and the founder of Dalston Superstore – spoke to Karl and a fellow sex club promoter Eden Topall-Rabanes in Issue 26 to uncover what is attracting people to club spaces where fucking on the dancefloor is the purpose of your visit, not simply a tawdry example of the prank generation. He uncovered a fascinating world of human connection, rules (‘Don’t Have A Solo Wank’) and of course ‘undulating arses on either side of me [that] made my exit feel like a Marina Abramović installation.’

Don’t be shy now, read it here.

She Walks in Beauty

A shout-out to a friend of TF, Katy Hessel, whose new book, The Story of Art Without Men: An Illustrated Guide to Amazing Women Artists, is out now, and you can get your copy here.

Overflowing with gorgeous illustrations by Ping Zhu, it’s sure to get kids – and parents – off their iPads.

Plus, don’t miss her monthly newsletter for the best art-centred content around… Sign up here.

Lubbly Jubbly

You know when a trend gets taken up by a politician, that it automatically dies. Step forward ‘Londonmaxxing’, which died this weekend when Sadiq Khan – not an unambiguously successful mayor of the city, as we and others have pointed out – changed his Twitter Bio (itself a deeply embarrassing thing to do in The Year of Our Lord 2026) to say ‘Londonmaxxing since 2016’. What is, or perhaps was, Londonmaxxing? Examples of it from social media apparently include posting photos of Canary Wharf that make it look like Dubai (minus the drone strikes), using the tube and going to Gordon’s Wine Bar. So far, so depressing. But of course, that isn’t to say there aren’t interesting or cool or inspiring things going on in London. We have been pointing them out for several years now.

The problem is that anyone using the phrase Londonmaxxing is most likely not going to be the person who can point you in their direction. If you want the real version of the trend, and the actual places to go, then you could do a lot worse than subscribe to our zoom in on London, the Capital Letter. It’s free, it’s sexy and – barring legal action – it will almost certainly never appear in a politician’s social media bio. Subscribe here.

In Case You Missed It

A very enjoyable piece by Sarah Simpkin, regarding film set trailer decor.

Veronica Horwell celebrates the life of the legendary journalist, Drusilla Beyfus, who has died at the age of 98.

Helen Mirren and Vin Diesel smoulder.

A great piece of recent London history on one of the best Instagram accounts around.

A group of young kestrels reacting to a butterfly is about as wonderful as it sounds.

Another tribute to Palmerston (cat). What a great cat he was.

Henry Mance meets Lord Mancroft for lunch at Bellamy’s.

The Times’ piece on Paul Bremer’s time running Iraq for the Bush administration is really quite something.

A happy, if belated, World Seagrass Day to all.

And Finally

We won’t pretend to be original with this one. It’s Gordon Ramsay. He has, of course, been parading around our screens for some time, shouting at people, pretending to be nice to people, cooking things, eating things, etc. He is so media perennial that the man has even prompted someone to create this visceral animation of his rage.

But if there is one chip off the Gordo mountain that we keep returning to, it’s this seemingly banal burger tutorial he once made for Good Morning America. It’s fascinating because it is a total car-wreck of incomprehensible Gordonspeak (odd stresses, syntax, vocab) and bad editing in the attempt to make it look like one, on-the-fly take.

It starts strong with Gordon intro-ing us with the phrase ‘welcome home’ (???), which is quickly followed by a slew of misspeech, mostly centred around a Joycean refusal to give the word ‘burger’ a definite article: ‘the secret of burger’, ‘once you put burger on the grill, the secret is to move it as less possible’; ‘ preparing everything beforehand stops the burger going cold and you want to eat it when it’s piping hot!’ He also confidently tells us that you cannot season a burger after it is cooked before throwing handfuls of salt at his flaming grill as if the devil had finally moved from behind your shoulder to under your coals.

Then there’s the sudden apparition of three new burgers around four and a half minutes in, and an entirely overwrought ‘assembly’ section where Rambo loses all sense of what the words ‘in’, ‘down’, or ‘on’ mean and attempts to cover this with the phrase ‘hold that baby’. A living hell from start to finish that ends with a double-clang name drop of Kardashians and Stevie Wonder. We’re glad Marco made him cry.

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And so another week’s missive finds its end. Do remember that we have beautiful ten tickets with 20 per cent off a year’s subscription at the shop here. All emails to be directed to editorial@the-fence.com or if you’re being technical, support@the-fence.com. Peter Mandelson is an anagram of ‘repent, sad lemon’ and ‘lean modern pest’. Until the next time.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter, not a love letter. Issue 27 is currently being laid out on a flatplan, and it really is looking very special indeed.

Issue 26, however, is still very much knocking around, and was even spotted in Antarctica this week, would you believe it – the magazine has now been snapped on all seven continents, which is something of a landmark. Remember to keep sending in the photos to editorial@the-fence.com

Now we’ve got ten tokens giving you 20 per cent off a year’s subscription, which applies to print, digital, or both – and to gift subscriptions too. Just enter code MARCH20 at checkout, but remember, we’ve only printed off ten of these sweet little treats off.

Be Quick, Be Quick

Now, today, we’ve got the dark side of ‘pubfluencers’, underpaid interns and a fresh nugget from the coalface of the Epstein files.

From Hollywood to Hollywood

Irish people, unlike their transatlantic counterparts, have been poorly represented in the Epstein files. One name that does feature (360 times) is that of Bangor man Paul Tweed, one of Hollywood’s foremost libel lawyers (Hi Paul!) who has advised high-profile celebrities and lovable social media rogues ranging from Britney Spears to Gerry Adams.

In the wake of Jeffrey Epstein’s release from Palm Beach County Stockade in 2009, Tweed was one of those he enlisted in the campaign to rehabilitate his image. The US Justice Department’s disclosures reveal how Tweed helped Jeff to pressurise publications including the Telegraph and Tatler, to remove their annoying and repetitive use of the word ‘paedophile’ from their copy. One letter from Johnsons LLP in which Tweed was a partner, argues that, ‘the procurement of a seventeen and a half year old girl for prostitution… cannot be classified as “paedophilia”’. An interesting distinction.

In one of his introductory emails to Epstein, Tweed cites his ‘generally good relationship’ with the Legal Managers of The Times and The Guardian, and notes that he might be able to ‘persuade one or both of them to publish a clarification, which we could in turn use as leverage in relation to the other publications’. Tweed also advised Epstein on his efforts to obtain an apology from Sarah Ferguson – then Duchess of York – who had referenced the paedophile’s ‘paedophilia’ in an Evening Standard interview.

Indeed, a lot of the correspondence between Tweed and Epstein relate to their proposal for the Duchess to publicly apologise for her use of ‘the p word’. A few draft apologies suggested she describe him instead as ‘a kind and very generous man’ and ask that she mention how he ‘is focusing his life on helping others’. ‘We should all do the same’, the drafts moralise.

Ferguson’s lawyers apparently demurred at these alternatives, so Tweed promptly informed them that if they did not agree to the ‘correction’ he would ‘likely to be put in a position… where I will have to undermine the credibility of those comments by pointing out that your client and her daughters were among the first to enjoy my client’s hospitality upon his release from prison and continued to do so until very recently.’ Ferguson’s lawyers argue that the tenor of Tweed’s demands ‘could be construed as attempted blackmail.’

The correspondence reveals the rabid paranoia that governed Epstein in this period, in one message, he tells Tweed he is ‘certain’ the News of the World was hacking his phone, asking the lawyer to make a request to Scotland Yard. Tweed responds by telling him that he had spoken to his ‘contact in the MET’ to try and work out if there was any truth to the billionaire’s fears.

Another piece of invaluable legal advice imparted to Epstein was a recommendation that he should write an op-ed comparing himself to former Italian Prime Minister, and Lazy Town character lookalike, Silvio Berlusconi, who had successfully weathered an attempted cancellation after being caught soliciting sex from an underage girl in 2013.

For these indispensable morsels, Epstein was charged tens of thousands of dollars. The files show how Tweed’s entreaties to be paid, however, repeatedly fell on deaf ears. At one point, Tweed tells him, ‘Obviously I value you as very much a blue chip client and I want to ensure that you are happy not only with my advice, but also that you are being charged for it’ before offering to ‘write off 50% of the bill total in return for payment of the balance’. There’s nothing worse than someone who doesn’t pay their bills on time, is there?

Halton Moreish

In September 2010, Jimi Heseldon fell to his death reversing one of his own company’s segways off a cliff. He was trying to make way for a dog walker in a final act of courtesy. It was a sudden and sad end for an incredible man who made his wealth by redeveloping a medieval siege defence known as a Gabion or Leonardo basket.

Using redundancy pay he received after the closure of the local mine where he worked, he developed his business eventually selling them to the US army, where they proved just as effective as they had ever been. Thus Jimi became known as a man made rich by ‘the twin evils of Arthur Scargill and Osama bin Laden’.

But what made the man special was what he did with that money. You can read about that now, as the piece has gone up on our website.

18-00-02 Was My Number

While London’s other creative industries have largely been defanged, there is still a fair amount of ‘difficult’ behaviour in the food world. However, the restaurateurs and their retinue have nothing on the fashion mavens, who still carry on as if it were 1996, as Clive Martin reported, at length, in Issue 15. When it comes to staggering breaches of employment law from up-and-coming ‘names’, we would like to say that we are, unfortunately, unshockable, but this nugget of info really did rock our world.

A well-established London designer recently had an intern working full-time who wasn’t paid for nine months. And when they were, finally, remunerated for their efforts, payment came from a Coutts business account.

Lock-In Privileges

In today’s Guardian, Tomé Morrisey-Swan speaks to the ‘pubfluencers’ who are encouraging Gen-Z drinkers to discover the lush carpeted joys of the proper boozer. Among others, he talks to our own correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh, but, for some reason, he doesn’t find the time to talk to Twitter user, ‘Chelsea Dan’, a 49-year-old bike courier-slash-pubfluencer. Unlike the Instagram-first activists, Chelsea Dan (twitter bio: ‘Hail Odin’) does not have progressive politics.

Regrettably, Chelsea Dan is one of the most fascinating English users of Musk’s platform, deeply knowledgeable – if consistently direct – about aspects of London’s recent working-class history, and bringing with him a cast of characters who regularly feature on his feed (‘Wonky’, ‘The Duck’ and so on). In a perfect example of the horseshoe theory in action, you can spot him at many of the boozers increasingly frequented by the trendy young things, much to his increasing ire. Turning an honest boozer into a ‘hipster gaff’? Jail sentence, for sure.

In Case You Missed It

Jane Ruffino marks the end of the underwater cable that supplied the internet.

The biggest thing to come out of Utrecht since Jurriën Timber: the fish doorbell, is back. See a fish? Ring the doorbell, of course.

Jackson Lears on the interesting life of Zbigniew Brzezinski (say that ten times fast.)

We’ve never watched The Great Pottery Throw Down, but is this Keith bloke okay?

Strange coding experiments from a middle-aged Japanese man.

Brilliant work from Bellingcat into the ‘TikTok stars’ of the Sudan war.

AI moves on to dizzying new heights.

And Finally

The lamentable omnipresence of adverts in our lives is often lamented. And yet, we can’t help but feel that within this, there should be some respect for standards. Because the adverts today drone at us with slogans and visuals that are so rubbish, you do wonder what the point is. Everything about them is bland, crass or annoying, with each punchy, comma-separated tagline and hacked-up ‘visual identity’ so devoid of humanity that you can almost feel the sapping tendrils of every ‘idea summit’, the cloying papier-mâché cling of every pointless layer of bureaucracy.

There are so many offenders here, but briefly: Ricky Gervais’ entirely fake rage-bait ads, Bitpanda’s collaboration with Arsenal and the (apparently) upcoming ‘savvy squirrel’ whose AI-generated face will encourage us to save all the money we’re earning in this wonderful economic climate.

This was not always so. And so we thought we’d pay a truncated but heartfelt service to a wonderful collection of ads that programmed our subconsciousness with a degree of aesthetic quality or charming, rough-around-the-edges authenticity.

The kings of the former in the 90s were arguably Murphy’s, who attempted to sling us their stout with some excellent Japanese-inspired ads, one in the style of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and another in an incredibly detailed cyberpunk anime short called Last Orders that must have taken some serious inkspilling to realise. Indeed, importing Japanese stylings for western products is apparently a perfectly reversible formula. See two Japanese coffee ads from Tommy Lee Jones and the cast of Twin Peaks. And, of course, Murphy’s more successful counterparts in stout making also have the legendary surfer ad.

The latter category has too many brilliant examples to choose from, especially from US local networks. Quite simply, local business people make exceptional advertising content. We buy golf? Of course you do! Free Jewish magic? Where do I sign up?

Perhaps the best of this form actually comes in a well-known – amongst internet lore collectors – spoof of them. We’re talking, of course, about the advertising wing of Toby Jones’ (not that one) commercial empire. Here are his adverts for his ‘Good Ass BBQ & Foot Massage’ and his ‘Big Ass Truck Rental & Storage’. Sadly, neither are real businesses, but the ads are so good, we almost forgive him.

If, however, there was one piece of advertising we would hold above all others, we know our choice. In 2003, CCU prepared a series of adverts for their Chilean beer brand, Cerveza Cristal. What made them special is that the adverts were designed to fit seamlessly into upcoming TV runs of the Star Wars trilogy. Separated from the film by only a single black frame, Chilean viewers got to see their favourite space heroes repeatedly pause their conversations and fights to briefly unveil some of the crispest- looking refreshments imaginable. Felipe Wielandt, who supervised the project, suggested an almost philosophical reason for inserting the ads into the action: to ‘reach consumers that are becoming increasingly aloof’.

The success of the campaign (titled The Force Is With Cristal) was so great that the producers launched an expansion of them, called Breaking Zapping. These saw similar ads inserted into Gladiator, Notting Hill and even American Beauty. Both campaigns went on to win a slew of awards before George Lucas – whom we resent greatly for this – filed claims with the Chilean government and had the ads permanently banned. It’s perhaps the greatest sin on that bearded little freakshow except, maybe, the time he gave David Lynch a searing headache.

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Thank you for joining us this week. We will be back with another outing of Capital Letter on Thursday, which we recommend you sign up for here. Remember, there are ten tokens available for discounted subscriptions here too. Woodpeckers’ tongues wrap around their brains.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s scaled the north face of the Eiger before lunchtime.

It’s been a busy week already for us as Issue 27 starts to get wrangled into place. But our editing hand has not been so hot that we have forgotten our sacred weekly duty, and we have many a tasty crumb for you to chew until the mag is out.

Some lovely photos continue to be sent our way and oh how they make our hearts sing so! Issue 26’s black and white cover looks wonderful against these snowy ski scenes in St Moritz and also on an icy lake in Finland. The winner of the week (but will it take the top spot?) is this beautiful cat who is perfect for this newsletter, titled such as it is.

With newsstands shuttering – alas – the easiest way to bag a mag is by subscribing straight to the source. The product is magnificent, and as for the price? It’s very reasonable.

Subscribe to The Fence

We are also very happy to say that Capital Letter is very, very nearly at the 3,000 subscriber mark. It’s been such a pleasure to see so many of you join up and help us build this newsletter. We’re exceedingly proud of it and we think this issue – the quarter-century – is one of the best we’ve put together with dispatches from the underground rap scene and a church full of clowns. Do make sure to sign up, we’ve got a lot coming, and in the not-too-distant future, it’s going to be evolving, expanding, improving. Do sign up here.

This week, we have a burgeoning cult and the story of possibly the worst animated film ever made. But we begin with a little story about a lettuce-adjacent PM.

What’s That Nancy Sinatra Song?

Last week, we asked for stories about rude politicians. And one of you replied, informing us that Liz Truss ‘made her private secretary remove her boots while she was Foreign Secretary’ – which is a delicious anecdote indeed. Please do supply us with more via the usual channels.

Prydferth & Hyfryd

Charlotte Church seems to be getting stuck into a nice side of woo-woo, having just launched a brand new wellness retreat in Wales called ‘The Dreaming’. The social media ads are distinctly cultish; it’s not a great sign when if you open with ‘beloveds’ as a greeting. The standard packages don’t look too crazy, but some of the retreats led by Church herself look a little more involved. We were especially drawn to one which is simply called ‘Witch’. It promises ‘an enchanting five-day retreat… for 17 souls ready to embody their magic through ritual, nature, and deep witchcraft practices.’ The video package includes some pretty pictures, but it’s hard not to see it as the opening shots of Midsommar 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Surprisingly, it’s not too expensive. It’s certainly not cheap, but we were bracing for some insane prices. A three night stay is available for £688 per person in the cheapest room, the most expensive running at £999 (save that pound). Given this includes meals and ‘wellness activities’, we’re forced to shrug our shoulders, although if someone tried to charge you to walk around the forest surrounding the guest house you were in, you’d probably be pretty miffed. That said, perhaps this advert for their ‘work-exchange’ programme explains how they are able to offer such a bargain. As Church has apparently ‘spent her life savings’ on purchasing the property, perhaps she has some need for financially-laden idiots and a bit of free labour. Who can tell?

Justice for Joe

The lead investigation from Issue 26 is now available to read online, and what a story it is. Last summer, James Riding travelled to the West of Ireland, to walk with the family of Joe Deacy. On 13 August 2017, Joe was discovered bleeding and unconscious in a driveway in County Mayo. How he came to be there is still to be unsolved, as James reports with deep empathy. Do read the piece here.

The Bermuda Triangle

The Labour Party has been trying to set Twitter ablaze with a series of posts attacking the Green Party’s stance on drug legalisation. They have also been gleefully retweeting a Metro article which is claiming, on pretty thin gruel, that Polanski wants to teach primary school children how to take drugs ‘safely’. As funny as images of Zacky P showing some little ‘uns how to find a good vein are, their actual plans are a bit more modest.

One Labour post, however, discussing proposed plans to legalise GHB, couldn’t help but remind us of Bron Maher’s excellent piece on the use of that drug – alongside meth – in the chemsex scene in London. It’s a fascinating piece about a prominent and divisive aspect of London’s gay community, the activity of which can be quite neatly mapped in a triangle made up of Vauxhall, Stockwell and Oval. Unlike most drug discourse, Bron’s piece is clear-eyed, resists being ideological or giving into moral panic and actually talks to the people involved. It also manages to be quite funny, and certainly puts a question mark over Labour’s claim that the Greens’ plan for GHB is the same as ‘legalising roofies’.

SEND in the Clowns

In July last year, we published one of the most important stories we’ve ever put out: Jack Beaumont’s ‘The SEND School’.

The government is now, finally, wading into these waters. Initial plans to reform the broken SEND system were meant to be put forward in autumn last year, but were quickly shelved when it became clear that the policy in its previous form would prove deeply unpopular with families and MPs. The government’s done some re-thinking and a little bit of ‘preparing the ground’, and now here we are with some big shiny headlines: £4 billion invested, 90% of council SEND debts written off, poorly performing councils to be held to account.

But, as Jack’s piece suggests, the centre of the problem isn’t necessarily one of funding or debt: many of the schools were not short of cash, and yet they were still running a shoddy service. Two of the biggest issues were a complete inability (or refusal) to hire and retain enough staff, and the overreliance on specialist schools to deal with children in need of SEND services. Given that the bulk of the money is going through the same councils that have overseen this process since 2014 and into specialist schools, it’s hard to see what’s going to change. Some money is going to what is being termed ‘in-house provision’ (i.e. regular schools being able to care for children with SEND needs) but given the total £4bn sum has been called a ‘drop in the bucket’ by teachers’ unions – and the money going towards in-house provision is but a molecule of that drop – the reform looks doomed to fail.

There is even less said about the problem of staffing. The poor quality of pay, intense working environment and soul-sapping CCTV-based management style combine to make an environment that anyone would struggle to stay motivated in. On top of this, most of the staff are unable to speak out about these conditions because they fear violating their precarious work visas, something this government is certainly not going to be improving any time soon.

In Case You Missed It

Donald Trump uses a fake name to call C-SPAN.

We finally achieve clarification that the Council of Nicaea (325AD) is not subject to the control of Bedford Borough Council.

Our favourite person at the Winter Olympics.

ScotRail soft launches its retrospective support for the British Union of Fascists in a recent mock-up of a future train design.

Adam Tooze is unable to spot AI and becomes the latest ‘slopped unc’ to fall.

Curtis Sliwa – yes CURTIS SLIWA – has joined Substack to talk about his favourite dance music. What a world.

Larry David in conversation with his daughter Cazzie is the best interview we’ve read recently.

A young Willem Dafoe sings a ridiculous version of ‘The Streets of Cairo’ in a show from experimental New York theatre company, The Wooster Group.

And Finally

What was Sean Connery’s last film? If your answer was 2003’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, we’re afraid you’re 9 years off. And if you think the answer is a rather tedious point of trivia to be left to a bad pub quiz on a Wednesday night, you’re even further from the mark. Behold, Sir Billi a Scottish CG-animated disaster of a film from 2012.

To attempt to summarise the film’s plot would be an exercise in futility. It is full of non-sequiturs, entirely random character introductions and lacks any clear reason to exist. Loosely, it’s about a man, Sir Billi (Sean Connery), and the various scrapes he and his dog-like Goat (Alan Cumming) get into while attempting to protect the identity of an escaped beaver from the Ahab-like pursuit of a local policeman, who tracks the animal for five years after the Scottish government bans the species from its borders. Indeed.

The beat-by-beat action is, if anything, more convoluted, and the terse, punchy tone of this Wikipedia summary is genuinely the best prose description we can imagine of one of the film’s many strange sequences: ‘The group retrieves Gordon, but they are distracted by a submarine. Billi gathers a group to save Gordon with a trampoline, but Gordon gets knocked out. Victoria, a pilot duck assisting with the group’s rescue [and has yet to feature in the film], throws Billi a bottle of water, which he uses to revive Gordon.’ If you’re intrigued, we offer up the trailer below, which genuinely includes the strapline – read out in that bass-boosted American trailer voice – ‘Can this octogenarian… and his goat… save the day???’

All of this was a seven-year passion project by husband and wife duo Tessa and Sascha Hartmann. Prior to Sir Billi they had made only one animated short, and somehow came to the conclusion that the story to break into the film industry was one about a skateboarding – no, we hadn’t mentioned that yet – octogenarian vet in the Scottish Highlands. Connery was brought on board via the then-chairman of Rangers Football Club, Sir David Murray. Charmed by its Scottishness and a David versus Goliath narrative about animated filmmaking, Connery signed on, bringing with him not only Cumming as the goat, but also Miriam Margolyes as Baroness Chantal McToff and Dame Shirley Bassey to sing a Bond-style theme tune for the opening credits.

The production itself was constantly beset with problems. Production members frequently left when better jobs came up; several scenes were lost in what the Hartmanns allege was an act of cybercrime or sabotage; the animators – especially the Italian ones apparently – struggled with models of the women of Cetterness, whom the Hartmanns insisted needed to have enormous breasts. Sean Connery also wanted to record all of his lines from his home in the Bahamas, perhaps aiding in some of these unbelievably crap line reads. All in all, the film cost £5 million to make.

The brutal reviews came as a shock to the Hartmanns. The screening at the Sonoma International Film Festival had apparently gone okay so when Peter Debruge dropped the first bomb in Variety – calling it a ‘woefully anaemic animated feature’ – they were stunned. To cope, a narrative was adopted that the powers that be were working against them, unable to countenance a new upstart on the scene. This had, in fact, been an idea among the core team of Connery and the Hartmanns for a while. When the Scottish Tourist Board issued a special tartan for the release of Shrek, Connery lambasted them failing to back a Scottish homebrew animation over a nasty foreign import. This anger was repeated when the Scottish Government spent £7 million on ‘maximising benefit’ to the Scottish economy from the film Brave. So when things went bad it was easy to keep on this line. Connery apparently told a tearful Tessa that, ‘the only thing that it tells me is that you’ve got a fucking great product. They’re out to get you and you’re independent. You’re a small guy, and they don’t want you in this space.’

Years later, Sascha gave it a rewatch and claims it is ‘actually, objectively OK’. We find it hard to agree, especially as the film winds to a close with a horrendous, strange, sexualised dance number. This is a sequence which includes a local woman’s aside that she’s happy to see that Billi has found someone (a younger blonde American) to give him a bit of joy in his older age, ‘even if she is a brazen lassie with a funny accent and, I dare say, an enviable chest! They don’t make them like that over here any more, do they?’

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That’s that for this week, if you enjoyed this mail-out then do buy a magazine or a tote bag from the webstore, as that’s what keeps the whole thing going. Do send general notes to editorial@the-fence.com and order enquiries to support@the-fence.com. Papa New Guinea has more indigenous languages than any other country in the world.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter entering its seventh year of operational service. It’s been a delight to see how popular the last few outings have been, and we are endeavouring to maintain said fervour. As has always been the case, this mail-out will be free to read, and we have another fantastic outing for you today.

Another five tokens have been printed off that give 15 per cent off a year’s subscription – that’s print, digital or both and also applies to gift subscriptions, so do move with all haste to the link below.

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Issue 26 continues to be spotted in all places fashionable: providing wholesome parenting opportunities, in the UNESCO World Heritage city of Bath and, of course, in Soho.

Do keep sending these snaps through to editorial@the-fence.com or post them on social media and you can win a really quite expensive bottle of sparkling wine. Do note that the magazine is being stocked in Waterstones throughout the land – we’ve just received word that it’s now in Cambridge and Nottingham, which really is very exciting for us all.

Issue 27 is being brought to the boil, but in the meantime, let’s discuss the body politic.

Chilli Con Carnsy

There’s a touch of ‘1970s South America’ in the rapturous media reception given to Al Carns, or Al Carns DSO OBE MC MP to give him his full title. The Labour Member for Selly Oak only entered the world of politics in 2024, having spent 23 years in the armed forces. Yet last week an ‘Al Carns for leader’ website was registered, as the Scotsman’s chances of replacing Keir Starmer are talked up by some in SW1 and beyond. Here, he challenges a firefighter to a pull-up competition, and trounces him by 30 to 18.

Carns’ military career is impressive, and it is acknowledged that he served in the Special Boat Service (SBS) as an officer, but full details of that are hard to come by, and press coverage of Carns’ service is somewhat elliptical.

However, we have been told by multiple sources that Carns wasn’t just an officer in the SBS, that he was the commanding officer of the regiment.

Will Carns power his way to Downing Street? It remains to be seen. As one observer puts it, there’s ‘a world of difference between leading a small team of hyper-motivated task-oriented best-of-breed professionals, and trying to herd 400 attention-seeking pathological narcissists.’

Mummy, Can You Help Me?

A wonderful tale has reached our ears: of a currently serving MP who commands their staffers to tie their shoelaces. Do you know more about this story? Are you aware of other imperious parliamentarians? Drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com.

You Know the Coke Ain’t Diet

We haven’t had the time to tabulate it, but we reckon that Digga D has been mentioned in this mail-out almost as many times as Peter Hitchens. Digga (real name: Rhys Herbert) appeared in Parliament last Wednesday, especially to assist the pressure group Art Not Evidence in their battle to stop drill music lyrics as admissible evidence in trials by jury.

Digga is appearing in court himself this summer, as he faces a proceeds of crime hearing concerning large-scale drug dealing, which he operated, despite being a chart-topping musician, from a detached home in Bracebridge Heath, Lincoln (Digga is from Ladbroke Grove). Truly, one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary British life.

Moors the Pity

Lotte Brundle took her boyfriend to watch ‘Wuthering Heights’, as Emerald Fennell so styles it, on a special screening on Saint Valentine’s Day. And he absolutely loved it.

I had always imagined that the Heathcliff to my Cathy would be a floppy-haired creative from one of the Home Counties. I did not imagine I’d fall for a hairy Scottish economics graduate. Before we went, he’d prepared by reading Jo Ellison’s piece in the Financial Times, so when I asked him what Wuthering Heights was about, he confidently replied: ‘An unhinged love story between Heathcliff and Margot Robbie’s character – but I don’t know what her name is’. Before adding: ‘It’s not by Emily Brontë, is it?’

‘Wuthering Heights’ was being shown a total of seven times at The Ritzy in Brixton on 14 February. When we took our seats, we were surrounded by at least 30 couples and plenty of tipsy ‘galentines’ groups. The girl behind us asks her beau: ‘Have you read Tess of the d’Urbervilles?’. ‘No,’ he replied.’ As the screen warned us of the ‘disturbing images and strong sex’ to come, audible whoops were heard.

Fennell’s choice of opening scene has been talked about so much that the man sitting directly in front of us had decided to film it with his iPhone. In case you’ve been living underneath a rock, ‘Wuthering Heights’ opens with a hanging. The unfortunate deceased has an erection, one which disgusts and titillates an onlooking nun in equal measure. There were gasps and giggles from the audience at the sight. Young Cathy and Heathcliff’s story is then told, to emphasise their childhood bond, before a tightly corseted Robbie bursts onto the moors and, to a cheer, an all-grown-up Jacob Elordi arrives on screen.

For those of you who don’t know the plot and don’t want to see the film, here’s a little précis. Everything goes swimmingly until tragedy strikes and Heathcliff, fearing Cathy doesn’t love him anymore, dramatically abandons her, not to be seen again for five years. In this time, Cathy marries a wealthy and kind man called Edgar and is well-dressed but sexually unfulfilled in their gigantic house, until Heathcliff returns, glowed-up with a haircut and new gold tooth. Then we finally get the sexy compilation we had all been waiting for – which was much less shocking and much more romantic than we’d thought it might be.

The second biggest audience reaction came later when Heathcliff, out of revenge, decides to seduce Edgar’s ward. He climbs through her window, dripping wet and says, pretty much verbatim: ‘I don’t love you. I will treat you abominably, and I am only marrying you to get my revenge. I will not ravish you passionately and brutally if this offends you. Does it?’ To this, she enthusiastically shakes her head, which elicited a round of belly laughs from the crowd. Later, he makes her bark like a dog on all four,s and she loves it – but if I went into that, we’d be here all day. The biggest reaction, however, was at the end, just after Heathcliff had cradled a pale, dead Cathy in his arms. The screen faded to black, and there was rapturous applause and exclamations like: ‘What the heck?’, ‘Bloody hell!’ and ‘That was so sad,’ (although I did spot a few novel purists shaking their heads and refusing to clap).

It was not how we thought the film would be. Many critics had dramatically condemned it as nothing more than an all-out shag-fest. A writer in the New Statesman even described it as ‘porn’. Obviously, it’s not a faithful adaptation of the book, but the film we saw was a funny, tragic and romantic story about a pair of doomed lovers. Yes, there was BDSM. Yes, there was a dead man’s boner. Yes, Elordi was brooding and sexually domineering in the fog, etc., etc., but when the film ended, we weren’t thinking of any of those things; we were thinking about their love story. And, like many in the audience, had both shed a tear at the tragedy of it all.

Let Me Tell You a Secret

From Angharad George-Carey, creator of the hit podcast Daddy Issues, Something I’ve Never Said (S.I.N.S) is an intimate new interview series that dares to go where most conversations end. Each episode invites a high-profile guest to share truths they’ve never said aloud – confessions, contradictions, private fears, moments of devastation and guilty pleasures.

In the first episode, Angharad speaks to actress Anna Chancellor about the death of Anna’s daughter, Poppy, who died in 2023 from acute myeloid leukaemia at the age of 36. In the most recent podcast, Angharad sits down with the legendary Hanif Kureishi and his son Carlo to talk about Hanif’s appalling accident that has left him confined to a wheelchair, and how that has drawn the two of them closer together.

The Rising Sun Salutes the Iron Lady

No one does social media diplomacy like the Japanese. We’ve told you of their wonderful celebrations of Mexican Independence Day, their new Jamaican ambassador who briefly inspired the hashtag #OhayoWagwan and now we bring you the ambassador closest to our doorstep, Mr Hiroshi Suzuki.

There’s lots of stuff to love here, not least his compilation of a year’s work travelling around with a small plushie of Paddington Bear. But his recent work deserves the most attention, because in the span of one day, he posted photos beneath Margaret Thatcher’s towering form in Grantham and draped in green on the terraces of Celtic Park, a phenomenal contradiction that Mr Suzuki lightly brushed off by going for a ‘wee Swally’ and smashing into a pint of Tennant’s.

It puts us in the mind of some of our own travels up and down our own nation, bucking the false narrative that we are but a Soho publication. Just a little over a year ago now, we headed down to Grantham ourselves to see what lay beyond and underneath the Iron Lady’s legacy, and before that, we were off to Liverpool to explore the aftermath of the failed terror attack there on Remembrance Day 2021. More recently, we’ve been up to Glasgow to find a cabbie poet and across to Belfast to find a street preacher. Truly, we are as fond of all the varied aspects of these isles as Mr Suzuki is, and that really is saying something. We’re also looking for more pieces from beyond the M25.

Who is Jim E. Brown?

Last week’s Off The Fence introduced you to the wonderful music of one Jim E. Brown as its send-off. We can and do still recommend his oeuvre to you; it’s really very funny. But we must admit that we, like many others, have been foiled. That Jim E. Brown was a character was obvious – he claims a birthday in 2001 and to be perennially 19 – so we expected artifice. What we did not expect was that Jim E. Brown is the creation of Max Marguiles, an American.

Everything about his accent, image and music felt like such a perfect send up of UK gloom, that if felt impossible to believe the man behind the mask was not from these isles. The facts, however, cannot be denied. A Reddit user on r/jimebrown who claims they were ‘hired’ to find out Jim E’s real identity has noted the occasional inclusion of one Max Marguiles as an additional songwriter. Deeper digging found an old website owned by Max, stating that he is a Philadelphia–based filmmaker and musician. The likeness is irrefutable, and the revelation makes Jim E. Brown’s regular shows there – along with his U.S. podcast appearances – much more intelligible. He can also be found in an 11-year-old video as part of a much less funny musical duo called Shy Boyz.

And yet, this does not dampen our pleasure in the man’s work. On one level, it is frankly staggering that an American has made such an accurate British satirical character. There were some small signs (referring to ‘Prozac’ for example) but these were hardly jarring amid the talk of Greggs, Asda and depression. We are simply forced to hold our hands up to a master. It has also promoted his avid fans to assiduously deny the connection, demanding Reddit mods ban any mention of Max, and insisting he is a distant, and malign, relative, out to get the credit for Jim E’s incredible work.

In Case You Missed It

Robert Duvall has died. Many were great fans of the man and, as it turns out, he was a great fan of Scottish football legend ‘Wee’ Jimmy Johnstone.

Genghis Khan continues to be responsible for violence despite being dead for centuries.

Lord Palmerston bids the world farewell from Bermuda.

And Finally

We have a hell of a local politician to introduce you to: Eric Mays, a former council member from Flint, Michigan. Mays was, shall we say, a complicated figure. He was a long-time unionist, having worked for General Motors, and then represented the NAACP. He won praise for being one of the earliest and most outspoken public voices on the issue of Flint’s water pollution – a genuine scandal which still plagues the city today. He won less praise for his numerous in-session outbursts, which, along with convictions for felonious assault (waving a revolver at a man he claimed tried to rob him several years prior) and driving under the influence, made him one of the most frequently arrested representatives in U.S. history.

More recently, he has won the internet’s heart because, whatever one makes of him, he’s absolutely hilarious. Highlights include walking into council sessions to ‘theme music’, extensive imitation of his many council nemesis and a catchphrase of ‘when they go low, I go lower’. All of this is delivered in Mays’ iconic voice, which always seems to clip the levels on his microphone by a good 1000 db. It was a brash style, but it was one that won him many loyal devotees, especially representing a quarter of Flint that is often heavily overlooked. To be clear, we don’t necessarily commend Mays’, but it’s certainly a welcome change from listening to more verbal aspic from our own PM. There’s a short set of clips here, or you can settle down for a nice cup of tea with the fuller version below.

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We’ll be back on Thursday with a particularly vicious outing of Capital Letter, which you can sign up for here. Do remember that we have some reduced subscriptions available and please direct all administrative queries to support@the-fence.com. The most popular girls’ name in France today? It’s ‘Louise’. Until the next time.

All the best,

TF