Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s amore. As various letters are dotted and crossed in our next (marvellous) issue, we continue to enjoy seeing Issue 28 jaunt around, from our coastline on the blustery beaches of Norfolk all the way to Australia’s, loitering conspicuously outside the Clocks at Flinders. It’s also been spotted in Soho (quelle surprise) and in the heart of the Angel. Please do continue to send (or tag us) in your snaps, we do love to see you reading out and about, and you get the fringe benefit of entering into our hotly contested race for a rather decadent bottle of Bolly. The competition is open for a week longer.

Speaking of deadlines, until midnight tonight we have a very special offer, and then it will expire, Cinderella-style. Everyone who subscribes to the print magazin will get Issue 22, 25, 26 and 27 for free on top of their subscription for the year. This applies to gift subs and also internationally, so scoop one up at the link below.

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Today, we’ve got a dispatch from Madrid, courtesy of an old friend of the magazine, Francis Martin, who has been to a bar like no other.

A Night on the Tiles

Even by local standards, Una Grande Libre is an unusually patriotic drinking hole, with the awning and windows bedecked in the glaring red and yellow of the Spanish flag. But the image of a moustachioed face above a flamboyant fur collar betrays the establishment’s full identity: this is one of Spain’s few conspicuous Francoist bars, located just beyond the Madrid ring road, in a suburb with a large immigrant population. And the surprises don’t stop there.

Named after a Franco-era slogan proclaiming Spain ‘one, great and free’, the bar is also known as Casa Chen, after its owner, Chen Xiang Wei. Chen is diminutive, with a plasticine face that makes him hard to age, and an asymmetrical haircut strikingly similar to Adolf Hitler’s. He is also more than happy to talk with the two Brits who stumble into his establishment.

After moving to Spain almost 30 years ago, Chen at first ran a conventional outfit, but conversations with regulars inspired him to redecorate it in homage to Francisco Franco. When the landlord priced him out, he purchased the current premises, and runs it as a shrine to the man who believed himself ordained by God to rule the Spanish. There are rosary beads hanging from the bar, though Chen himself is not a Catholic.

He is, though, an unabashed Franco-phile, even naming his son after the generalissimo. A law passed in 2022 bans the promotion of Franco in spaces ‘with public access’, but Chen tells us he hasn’t had any problems. Perhaps part of the explanation comes when he points out the dozens of donated police caps, including from senior commanders, proudly displayed above the bar.

Clips of Chen’s exuberant Francoism have been going viral in Spain for years. His infamy owes much to the apparent cognitive dissonance of an immigrant supporting a far-right nationalist, as well as the eye-popping aesthetics of his bar, every inch of which is decorated with nationalistic tat, and innumerable pictures of the dictator (though few from his jowly old age).

There are images of Chen too: grinning next to Franco’s great-grandchildren, printed on commemorative coins dispensed by a machine in the corner, and emblazoned on bottles of olive oil. The bottles also carry his name and sobriquet, ‘El Chino Facha’, in an incongruent mishmash of faux Cyrillic and the font used by provincial Chinese takeaways.

Is he a fascist? He ducks the question with a spiel distinguishing ‘facha’ from ‘fascista’ (throwing in an unprompted distinction from Nazism for good measure). Sceptical, I ask a Spanish friend, and he tells me that ‘facha’ is used more like ‘commie’ – employed as a slur, but often with a certain level of irony.

At times, I can’t help thinking that Chen’s allegiances are reflective of naivety and an addiction to a minor level of fame. His love of Franco seems to be inspired, in large part, by opposition to the communism of his home country. This predisposition is bolstered by a certain nostalgia for a period through which he didn’t live, and in this he is not alone: a 2025 poll suggests that around one in five Spaniards consider the Franco years ‘bueno’ or ‘muy bueno’, including people aged 18-24. The worst period of homicidal repression has now slipped out of living memory, and for many Franco’s legacy begins with the economic boom of the 60s.

The contradictions in Chen’s politics are not hard to find. Today’s politicians, he says, just follow a party line, never questioning their party leader. Chen also criticises Trump for cosying up to ‘dictators’, such as Putin and Xi. It is a curious statement to hear when our beers, and accompanying plate of rather good jamón, are resting on a table printed with an image of a man who ensured there were no free elections for four decades.

As we leave, Spanish teenagers of Chinese descent pose for a photograph in front of the bar, holding their fists to their chests in a caricature of a martial salute. They assure me that they don’t support Franco; for them, a trip to Casa Chen is more of an ironic rite of passage, to be posted on social media. When we leave, they haven’t yet decided whether they will go in to speak with Chen, but half an hour later we pass the bar again, and I see that they’re inside, having a night to remember – or, as some might have it, a night of forgetting.

You can follow Francis’ excellent Substack here.

Extra! Extra!

Not known to be totally humble at the best of times, we do tend to credit ourselves with coming up with some witty banners to adorn our print editions (see the quartet of s’s on our lovely summer issue) but recently our attention has been drawn to a long gone rival. Details magazine, a New York-based mag founded in the 80s and operating for around 30 years, started its life covering downtown club culture before moving on to a guise as a men’s fashion mag in the noughties – over the course of this, producing some of the most outrageously brilliant cover copy we’ve laid eyes on. Have you ever wondered how gay really were the Taliban? Or perhaps if Obama could make you better in bed? Well, thankfully, Details did too. Any subscribers that are also fans in possession of one of these fantastic covers, please let us know.

Hey There Good-Looking

We put Clive Martin’s rollicking investigation into the man behind all the noughties nightclubs you know and love in front of the pay wall. Clive chatted with Howard Spooner, whose venues include Embargo, Public, the Leopard Lounge, Crazy Larry’s, the Hammersmith Palais and the Clapham Grand (which he still owns outright) ‘were part of a hyper-luxe, pre-credit crunch club landscape that brought disparate and dangerous characters together to pop bottles and toast themselves silly’. Read on for the backstory. There is also some good gas on Prince Harry: ‘When we opened Public in Verbier in 2012, Harry was there for four or five days. One afternoon I came off the slopes with my two eldest children. I walked into the apartment – Guy Pelly had given him the keys – and he was lying there on the sofa, just in his boxer shorts, watching The Inbetweeners.’

Keep Left

Driving instructors continue to live up to their hallowed position as the most bombastic of all employed persons. It’s even a cliché, an old faithful at the chit-chat factory, to ask an interlocutor their best driving instructor stories. We’ve heard rumours of tear-flecked arguments concerning the moon landing. The emergency stop on the dual carriageway to get a look at a pretty girl walking by. An attempt at Biblical conversion. There was even a warning of decapitation for improper use of the seat belt. Now, though, driving instructors are not satisfied with terrorising us in the mortal realm, and have upped the ante by entering the digital one. There has been a spate of videos in the past few years of instructors taking videos of their lessons, and none so popular as Clearview Driving, which shows inane video after inane video of students messing up their parallel park. There’s even a narrative structure to some of it – you can follow a learner from first stall to getting their license in nine months. You have to see it to believe it.

Camp Matrix

This week our matrix of campness made a splash on Instagram. It is good to know how switched on our audience is to the issues that matter. Happily, all the engagement was positive and no one took issue with our empirical system of adjudication. Some commenters had thoughts on other figures they considered gaping holes in our assessment, but they were wrong. Still, we like to hear from the dissenters. Please write to us along the usual lines: editorial@the-fence.com.

In Case You Missed it

Economists getting shirty.

Sir Anthony Hopkins does geolocation.

Man renovates former sex dungeon.

Loyalty faltering in Massive Attack.

The food influencer who was a covert drug dealer.

And Finally

We have dredged up yet more adverts from the YouTube treasure chest, although this one is probably not going to hit the nostalgia-core notes of previous offerings, unless we have some secret centenarians in our midst. If so, welcome, and please do wave to us at editorial@the-fence.com.

In the 30s, the Post Office commissioned Len Lye to make a series of surreal short films capturing the surreal joy of the post office. The best-known one is probably Colour Box (1935), which was intended to showcase the Post Office’s cheap parcel service. It’s slightly mystifying, looking back, what the motivation behind hiring Lye – an abstract expressionist artist – was. The ‘advert’ is really a series of kaleidoscopic colours and shapes interspersed with large, mechanical script simply spelling out the name of the postal service. Over the top is rumba music.

To make these colourful jewels, Lye literally painted and etched his designs onto the filmstock. Technicolor had just been introduced for large studio movies, and along with it came other film breakthroughs. Lye was using something called Gasparcolor, which used a three-colour subtractive system. Basically, you use special filters to subtract certain colours from the spectrum of white light, which leaves super saturated shades visible – perfect for very trippy adverts.

He also did a couple that were black and white. In 1937 he actually briefly strayed from trying to sell things to people, and actually tried to give them a proper talking to. That’s right, an artist who debased his craft making adverts had some moral lessons to teach. In N. or NW., Lye makes a public service address on the importance of correctly addressing letters. It tells the story of a lovers’ tiff and the failure of letters to reach the other person. It was apparently so ‘extreme’ – the Post Office was particularly pearly-clutchy about a scene where a girl gets dressed and has a stroll – that it never really got shown in full. So, it’s still unclear what was so extreme about what sounds like would now pass as a very tame yarn.

The best of the entire series, however, is surely Rainbow Dance, where Lye got Rupert Doone – much-loved dancer, choreographer and collaborator with Cocteau – to shimmy across the screen, variously imitating walking, tennis and dance. He then upped the saturation of the black-and-white footage to form a silhouette, which was then replaced with colour screens, so that when the body moves, it leaves a trail of lots of different colours. It is hard to believe that this was an advert for the Post Office’s savings bank, ending with the winking catchphrase: ‘Pot of gold at the end of the rainbow’.

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Ta ra! That’s all for now. If you enjoyed this newsletter, then you’love the print magazine, and until midnight you’ll get four free ones if you sign up for a print sub. If something has gone wrong for you – in relation to the magazine – seek our therapeutic counsel at support@the-fence.com. During his only visit to New York in May 1946, Albert Camus visited the zoo 20 times.

All the best,

TF

Good evening and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter with a spring in its step. Summer may be winding down but we are ramping up for our new issue and dare we say our best yet – start counting down the days. While we may be working away on issue 29, our summer offering has been characteristically gallivanting far and wide, seen entwined in a subscriber’s garden, taking a dip in east London, admiring Edinburgh Castle and paying a visit to Hawker’s Hut, the smallest National Trust property, perched on a clifftop in Cornwall. From one end of Britain to the other, it has also been papped at Iona Abbey in Mull, contemplated the distant silhouette of Mount Olympus in Greece, as well as enjoyed a platter of pinchos in northern Spain. As we finish our next issue, the window starts to close for this iteration’s competition, so do get your photos in while you can – there’s a bottle of very decent fizz on the line. The photos don’t need to be taken in exotic locales, either. We welcome everything through to editorial@the-fence.com or tag us on social media.

We are continuing our special eight-for-four magazine deal, but only for the first ten people who subscribe to the print magazine, wherever they are in the world. So do move with indecorous haste to bag yourselves four mags for free.

Move Quickly

And so we soldier onto the business of the day - this week we consider multiple Ricks, results day, the seedy underworld of noughties nightlife and a fantastically bad film with a fantastically lucrative reception.

Great Expectations

We have heard some pretty solid intelligence as to where Harry and Meghan will be resting their heads for their reverse-Megxit. And it makes their unexpected departure from their Montecito manse make more sense…

Murder on the Dancefloor

Howard Spooner has had a life like no other, a real-life Guy Ritchie biopic. The Chelsea club king has partied with royals and shaken off Verender ‘Indian Dave’ Sharma. If you ever went to Embargo, Public or Crazy Larry’s, then you’ll want to read this profile from Clive Martin. Plus it’s got some truly unbelievable Prince Harry anecdotage. It’s free to read here.

Singin’ Em

Usually, we try to keep this newsletter smart and inventive, not just throwing random stories and content at you, but finding ways they connect to things in the news, or a great piece we’ve just done. But sometimes, the content asserts itself, sometimes the need to share our discoveries is so urgent that all we can say is here is the thing, gaze upon it.

So it is with celebplaylist, an Instagram account dedicated to finding music performed by anyone famous for anything but music. There is Patrick Stewart’s greenscreen Rawhide, Rodney Dangerfield’s rap single that made the Billboard Hot 100 and, our favourite, Rick Moranis doing a lounge version of The Vapour’s Turning Japanese. A true piece of media madness.

Rubin It In

One of the more depressing signs of the state of the music industry these days has to be the recent appearances of Rick Rubin in Polymarket ads. For those who are good at smelling a rat, Rubin’s untrained, produce-by-vibes, woo-woo-infused music career has always been somewhat of an eyebrow-raiser.

But for a long time, it was just hard to argue with some of his achievements. Yes, he produced Kid Rock’s album Born Free but he is also the man who reinvented Johnny Cash’s career with Hurt, quite possibly even saving Cash’s life in the process. He also had a near-legendary ability to jump from genre to genre – rap, metal, country – Rubin could do it all.

So we could put up with him occasionally sounding off QAnon talking points on Twitter, asking Anderson Cooper to meditate with him on Sixty Minutes to ‘just like, get… here’ and listening to music on objectively awful-sounding air-tube-based headphones to avoid Bluetooth-related brain damage.

Now he’s appearing in dystopian ads for Polymarket – the now notorious ‘prediction market’ – which appeared at the UFC America 250 event on the White House lawn and promoting AI tools as the ‘new punk rock’. His book called The Creative Practice is a mash of contradictory faux-Buddhist nonsense.

What Rubin’s career perhaps demonstrates most clearly is something we’ve written about closely over the last few issues. The modern music industry is all about business, the music is secondary. Was Rubin’s reinvention of Cash’s career a piece of genius musical reinvention or more of a smart rebranding, making a once famous name attractive to a new round of investors?

It all feels much closer to the processes of selling and marketing that Sarah Haque described in her piece Burning Cash at the Wah Wah Hut… and we’ve got even more insider intel on in the upcoming issue.

Risky Business

Tom Broughton, founder of Cubitts, once thought his company made spectacles and sold them to people. How quaint! Writing in Issue 28, Broughton reveals how as the popular spectacle brand grew it transformed altogether, revealing the real implications behind scaling up.

A New Obsession

Fans of this newsletter will know we love a truly bad film – not Odyssey bad (whose badness is even banal) – but something that goes so strange and awry as to push the limits of art; we love the outsiders. And it is hard to think of a more enjoyable example of late than Niu Lai, a Chinese film made by a mother and son duo over five years.

It’s an animated film about a prolonged dream of a newborn calf, and boy is it animated. It was made in a free software called SketchUp, an architectural modelling programme that they bought second hand, not designed to animated feature length films. It gives the film a mad look, like if David Lynch’s special effects guy on Dune was asked to do an animated re-make of Marley and Me in a weekend.

Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang wrote, directed, animated and voice-acted the whole thing with a total production cost of a few hundred dollars. The resulting quality was a concern, and the film was nearly canned, but Xin had a friend in the studio, so out it went to the people. The film’s promotional campaign consists of one poster, total. Cinema staff were forced to draw their own to place around their theatres.

But after grossing just under 1,000 quid and being seen by just 236 in its first week and a half, virality took hold. People have flocked to see a film whose animation would get anyone flunked from any film school anywhere. It has now grossed over seven million dollars. Given its budget was 200 dollars, it has just dethroned Obsession as the best ROI on a film of all time, generating a 3,499,900% increase on its production cost.

You can watch an appropriately badly ripped version below.

The Centre of Excellence

It’s that time of year again, when teenagers wake up at the same time as the rest of us and open (now presumably prop?) envelopes nervously on BBC Breakfast to find out if they’ve secured their first choice. A cohort that might have been armed with a decent level of confidence are the sixth formers at Brampton Manor, an institution that goes viral year on year for its increasing ratio of students securing Oxbridge places and, in case this may happen to slip under the radar, gallery of beaming graduates posted with their results to their X feed. However, the stories behind these results are not quite so heart-warming, as a report from Francis Martin reveals back from Issue 10 – detailing how an obsession with grade stats and Oxbridge count has come at the detriment to the wellbeing of both staff and students, from accounts of brutal quality control to intimidation and bullying.

In Case You Missed It

Auctioneering school.

K-pop fans side with Ian Paisley.

RFK Jr.’s phone calls him a quack.

Titanic reenactment.

Becca Rothfeld eviscerates Rachel Cusk.

The hip-hop stylings of Siggy Retts take our feeds by storm.

Therapists speak out against therapy speak.

We’re on the brink of a vaccine for skin cancer.

Little Snoring and Greater Snoring have been roused by a police-raided rave.

Amazon’s drones are delivering packages into pools.

And Finally

The children’s baking book, filled with glassy photos of how to bake and construct cakes in the shape of all manner of objects – including a swimming pool, sandcastle or hedgehog – is basically a holy object for British adults under 40. There have been different iterations of the same sort of book over the years. Perhaps the most famous is The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, which featured what the authors have now admitted were several essentially impossible-to-construct bakes, including a duck with crisps for its bill and a pick-up truck mid-material dump of crushed biscuits. Googling the cakes is like stepping back into a warm bath of birthday imagination and disappointment. Parents, who are now grandparents, still shake their fist into the sky at the thought of these recipes. It was undeniably wonderful, though. The swimming pool made of jelly? Fabulous. Perhaps every child who requested that one received a puddle of sludge instead.

There are other cake-based memory lanes available on YouTube, including a series of adverts by Betty Crocker – remember those? We can’t find the UK versions of the adverts, but American equivalents are alive and kicking, and there are some especially great ones in the archive. One is a sort of educational video on the making of cakes through history, featuring a quasi and rather fierce Henry VIII chowing down a wedding-sized bake followed by a sort of austere, Edwardian gent stationed between two turquoise candles. He’s nibbling on a more sober cakelet. The final character in the trio is a woman, presumably Betty Crocker, who has no distinguishing qualities except being a baking fiend in a yellow dress touched by the fire of baking passion. These three characters are trotted out to represent the three great eras of cakemaking, and they take their charge very well indeed! It’s a charming doc-advert. The video also does much to continue Big Children’s Baking overrepresentation of the importance of cakes in daily life. Were all of us convinced that knowing how to make a rosette out of fondant would be a vital skill? Maybe it is, and we’ve all missed a trick. Viva campy cakes.

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That’s that for this week. We’ll be uploading lots of articles for the rest of the year, which is exciting for us all. If you have any technical issues, drop a line to support@the-fence.com. Sharks existed 50 million years before the first trees appeared on land.

All the best,

TF

Welcome back to Off The Fence, the newsletter that Marx failed to predict. It’s been a busy time for us here, but the exciting news is that the latest issue has found its way to Studio Mathias Clottu. Yes, unbelievably, a whole new issue of The Fence is already nearing. It’s set to be another barnstormer, with the biggest ETC section we’ve ever done and a beast of a central feature.

We’ve had some fun photos this week, which saw the mag drop in on one of its contributors, but perhaps our favourite was this snap of it retreating to its villainous hideout to scheme up some devilish ideas. The race is still in full flight, so do get those photos flooding in to editorial@the-fence.com. It’s the only way to win delicious fizz.

Excitingly, we are also deciding to extend last week’s offer: anyone who signs up for a year subscription will get a mag bundle that includes Issues 24, 25, 26 and 27 along with the new one. That’s eight mags for the price of four folks, but move quickly, as only the first ten subscribers across the line will get this unreal parcel through their letterboxes.

Get! Those! Mags!

We do also hope you’re excited for this Thursday when another delectable edition of Capital Letter will be hitting you all. It is our fastest growing offering with all the insider and historical info about London you could possibly want – and an entire map of all said info to boot.

Recent offerings have contained all sorts of goodies, including a wonderful close profile of the legendary sound man at The Elephant’s Head in Camden and a detailed guide to travelling to North Africa and Southwest Asia without leaving the capital. The last edition had a deep dive into the situation at Ridley Road and Gabriel’s Wharf markets, a tribute to the legend that was Godfrey Old and the tips on Sunbury Antiques Market. Get stuck in.

Subscribe To London

But for now, let’s turn to the week’s events. We’ve been learning about the Marine Corps and are hot on the most pressing issue that Burnham has yet to address. But let us begin with a small, personal victory.

Ta-ter! Farewell!

Committed readers of Off The Fence will remember that a little over a year ago, our lovely corner of Soho was rudely interrupted by a pair of brothers insistent on selling as many baked potatoes as they could sling down the gullets of passersby.

We were appalled and intrigued, so we investigated, and found a world where there were ‘no secrets’, where things were not as they seemed and where the item on sale was ‘not just a potato’ but in fact ‘a spud’.

For a while, it seemed like there would be no end to our starchy hell, but when the bros planned and then pulled an immersive potato-centric theatre experience, it began to feel like the writing might be on the wall. Well, this morning, we turned the corner of Archer Street to a scene of bizarre serenity, our momentary confusion dispersing when we noticed that the alarming fire engine red arch under which that tatties had processed had been returned to the cool washed white you see below. Victory at last.

Justice For Joe

This week marks the nine year anniversary of Joe Deacy, who died on 13 Aug 2017 in County Mayo. He was found in a residential drive with a mortal head injury, and the case remains unsolved. His family continue to search for answers; from the police, from outside the house where he was found. It is a deeply moving story and one that we bring to your attention here on this anniversary.

That Sounds Alarming

Big Andy B made his first strong foray into annoying the British public this week with his multiple alarms that signalled the coming of the end times and asked us not to use any barbecues in case that sped the whole thing up. It was a slightly surreal moment for the UK to share in, but it did at least produce some lovely bits of live TV.

But it’s got us thinking whether the UK’s emergency alarms are up to scratch, not in the practical sense, but in the ‘vibe’ sense. Does ours have the snazz of say Iran’s pre-1991 alert, or the sheer force of Japan’s J alert or even this filthy Jazz chord offered by what we can only guess is Denmark’s finest truck driver. For our money, it’s a bit plain which at least involves the ignominy of having a really shit one (imagine watching the world die to New Zealand’s annoying bleeps or the alien Mexico forced to say ‘wow’ on repeat), but we can’t help but hanker for more. We’re sure the PM will sort this pressing need out imminently.

Not All Scandals Are Equal

This week’s news has been dominated once again by coverage of Jason Arday, although now in a very different tone. One of the things that has been so striking is the speed and quantity of coverage and, like many stories in the current media climate, this feels like one where everyone is commenting without holding all the facts in front of them. Needless to say, it is perhaps a time where all of us in the media should spend some time in self-reflection, ourselves included.

What is worth mentioning now is the sheer number of other Cambridge professors at the heart of scandals which never got anything like the same coverage.

There was, for example, a fresh wave of sexual harassment allegations levelled at Professor Simon Goldhill which led him to resign his post in June 2026 – an allegation somewhat more concerning than plagiarism that nonetheless only seemed to have broken into the Telegraph.

Or indeed, if shoddy research is your top concern among our universities academics, it is equally interesting how little attention David Latchman CBE received when a whistleblower alleged that the laboratory he’d presided over had been producing doctored papers – with investigations finding evidence of research fraud across 14 papers between 1990 and 2013. He’s now acting Vice-Chancellor at the University of London. Likewise, there’s Silvia Bulfone-Paus who retains employment at the University of Manchester despite having had many of her papers retracted by academic journals and institutions for containing false information.

Unless you are plugged into the scene, these may well have passed you by. Certainly they did not rack up 188 articles in a mere nine days.

Hackneyed

It’s been wonderful to see that Max Daly’s fantastic piece from a few years ago has been getting a second life, with lots of you finding it on the website of late. It is a gripping tale about Clapton, the murder mile and two figures caught up in London gang life. If you haven’t already, you should give it a read here.

This Little Recruit Stayed at Home

We enjoyed stumbling across this rather strange little memoir of sorts from a former U.S. Marine about what boot camp is really like. It’s a neat little insider’s account that really does put to rest any lingering ideas we might have of this kind of army training being designed to toughen folks up, or select those who are hardiest from a bunch of wannabe gunmen. It’s an interesting perspective because we hear not just that boot camp is horrible – we knew that – but that it is mostly just dumb and designed to be passed. It’s less of a tough selective process and more of a hard-to-escape brain-smoothing exercise.

We particularly enjoyed the fact that drill instructors have a lexicon that has remained decidedly old-fashioned, being passed down from one generation of shouty men to the next. Drill instructors will frequently describe bad showings as ‘heinous’ and tell recruits that it ‘would behoove you’ to listen to them. But, as these terms are yelled as loud as possible, there are frequent mishearings. Thus, genuine US drill instructors will frequently instruct, and write, to others that their conduct has been ‘anus’ and that it ‘would be who of you’ to pay closer attention next time. Those Yanks, eh?

Incidentally, we recently heard a tale of a British lad going through boot camp here who, while at the firing range, was ordered by his CO to keep one earmuff off while shooting so he could hear orders properly. The new recruit took his next shot and promptly blew his eardrum, getting a medical discharge for his trouble. Perhaps this is a cross-Atlantic issue after all.

In Case You Missed It

The bird who can imitate a camera.

A rather fun interactive ‘audiovisual map of UK tourist notspots’.

Eyewitness to the Lewes derailing.

A beautiful nature scene.

The toxic caterpillar infestation sweeping Europe

Bjork’s eclipse DJ set got weird.

And Finally

After Dark is an unparalleled repository of wayward characters. In 1988, the Duchess of Argyll went on the programme to have a gas about horse racing with a general and amateur steeple chaser by the name of Sir Cecil ‘Monkey’ Blacker. Dressed in a rhinestone, flesh-coloured smock dress, the Duchess makes what seems like a reasonable case in an admittedly extinct voice that horses need not be shot once they can’t compete any more. Monkey finds this worldview utterly outrageous. So does ‘Michael’, too, a man who joins the debate under a pseudonym – was this a thing? Did After Dark get members from the public to speak on TV under the protection of anonymity? Was horse racing that controversial? Mysterious. Anyway, another gem of a moment in the same programme was when the Duchess had to call it a day and leave the transmission early because she was tired. It was a slightly floatier and hoo-rah version of Tracey Emin’s disastrous jaunt on the show about a decade later.

The Duchess has made other YouTube outings of note, including a few interviews on her famous divorce from – famously – possibly the worst man in England for a certain period of time. He has since invited some formidable rivals! The main appeal of these interviews is the now defunct voice and vertical hair on a former version of daytime TV, and which now only exists as a last posting on a newsletter.

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Last posting posted its time to post up at last. We do hope you enjoyed this little canter – we look forward to bursting into your inbox with some very hefty offerings shortly, but whoever said there was anything wrong with keeping it light and breezy. Do keep sending in photos for a great chance to win a delectable bottled prize. Photos should be sent in to editorial@the-fence.com, which is also where you can pitch us and ask any pressing editorial questions. Any issues with the website or the mag can be directed to support@the-fence.com instead.

A reminder that now is the moment to subscribe to the print mag – the first 10 of you lovely lot will get more mag for your money than we’ve ever offered. Issues 24, 25, 26 and 27 along with the new fella. Agatha Christie was the first Western woman to stand up on a surfboard.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter with notions. Several of them. We are firmly in lying-down season and the photos are flying in. Issue 28 doing the rounds of summer holidays in this most wonderful time of year. Here it is as it sips on a cold beverage in Spain, takes a tour of the White House, makes a stop in Greece, takes a sunny train ride and is tipped off as cool by an anonymous savant. It then took the time to once again dominate the scenery of the Lake District and takes in the loneliest hostel in the country.

As we sally forth into August, let’s keep the mood high with a great deal: everyone who buys a print subscription today will get Issue 25, 26 and 27 alongside the current issue – eight magazines for the price of four. But this will only be for the first 15 people who sign up, so get in while the iron is hot.

Four Free Mags!

Speaking of heat, do remember that all our best takes on summer in London are contained in the bi-weekly and elegant package of Capital Letter. Last week’s dispatch was especially varied: Ridley Road, Limehouse, Mayfair and Kempton. Sign up for obvious reasons.

Get The Capital's Only Letter

It’s wonderful to see everyone enjoying Issue 28, but we are looking forward to 29 – always one step ahead around here – and specifically to Fencepost. We’re asking you: what are your funniest first date stories? The best entries will be featured in the next issue, and please remember: funny stories only. Finally, as you must surely know by now, we also run a photographic competition for our sins. Drop us your entry at editorial@the-fence.com for a chance to win a bottle of something glamorous and a prime spot in the newsletter. But let’s move onto the reason we are all here.

Jaffa Cakes Are Biscuits

There’s been a lot in the media lately about one Jason Arday, the Cambridge professor once hailed for being the university’s youngest black professor and one of its few autistic ones, is now under fire for accusations of plagiarism and tall tales. We particularly enjoy his (not officially falsified) double claim to have run both 30 marathons in 35 days and 600 miles in six in order to raise an ever-shifting sum of money for charity. Perhaps best of all was Arday’s response to the Guardian’s querying of these claims: ‘To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me… why would I lie?’

But as good as it, we prefer the stories propounded by one Sacha Jafri, the subject of 28’s mammoth feature ‘Impossibility is a Myth’ because for grandeur they are hard to match. Jafri is a man who has claimed his Eton headmaster took a Picasso of his wall to hang up one of his teenage works; that his clients include Obama, Bills both Gates and Clinton, DiCaprio, Beckham and Clooney; that he travelled to Sudan with the last of these to make a film called Sand and Sorrow. The last of these tales is funniest – Jafri once claimed that flying over the Sudanese desert he remarked to the star, ‘Wow, the sand is really red here’, before George turned to him, background music presumably swelling, and said ‘No, Sacha, that’s blood’.

The full story behind these tall tales and the game of international con-man-ship they connect to are still only readable in print. Get moving now.

Pitch Me Till’ I’m Gone

The magazine world is a perverse one because he we are, mid-fifth heatwave of the summer asking for your winteriest pitches… but so it goes. We are on the hunt for pieces for Issue 30, the big three oh. If you have a great story, something insidery, something no one else is talking about, do please send it our way on editorial@the-fence.com.

But! Before you do anything and start pitching us a piece of armchair analysed psycho-geography based on an academic’s thesis set in Papua New Guinea, do please have a read of the pitch guide. It will save us all time and effort.

We look forward to our inbox ringing off the hook.

When the Going was Good

This week, an insider from Vice has gone on the record about the fall of what was once the coolest outlet around. We ran a similar story about a similar sort of place in Issue 4: ‘When I started there, my publication was a darling of new media. In the open-plan office, beer was plentiful. Most people did not start work before 10:30 AM. Everyone had shagged; everyone did drugs with each other. You could progress from intern to managing editor in a few years, if you slept with the right person, and liked cocaine.’ It is one of dozens of insider pieces we’ve done, including on sex work, filmmaking, modelling and jury participating.

One for Sorrow

James Ramsden’s tour of restaurant ghosts from the current issue is now online. James tracks back through the recesses of past ventures throughout the capital: setting up Pidgin in Hackney, before traversing the borders of central London with both Magpie and Daka Daka. James does a brilliant stock take of the better and worse moments of setting and keeping alive a series of much-loved and much-missed restaurants: ‘Magpie wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t good enough. It’s especially true now, but even ten years ago, you couldn’t afford to get off to anything but a racing start in central London. When you’re raiding your personal savings to make payroll at the end of the first month, something has gone terribly wrong.’

An Evening to Remember

Now for a message from our friends at Valemark – if you’d like to take an advert with us and reach more than 63,000 eyeballs then drop an email to the editor at cb@the-fence.com to discuss rates.

Here’s the truth: London is full of interesting people you’ll never ever meet. How do you end up at dinner with six strangers who are actually worth the evening? Valemark’s Tables is built for you: curious, good company, fond of a wide-ranging conversation. Every guest is vetted by our team, and each table is seated with people seeking the same thing you are. It’s next Thursday and the Thursdays after. Apply for a seat here.

Missed a spot

There’s a video doing the rounds of Nana Patole, the Indian politician and a member of the Indian National Congress Party, having his feet washed by senior members of congress.

Cormac Kehoe Runs the Government

We were interested to see that Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown on ‘dodgy businesses’ on high streets though a little less pleased that he only mentioned betting and vape shops. As anyone worth their body’s salt – meaning everyone who has read our Cormac’s latest incredible investigation in Issue 28 – knows, the real shiftiness is to be found in the souvenir stores, especially anything ‘Harry Potter’ branded. It seems Burnham has taken the hint, but not taken it far enough

These unofficial tat stores are a nightmare and have been used as a fascinating channel for moving money for some time now. It’s unclear how Burnham hitting his ‘give more power to local authorities’ button again will shake things up, but if it does we hope the remit widens. With the recent news that potter fans managed to move an entire infrastructure project to protect the ‘grave’ of a fictional (and annoying) CG character, it has become clear that their power needs to be curbed. We hope the PM will take this into account, or at least begin spreading the rumour that Dobby’s final wish was the rapid completion of HS2 at no extra cost. It’s what he would have wanted…

In Case You Missed It

Death of a spy.

Lost goose in London.

Rodney Dangerfield’s short lived rap career.

Jude Bellingham’s grandfather on mastermind.

More goose content.

Ongoing Reform trolling.

And Finally

We must thank a reader from Canada for putting us on to this marvellous five-minute gem, which you can watch on the country’s fantastic National Film Board player. This might be a first outing for the CNFB – so, hat’s off to our man in Toronto for the tip! And, thank God for a new resource to dredge through for OTF. Onto the show.

Larry Bauman’s 1985 documentary, produced as part of a series titled ‘Vignettes that Move’, follows the moving of a Saskatchewan grain elevator across a snow-covered prairie. It is nine storeys and 200 tonnes, and the venture basically spells an immoveable feast. In short, they are trying to get it from Greenstreet to Marshall, both of which to mystified English eyes at least, look totally identical. Cue a gargantuan effort for apparently no major outcome. But the result is at once very beautiful and very funny. Teetering on the back of an open truck, the structure is comically outsized, and a wonderful testament to strange human invention and skill. It is so enormous that at one point, the nose of the truck tips back beneath the weight of the elevator. Nonetheless, they persevere, and the job gets done. The elevator is moved, bouncing up and over the snowy side, proudly pulled towards its new home. The word ‘PIONEER’ is fittingly emblazoned on its facade. It is oddly moving. Incidentally, what is a grain elevator? Do we have that here?

The film has a slight James Benning vibe, and definitely a Man Alive touch, and so a fitting and proper offering to the And Finally altar. There are other vignettes on the Arctic sea creatures, train robbers, schooners and steam organs. It is not just a treasure trove, but a veritable mine.

https://www.nfb.ca/film/canada_vignettes_move/

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It is with the sparkling possibility of a burgeoning short-form video gold mine that we shut shop on the latest run of Off the Fence. If you are still wanting, why not sign up to our sister series, Capital Letter?

Do remember that there are 15 spots for a multi-bag TF subscription, so do move quickly to the shop page here. In any case, keep us in the loop with your high days and holidays at editorial@the-fence.com, and don’t stray too far from home between now and the next newsletter mailout. Or do, but make sure to snap a photo of the issue on your travels. There are more species of beetles than any other animal: 400,000 of them.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that zigs when you think we will zag.

As the most leisurely month of the year stretches ahead, there is no better time to indulge in a subscription which would start with our latest (exceptional) Issue 28 – recently seen sunning itself on a beach in Portugal, sitting upfront on the way to Hong Kong, and gallivanting around Rome like a young Audrey Hepburn. It’s been seen alongside another magazine on a writer’s desk, underneath the north London sky, primed at St Pancras, on the NY subway and at the West Cork Model Village.

People really are saying it’s the greatest issue yet, and that the Shetland Separatists piece (soon to come online) must be a (very) early April Fool’s Joke (it’s not).

Subscribe Today to Score the Mag

Armed with your issue you will then also be able to enter our fiercely competitive quarterly competition to win a bottle of something sparkling - those already reading in enviable locations do send your snaps to editorial@the-fence.com or tag us on our assorted social media.

Now let us get into the business of the day as we share some exciting news, assess a case of lethal workwear and contemplate an escape to the country, as well as the fate of our fifth prime minister of the decade.

The Thing Is Impossible

Our biggest investigation yet - an expansive feature looking into the staggering case of Sacha Jafri and millions in missing charity donations from a record-breaking auction in 2021 – was trailed by the Sunday Times over the weekend. You can read Jack Jeffery and Abraham Elton’s excellent piece in the magazine, and do keep an eye out for a more deeply reported digital edition which will be online, and soon.

Hailing the Removals Van

Patrolling Rightmove still throws up the odd gem – this innocent-looking farmhouse in the Lincolnshire Fens does, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be ‘Chunky Muffins’ Swingers Club; but we have particularly enjoyed a new Instagram account called ‘In Search of Home’, which is recommending choice cottages and distressed manses across Britain, nearly always for a song. Check out this Devon verandah and let the reveries commence.

Andy Boshnam

The Burnham Bounce is undeniably real – but only time will tell what strength of political gravity his current trajectory will be subject to. As ever, we are consulting with our evil secretive masters and casting the runes to foretell his fate, and some recent signs are troubling. We’re talking, of course, about the PMs fun and cheery interaction on X with the weaker of the two boshmeisters, Tom Skinner.

As we’ve mentioned before, Skinner is an odd ally for politicians to have given his 2011 conviction for handling £40,000 of stolen goods and his association with a number of fellows not hyper-friendly to a Labour position, not least JD Vance and Robert Jenrick.

Most interestingly has been Skinner’s occasional social media promos for Stevie Hunt, the owner of Hunt’s Waste Management. While there is no suggestion that Stevie Hunt is in any way connected with any criminal activity, he has inherited his recycling business from his uncle, David, regarded by the Metropolitan Police as ‘too big to bring down’.

It would be excessive to demand the resignation of the new PM due to his preference for the wrong internet bosher but… well, let’s say we hope he comes back to the light sooner rather than later.

For Your Consideration

Thank you very much to Jay Rayner, who very generously did a shout-out for this very magazine to his 210,000 Instagram followers, and also to Foster Kamer, who praised us on his Substack for putting on an ‘absolute goddamn clinic for interesting, novel, funny magazine-making’ before highlighting an article format that we stole from Spy magazine.

As ‘X’ becomes more unusable under its maverick owner, we really appreciate those with big platforms (any platforms, really) celebrating the work that we’re doing – it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

If you’ll permit some boasting, people love The Fence – just look at this list of well-wishers below. Do support us today by signing for a subscription.

Go Onnnnnnn

For Your Safety

What is it about teched-up glasses that just can’t catch on? Since the days of the failed Google Glass, tech and fashion companies keep throwing themselves at the wall on this one, and even though the Meta glasses of recent release have easily proved the most successful iteration yet – with over seven million of the things already sold – but something about them always seems off. Are we really to believe they will become the next Airpods? We think not.

And the biggest part of the problem is that it really doesn’t matter how great it supposedly is to be able to ask – without the excruciating inconvenience of lifting a few hundred grams of glass and metal – what kind of dog it is that has just pissed on your shoes in Brockwell Park. The idea of glasses that record everything will always be associated with creeps and surveillance – and recent events aren’t slowing that down. One of the most remarkable features of the recent student protests in India (there are many remarkable things about it) is that one of the favoured tools of the violent police response has been Meta’s silly glasses, red recording light predictably disabled. Who your customers are often tells others everything about your product and there’s really no worse collection than rich fools, perverts and the police. Or perhaps this is what they call a target market.

Challengers

TF columnist Sophie Heawood returns in our blockbuster summer issue, with another dating dispatch taking on the famously sultry readings in Soho, bringing back BDE and, this time, a bottle of Crémant.

Buzz Buzz

Is Elliot Doyle a parody? Is he somehow real? Either way this WASP art advisor is our new favourite Instagram freak. The ‘Swiss boarding school’, the sedulously gelled hair, it’s all absolutely perfect.

An Invitation to Lord Mansfield’s Demense

Now for a quick message from our friends at the most stylish newspaper in the world.

Experience the Financial Times come to life at the FT Weekend Festival, taking place on Saturday 5 September at Kenwood House Gardens in London or online. A festival for curious minds, enjoy world-class journalism, inspiring speakers, culture, food and live experiences in one unforgettable day.

Join Richard E. Grant, Paul Smith, Mary Beard, Peter Capaldi, Angela Hartnett, Fiona Shaw and many more. One ticket. Ten stages. Unlimited curiosity. Save 15% with code FTxFence at the checkout: ft.com/festival

The Devil Wears Zara

The struggle for heatwave-appropriate office attire may be fickle, but recently it has taken an almost lethal turn as evidenced by a viral pair of palazzo trousers from Zara. The £25.99 ‘Flowing Wide-Leg Trousers’ have an elasticated waistband, two handy front pockets, and may cause you to get stuck on an escalator, stack it in your driveway, on a pavement, or even break your wrist. Apparently unfazed by the reams of casualties Zara still seems to be selling them, so for whatever masochistic reason you might choose to nab a pair in Terracotta, Cosmopolitan has helpfully put together a guide on how to come out unscathed.

DINKWADs

While we hope you are all off reclining on some fair isle with a large umbrella-topped drink at hand, did it occur to you your dog could be too? Forbes has reported recently that the global pet-friendly accommodation market is now worth more than $17.8 billion, with luxury hospitality leaning into to what has been dubbed ‘Resort Anthropomorphism’, the emotional ties causing the inclination to humanise your pets – namely by DINKWADs (Double Income, No Kids, With A Dog). Now commonplace, services on offer include bespoke pet room-service and dedicated dog butlers as well as massages and early-morning yoga.

In Case You Missed It

The story of the man who was born into slavery but also buried 2,963 Confederate soldiers, marking each grave.

The last New York horse track.

Our junior editor has a production of Endgame in Edinburgh for those at the festival.

Unboxing rare business cards.

Beautiful grave.

Tour de France cyclists raiding cafes for wine.

The new trending anti-ageing ingredient is cadaver skin.

And Finally

It is high summer and we are all in the mood for a jolly jape across Europe or perhaps just a simple countryside gander. By this point we are probably less in the mood to discuss other people’s holiday plans. But such was not always the case! ‘Will you go on holiday this year?’ asks the news reporter to passers-by in Dublin’s city centre in 1973 and literally everyone who is not absolutely ancient says yes. ‘Of course I will!’ (a man with mutton chops and a white suit). ‘On the Continent somewhere!’ The street is practically teeming with people eager to talk about it. France, Corfu, Spain are all options, as is ‘Caravan’, announced by a small boy in a flash, shiny raincoat. Sounds nice. A woman with stripped blonde hair and a high-neck blouse is going to Morocco. Last year she went to the Caribbean – sounds very nice!

Ah, back in the day when people were pleased to be asked about their holidays. Now, colleagues and friends cough out a cup of scorn when we fall on this small talk crutch. Bring back humble discussion of holiday fever – and proud excitement for the Eurotrash tour about to unfold. We want to hear people wax on about their forthcoming promenade of St Tropez, Cannes, Malaga and Monaco with panache and joy.

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And it is with panache and joy that we close out this week’s newsletter. Do bag a mag at the link just here. In the meantime, throw us a summery thought at editorial@the-fence.com or else a summery complaint at support@the-fence.com. From 1896 to 1936, the Olympics held competitions for music, painting, sculpture, literature and architecture. They gave out 151 medals in total.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that welcomes heatwaves, but within reason. We will have a slightly slimmer newsletter for the next few weeks as we send Issue 29 to design. This is a reminder that we do have space for a late-entry five-star feature, so if you have one handy, do drop a line to editorial@the-fence.com and we will attend to you there.

Issue 28 continues to be seen around and about. It has received a dose of praise from legendary art director, Robert Newman and it’s been lined up against a wall in Soho. It’s been pictured alongside some quite doleful cats in a trendy apartment and at WH Smith Victoria. Here it is enjoying a slap-up breakfast and here at the San Francisco Art Book Fair and now sunning it up on the island of Hydra. It’s all happening!

Keep sending your best snaps through to editorial@the-fence.com or tagging us on social media, and you might win a bottle of Bollinger, an OTT reward from a small magazine.

On that note, there is a declining bundle of Issue 28s left at the depot, so please bag yours, or even better, score a subscription at the link below.

I Want The Fence

Our sister title Capital Letter has a review of the latest (excellent) outpost of the Jackson Boxset mini-empire and there are some less positive words for a new bar in Mayfair. It’s really very good and worth signing up for, if we don’t mind saying so ourselves.

As we said, a shorter outing this week, let’s get it going.

The London Fencimonic

Thank you to all the professional classical musicians who have got in touch with us for our planned piece. If you pluck an instrument for money, then we want to hear from you – send through an email to editorial@the-fence.com as we are very keen to hear from a couple more of you.

Homes for Heroes

Phin Jennings writes regularly for Capital Letter and spent months on the long investigation into Stuart Semple, which was the lead feature in the last issue.

Phin and his girlfriend – who is lovely, by the way – placed an ad in the LRB backpages, which we produce below.

Have you got more bedrooms than you know what to do with? You would do well to drop Phin a line, he is a responsible yet charming man who doesn’t deserve to pay four figures a month on the rental market.

No Comment

In light of the Groucho gracing headlines yet again, we feel inclined to remind you of Fonie Mitsopoulou’s fantastic deep dive into the dramatic demise of the once-lauded members club from issue 27 – available to read on our shiny new website.

Fuck Literature – How Were the Sausages?

Alongside our shiny new website, we have a shiny new columnist, John Niven. The O Brother author met Wendy Erskine – Belfast’s answer to Joan Didion – for supper in her hometown, taking on the elegant menu at OX. Pull up a chair.

Get Off the App

Fergus Butler-Gallie’s brilliant piece on Rory Stewart and his big bet is now on Instagram in its entirety. You can read it here. This piece really is too juicy to be ‘socials-first’ so we don’t really know what we’re doing with regards to editorial strategy… the heat is getting to us.

Soup to Nuts

It’s a family affair in John Banville’s latest piece, paying tribute to a beloved Dublin institution alongside his daughter, Ellen Quinn Banville. Charting the lifespan of Dunne & Crescenzi, an effusively charming Italian restaurant operating since the turn of the century, the pair recommend just about anything on the menu, settling in, and, for certain guests, sitting with your back to the wall.

In Case You Missed It

Some excellent work on the hideous Astley Warehouses, courtesy of Zoe Bread.

Emily Wilson reviews Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

An enjoyable piece from Jay Caspian Kang, about downwardly mobile children living at home with their parents in their 20s and 30s.

Why Ali G is no longer funny.

And Finally

One figure from that time who still stands the test of time is Gordon Ramsay, who in 2026 looks comfortably a decade younger than he did in the 1990s. All of his early TV programmes are as good as it gets, but for our money, Beyond Boiling Point might be the finest of them all, and the whole series is available to dig into here.

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That is indeed that for this week, and we will be back in a week’s time – all technical questions are to be directed to support@the-fence.com. The oldest living Olympian is the wonderfully named Rhoda Wurtele-Eaves, a Canadian skier who is 104 years young.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that once had a great fondness for a painter – and engraver. What a week it has been. The World Cup is over, Andy Burnham is now officially PM and Issue 28 has powered into its second week of existence. Actually, the new issue has not simply enjoyed a state of existence, but has actually thrived. Everyone is talking about it. On Twitter, Peter Hitchens waded into our discussion of the forthcoming civil war. Jack Jeffery explained his and Abraham Elton’s 8,000-worder on Sacha Jaffri. Bluesky loved Cormac’s piece on the souvenir shops of London and their funding links to Afghanistan.

The new website, engineered by our co-founder Will Pelham with the assistance of an unnamed robotic colleague really does look magnificent – do have a look at it here.

And, we’ve received more photos of the issue than we can possibly keep up with, including at Pret, beneath a neon-pink bus, dominating Good News on Berwick Street and beneath the lit-up signs of TK Maxx. It’s here with a British short hair cat called Sid; on the way to Mallorca; in a pub, of course; enjoying some video art; on the island of Hydra and in a forest in Wales.

Please send all relevant images to editorial@the-fence.com for a chance to win something very special indeed. A bottle of Bollinger, no less. We really do know to treat you.

In the meantime, remember that you can still take out a print subscription to enjoy all the trimmings of our imagination in their full, printed glory. Remember that if you subscribe you will get all the magazines before they arrive in the shops.

Sign Up Today

Speaking of shops, Issue 28 is very much in situ at all the major WH Smiths, resplendent on the shelves at Gatwick and Paddington – so do pick up a copy there if you’re in transit.

To business. This week we’re saluting a President.

Fixin’ for some Nix’n

‘Nixon’s Back!’ and he may as well have a giant robot body. The OG Oval Office Shifty Grifter has been enjoying an unlikely renaissance of late as Gen Z TikTokers are absolutely falling in love with ‘Nixon Edits’. And it’s hard to disagree with them. Over half a century on from Watergate, who really cares any more? Why would you care when your only interaction with tricky dicky is this beautifully edited masterpiece, or this Don Draper intro’d montage that’s so bursting with American patriotism we almost want to stand up and salute across the Atlantic. We particularly enjoy this interestingly forgetful compilation of his ‘top 5 career moments’ and an emotional NixonxPhil Collins collab.

What makes this weirder, and just a little more concerning, is that the main source of this Nixon aura farming is none other than his own presidential library, applying several different recent trends to old footage of the prez, like varnishing the rotting corpse of a toad. Their official Instagram account is pumping them out like no tomorrow, along with a line of Nixon merch containing his old slogan, ‘Nixon, now more than ever.’ It’s another little spotlight on the strange world of presidential libraries, institutions that through various back channels do tend to receive some federal funding and largely exist to create highly selective images of their respective guy and his view of American history. And yes, every president gets one, even Gerald Ford.

So there it is, the alt-right kiddies love Nixon. It would be the stupidest decision to come out of the states recently, if this bloke in New York hadn’t spent a hundred grand and broken his foot making a crap statue of Charlie Kirk.

Tolka Row

Brenda Fricker, the first Irish actress to win an Oscar, has died at the age of 81. Fricker quickly established herself in roles spanning the breadth of beloved British and Irish television, from Tolka Row to Coronation Street, and five seasons of Casualty. She is perhaps best known for her scene-stealing role as ‘pigeon lady’ In Home Alone 2, her endearing sincerity catching the slapstick film off guard. Adverse to being typecast, other notable turns included a grieving mother in The Field to a tabloid-obsessive in So I Married an Axe Murderer and a brothel madam in Painted Angels – as well as stints at the Royal Court, National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company. Characterful and cavalier, she didn’t think much of winning an Academy Award, using it as a doorstop, and in one of her last interviews with The Times talked about her disillusionment with filmmaking today, ‘It’s all sober people, just sitting around tables.’

Donna Summer’s Bad Girls

We have noticed that a depressingly large number of people have taken advantage of a bug in our old website that allows you to buy a print subscription overseas under a UK plan. This bug has now been squished – in the meantime, please do update your subscription here to save yourself the rigmarole of a tedious email from the editor. And if you’re feeling especially penitent, buy a friend a subscription here.

Toot Toot, Beep Beep

Floreat, Floreat

The story of Sacha Jafri starts on the playing fields of Eton, where he was a popular figure, a legend on the cricket pitch and all the rest of it. One of his peers writes in:

‘Two of my contemporaries are now in prison for killing family members. Chris Francis was captain of the golf team, and murdered his grandmother and aunt with a brick. Matthew Corry went on to teach at the school, and was recently remanded in Broadmoor after murdering his mother. Prince Dipendra – ‘Dippy’ – who shot nine members of his family, was a few years above me, otherwise it would be three.’

(There is no suggestion that Sacha Jafri murdered any members of his family.)

Strings to Our Bow

Do you play an instrument in an orchestra? Or by yourself, for money? Are you what might be termed ‘a professional classical musician’? If so, we would love to talk to you for an upcoming piece. It can be anonymous; it could even be on background – it would all be very helpful. Drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com and we will take things from there.

I Keep Dining on My Own

Writing may be a mug’s game these days, but not so long ago, you could make an honest fortune toiling in the content mines – just like NME journo-turned-novelist, Tony Parsons, seen here broadcasting his solo meal at Wilton’s, the iconic St James’s fish restaurant beloved by toffs and oligarchs. We’ve crunched the numbers and this is actually the 15th time (no joke) that Parsons has posted about Wilton’s on Instagram this year – Tony, if you’re listening, we salute you. You’ve earned it.

The More They Feel the More They Buy

While you wait for Clive Martin’s profile of Howard Spooner – the nightclub entrepreneur – why not enjoy his reporting from an advertising networking event from Issue 21? ‘I’m in a draughty old warehouse just off Brick Lane, wearing a lanyard, sipping on a can of blackberry & açaí-flavoured Tenzing, while Ferne McCann from The Only Way Is Essex leads a “breathwork session” for an audience entirely comprised of chief marketing executives, global account managers, senior creative leads and heads of innovation (EMEA region).’ Clive ventured into the annals of capitalist mingling to get to grips with the people who sell us all our worldly possessions.

Love in a Hostile Environment

Zara Meerza’s piece on her family’s immigration to the UK is yet to be put online, but our previous coverage of migration to Britain is up there and waiting to be read. In Issue 24 Claire Considine spoke to asylum seekers and refugees about love and dating. ‘In my time working with and reporting on asylum seekers, I’ve always wondered how feasible it is to maintain a love life in the mayhem.’ She met and spoke to lots of people, including Victor, a boy arriving from Nigeria at a school in Hackney, who ‘decided, in his infinite wisdom, that the best way to woo his crush was to serenade her. In the playground. In front of the entire school. “Oh God, I’m blushing,” he squirms, in a rare break from cloud-like calm. “I sang Ocean Eyes by Billie Eilish. I was a bit rusty so my voice cracked. To this day I can’t listen to that song.”’ Some indignities are universal.

In Case You Missed It

Senator John Kenedy’s exercise bike is named after Margaret Thatcher.

Wild boar babies.

The virtues of a post-literate lifestyle.

Vanessa Bell supported Argentina in the World Cup.

Muhammad Shehada from the ECFR writes for the LRB about Marwan Barghouti.

And Finally

‘Who’s your favourite Beatle?’ is one of those questions that we should all really dread. It speaks to a conversation that is dying on its arse and could only ever have been funny if George Martin asked it mid-recording session sometime around the late 60s.

And yet the answer, increasingly, might be Ringo. To be clear, we’re not judging them on moral grounds – close inspection suggests they’re all a little shaky on this front as seems roughly par for the course for 60s rock stars. But more cynically, did anyone play it better than the man who got his nickname because he wore four rings? He’s made piles of money, famously never practiced, avoided most of the in-band fighting and in later life found a much better plastic surgeon than Paul could lay his hands on.

And now he just spends his time being mental online. His Instagram has long been a treasure trove on this front. There was a brief period where he experimented with early filters, his truly artful series of silent posts and this haunting request to buy his ‘new CD’. But recently, he’s been popping up in stranger and stranger places. We particularly enjoyed this appearance he made on a livestream where his Gen Z host had absolutely no idea who he was.

But nothing can beat his recent appearance with Geoguessr superstar Rainbolt. Geoguessr is a simple game where people are dropped somewhere in the world via Google Maps street view function and they have to pinpoint where they are. Bizarrely, such a simple idea has become an international e-sport and has made some of its best players, like Rainbolt, into stars big enough to be able to bring on a Beatle as a kind of fun side attraction. It’s phenomenal stuff.

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Ringo bingo bango, it’s another week in the book folks. If you need us, we’ll be here, and by here we mean editorial@the-fence.com. Do keep pitching, and do keep those pictures streaming in. If you’ve had any technical issues, let us know on support@the-fence.com. Otherwise, we wish you a week of sturdy resistance in the face of buffeting winds. World Cup winner Lamine Yamal’s father was born in 1992.

All the best,

TF

Read It Here

My investigation traces the history of the group’s mid-2000s takeover of the souvenir trade in the West End, their expansion across the UK, and follows the money they used to fuel it all the way to Afghanistan.

It’s a story about how the British state has lost the ability to cope with bad actors, and the effect this has had on the built environment – and the billions now lost in tax.

It is, I think, a profoundly important story because it reveals the origin of a problem (the deterioration of the public space) which is fueling so much alienation, and which really should be so easy to fix.

Unpicking this tangled web took an awful lot of time, effort, and money. I urge you to sign up to a paid subscription to support this type of journalism.

Subscribe to The Fence

In any case, please do share this story far and wide, it’s a story of national importance.

Many Thanks,

Cormac

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that makes a magazine four times a year.

We do hope you’re enjoying Issue 28, which should now be with all UK subscribers. From our perspective, we are unbelievably proud of it. It contains Cormac Kehoe’s first solo byline in the magazine for starters, as well as the longest and most ambitious feature we have ever published. Sophie Heawood and John Niven’s columns return, and alongside them stars both new and old: Fergus Butler-Gallie, Clive Martin, Lucy Peett, James Ramsden, Zara Meerza and Stuart McGurk. But what might make this the best one yet is that alongside all this gold, it has one of the most bumper ETC sections in yonks, covering campness, civil war, abstract mathematics, Reform and the stock exchange. It’s fizzing with life.

Issue 28, Please

People are absolutely loving it too. There has been praise already from Paul Lay and David James. The magazine has been taken to the Great British Seaside and it’s been on Nicholas Morgan’s laptop and it’s been given the big five stars from the Guardian.

All of these people got their mitts on the mag as they are subscribers and didn’t have to suffer the ignominy of walking to the shops in the baking heat. You can join them here.

Sign Up for The Year

After the successful victory of Tim ‘Sycamore Gap’ Walker, which saw him take home a very fine bottle indeed, the race opens up once more. Saddle your steeds and send us the best pictures of the magazine ‘in the wild’ (again, that doesn’t technically mean with nature, but animal and landscape pictures are always stunners). All pictures to be sent in to editorial@the-fence.com. Get bold, get creative, there’s fizz on the line.

So, with the fanfare at full blast, let’s have a mosey down the red carpet of our making.

What’s the Story, Morning Rory?

During the 2024 US Presidential Election, Rory Stewart made an infamous prediction that Kamala Harris would romp into the White House. What is less well-known is that he bet quite a significant amount of money on her victory – ‘ the maximum I was allowed’ as per this piece in the Daily Express. Well, how much is too much for this centrist pin-up?

Multiple well-placed insiders have told us that this sum of money was £100,000. Stewart denied the story when we put it to him.

If Only the Walls Could Talk

Evgeny Lebedev was memorably profiled by Miles Ellingham and Cormac Kehoe two summers ago, and the piece still stands up very well indeed. Now his Hampton Court estate, Stud House, is up for sale for £25 million, which seems somewhat undervalued for such a ‘unique’ property. Do any of our readers have any memories of memorable visits to Stud House? We know that some of you do…

Pitch, Please

We have a slot apiece in ‘facts’ and ‘features’ for the autumn issue, and if you have some brilliant up your sleeve, then we would love to hear from you – send through your best to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll take it from there.

Am I Allowed to Laugh?

News this week has invited some uneasy side glances about what is OK to find amusing, and what is straight-up disturbing. If you’re toeing the line of online etiquette vis-a-vis humour, might we suggest perusing the guide published in Issue 8 by Josh Dell? He knocks your tweet and text compositions into shape. ‘The idea of “leaving” haha behind is a point increasingly made, with lol often shamed as a millennial hangover.’ Arguably, much has changed since the guide was first written. ‘Lol’ is now cooler than ‘haha’ – and certainly than ‘he he’ or ‘hu hu’. But may we also wager ROTOLO, the Italian version of lol, and which is surprisingly handy in the annals of WhatsApp, if nothing else than to break things up? Also, ROFL and LMFAO. Or, even a simple ‘omg’ (lower-cased). Nothing wrong with the classics. While we’re on the topic, the laughing emoji feels fresher than it did in 2021, as does the laughing cat, the latter a very slightly sweeter version of the former, and one that is especially useful with your most unbiddable friends.

I Hate Garden Gnomes

In better media news, Sirin Kale’s journalism has once again been leading the headlines with her revelations about former BBC star Ashley Cain’s Twitter conduct. It’s a brilliant piece and pretty vile reading, but what it has proved to us is that nothing sets the internet alight as much as a hate watch these days. There are, would you believe it, whole YouTube channels dedicated to compiling football fans’ reactions to their teams losing, just so their rivals can laugh at them from their sofas. Well, it’s the same with Cain, who has long had a legion of haters who gathered on sites which all true muckrakers will know. They greeted the article with sheet jubilation and a slurry of rather creative insults, although several comparisons between Ashley Cain and garden gnomes felt a little harsh to us.

Lindisfarne Away Days

Are all football chants born equal? Unlikely – take the Viking rowing. A Norway supporter Emil Anners Lappen went on Sky this week to clarify that the conceit of the whole thing is based on abject lies. ‘It drives me crazy,’ he said. ‘The Vikings did not row across the Atlantic – they sailed.’ He conceded that they did row down rivers, but the point stands that doing a group mime of rowing a boat is built on shaky ground.

Baby, You’re a Firework

Although we at The Fence like to consider ourselves the last word in cultural commentary, we can also admit when we are wrong. Thank you Ben, for correctly identifying Orlando Bloom – narrowly ousting Tom Hiddleston – as the defining uncool celebrity menacing public life. Reasons, need we list them, include being divorced from Katy Perry (somehow worse than being married to Katy Perry), the viral 2016 naked paddleboarding excursion, his day in the life from the Sunday Times (starting with 20 minutes of Buddhist chanting every morning), among many, many others.

Et ITV2, Brute?

Another year, another series of Love Island, which is now approaching its bitter end. But, if you haven’t yet had a proper fill of Casa Amor, go back and read about Snake Denton’s adventures auditioning for Love Island in Issue 25. It was a desperate measure in response to desperate times: ‘Although I believed I was the kind of boy who liked bums, boobs, and Megan Barton-Hanson, I wondered why sex left me cold, and why intimate relationships with women filled me with dread.’ It might leave a bad taste.

In Case You Missed It

A jungle set in a Japanese rice field.

Greenscreen Brezhnev.

A beautiful poem.

Incredible work is being done with the ChinARoonie.

The Chinese graduate accused of being Mexico’s ‘fentanyl king’.

And Finally

Readers of this mail-out will remember when we covered the truly bizarre film that was Sean Connery’s Sir Billi: a truly bizarre highland romp. Well, we have another film for you which we feel is a phenomenal way to spend one of these warm summer eves. Gather some friends, have plenty of drinks and when you are good and hooned, stick on Love on a Leash. It’s a rom-com about a man who is transformed into a dog by some kind of nondescript curse and falls in love with a beautiful woman. There were no beautiful dogs left, unfortunately.

One of its strengths is actually how it looks. It does not suffer from the fluorescent lighting of Netflix series of the past ten years, nor does it do that ‘Prestige TV’ thing of blurring the background in almost every frame, which makes it look like all characters are in a perennial Zoom meeting in a home they don’t want to show their colleagues. Or a square Instagram photo from 2013 where only a tiny circle in the middle is clear, and it’s very important to use every possible filter. Apart from the fact that this new obsession with blurring everything over a character’s shoulder looks crazy, it’s frustrating because we want to see the set! Love on a Leash does just that, and what an offering it makes. The set pieces are fabulous, complete with long noughties items including XL pearl necklaces draped over bedside tables, circular shopping racks in pink-tinted malls, aqua-marine lamps, lime-green walls and hemp curtains. There are also some wonderful camera angles, including having us perched on the parquet floor watching a pair of sling-back kitten heels skulk back and forth in an argument scene, as well as from the corner of a microwave (?) handily cutting off the corner of the beautiful girl’s head while she’s on the phone to a friend sitting in a pitch black room save for the spotlight on her face.

Everyone likes bad good films – Oppenheimer comes to mind in view of another Nolan summer – but what about the good bad ones?

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We will be back on Thursday to launch a very big story. In the meantime, please do send through photos to editorial@the-fence.com and please send all admin-related questions to support@the-fence.com. Botanically speaking, bananas are berries.

All the best,

TF

I’m very pleased to announce that after three months of daubing and dabbing, Issue 28 lands today, and will be with subscribers tomorrow and Saturday, and in shops next week – which is the way it should be.

This issue is, of course, the best one yet, and there are three stories within that we’re incredibly proud of.

Buy Issue 28

In 2021, Sacha Jafri made what was then the world’s largest painting. Titled The Journey of Humanity, it sold for $62 million at an auction in Dubai. It made headlines around the world, with a Frenchman called André Abdoune purchasing it, and with the proceeds going to charities helping children.

But as we reveal for the first time, the money never changed hands. In what is the most expansive and ambitious feature we’ve ever published, Jack Jeffery and Abraham Elton tell the story of Jafri and Abdoune, a tale that ranges from the playing fields of Eton to the Parisian banlieues.

Many of you will be familiar with the American Candy stores and ‘Harry Potter’ shops that litter this country. Cormac Kehoe uncovers the Afghan syndicate behind the shops, and details how the American money that came to rebuild a shattered country flew out of Kabul airport, over the Hindu Kush and back onto British high streets.

In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Howard Spooner was the club king of Chelsea, with venues like Embargo, Crazy Larry’s, Public and the Leopard Lounge, running with villains, toffs and princes. If you like royal gossip or you devoured London Falling then you’ll love this Clive Martin classic.

Elsewhere, Sophie Heawood and John Niven return as columnists, Fergus Butler-Gallie ponders the question of Rory Stewart, Daniel Shailer meets the Shetland separatists and we’ve got the bounciest and broadest ETC section in years.

I’m also delighted to be carrying more advertising in this print issue. The Fence is a magazine that considers itself very much within the world, not set against it. We have placements from MagCulture, Energiraven, Minor Attractions and the FT Weekend Festival, and they have been made in collaboration with the editorial team and Studio Mathias Clottu, who has done a brilliant job on making this issue sparkle.

There’s much more besides – it’s the best one yet, let me remind you – and I can’t wait for you all to read it.

Buy Issue 28

We’ll be back on Tuesday with a conventional OTF, and please do get in touch with any queries or questions. If you’d like to know more about the articles above or see a media pack, please do email me at cb@the-fence.com.

All the best,

Charlie

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that tops and tails.

Congratulations are now in order (to us) for the latest issue – 28! It is chock-full of fantastic reported features, golden eggs from our columnists, a lonely hearts page, fabulous fiction, dispatches from all corners of the country – and even a GCSE guide to help you through the exam season. Don’t say we don’t know how to treat you. Cover, standfirst, running text, bylines and illustrated advertisements to come, but in the meantime, remember to get your print subscription by landing on the large, orange button just here.

Sign Up

We are launching the issue on Thursday so everyone who subscribes today will get two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine, which is really living life as it should be. Here’s a lovely image from the fiction section in Issue 28, which fills up the social media box on the CMS and also looks really nice too.

Some exciting news. We are delighted to welcome Alice Lindsell to the team – she joins Rachel Dastgir as an editorial assistant. Alice has written for Capital Letter and the Daily Telegraph and you should follow her on Instagram here.

And, to wet your whistle and summon your appetite, we present our weekly offering of a newsletter.

Sing Your Song

In Issue 11 (how time flies!) Luke Dunne told the story of Michael Flatley’s thriller, Blackbird, a cinematic venture that the tap-dancer wrote, produced, directed and starred in. While at one time the film was so impossible to see that it was more a rumour than a feature film, the whole thing has now been whacked up on YouTube, and very enjoyable it is too, a genuinely terrible film of the type that gets made all too rarely these days.

Look at My Tail

Did you know that there are real-life mermaids all across Britain! It’s absolutely true! John Nugent travelled across Britain to meet them, and you can bone up on the Ariel actuelles here.

Schism!!!!

The big ecclesiastical news is that we may have a papal schism on our hands. People have been excommunicated, words have been had, but for all the excitement it just doesn’t feel all that crazy. What’s happened to the modern world that we can’t even get a proper papal ruck going? Does being schismatic mean nothing??

Times were – those times being the 9th to the 12th century, of course – that papal schisms were proper affairs. Not only did we get full-on wars, but we had antipopes with brilliant names like Calixtus III, Anacletus II and even Anastasius Bibliothecarius, many of them backed by warring kings and emperors. And sure, this modern lark has numbers –1,500 or so priests, possibly as many as 200,000 followers – but where’s the grit?

Even the few recent antipopes, and there are more than you might think, have been a bit of a washout. A number of them have been, surprise, surprise, accused of certain abuses of their pastoral care and many others are rather uninteresting cranks. Aside from a few different claims to be the future Peter II, and what a claim that is, we here at The Fence feel the Catholic church needs to up its schism game and hope to see improvements pronto.

Neil the Seal

For those who remember (and miss) Freya the Walrus, we have good news. The important role of large aquatic mammals causing chaos in suburbia is being heartily taken up by Neil the Seal out in Tasmania. Of course there is hand-wringing that could be done, is he a threat to public safety, is he in fact, very lonely, etc, etc. We don’t really care. For our money, he’s a bloody great seal that, best of all, is terrorising Aussies, giving us all this fantastic content of them chatting to, and reasoning with the beast, in the best possible accent for the situation.

An Affair to Remember

It seems love is in the air across the Atlantic as New York was rocked by outlandish romantic declarations last week. On Wednesday morning a couple of Russian ‘rooftoppers’ climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, unfurling a Pinterest-worthy banner and getting engaged in the process – the entire incident wryly commentated on by a couple of onlooking air traffic controllers.

Not to be upstaged, two days later pop star Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce got married in front of over a thousand guests at Madison Square Garden – seemingly ignoring our editor’s always sage advice this weekend in The Spectator. Unfazed by taking over the city on one of its busiest summer weekends – rubbing shoulders with Fleet Week, the World Cup and the Fourth of July – cops armed with jauntily formatted binders shut down parts of Manhattan’s main thoroughfares for the event. A staple of any billionaire wedding, a smattering of surprise guests materialised, including Fergie, Hugh Grant, Sacha Baron Cohen, Sir Paul McCartney (who played a rendition of I Want to Hold Your Hand) and Zadie Smith – seen sharing a car to the ceremony with Lena Dunham and Andrew Scott. Adam Sandler was also in attendance, officiating the ceremony and singing an original song written for the couple that sources described to TMZ as ‘humorous yet touching’. Swift’s music of course was featured throughout, the singer-songwriter walking down the aisle to an acoustic rendition of one of her own songs, and the couple are said to have written their own vows, lasting twenty minutes each. Although this may have been Swift’s bread and butter, we can’t help but wonder what Kelce made of the task, given the viral output of his now neglected X account.

Frosty the Snowman

People like to say that being cool doesn’t matter as you get older, which is somewhat true, but anyway… the Swift-Kelce nuptials really did remind us how many incredibly uncool people there are currently in public life. So we thought we’d ask our readers who they think the least cool celebrity there is… our vote, of course, is for Tom Hiddleston, seen here in an advertisement for Ralph Lauren with a CGI bear. Send through all nominations and your detailed rationale behind them to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll tot it up in a future OTF.

Continued Archival Bliss

The sentence ‘the BBC Archive is a treasure trove of amazing old documentaries’ is so obvious that if you’d said it to us between 21 April 2025 and 8 May 2025, we would have responded ‘Is the Pope dead?’ the best version of an old phrase ruined by a rare instance of Vatican efficiency.

All the same, it is hard not to encourage, even order you to watch this one, titled The Last Days on Grande Parade. Here the Beeb made its way around the promenade of Eastbourne, finding the last of its hotels’ permanent residents. We meet Muriel McNabb, who has been occupying the same table for 17 straight years and Mrs Sybil Bloom, a remarkable woman who looks like a cross between Thatcher and Grand Moff Tarkin.

All of these studies have the perfect backdrop of these eerie seaside hotels, with their long-suffering staff and ambitions of their remodelling owners. One of the main hotels, The Burlington, was undergoing a remodeling to appeal to the exciting new ‘conference crowd’, a move that included a gold-coloured ‘Cleopatra Suite’, which the hotel manager assures the camera ‘will certainly have its origins in Egypt’.

As with the best of these archive pieces, it’s a wonderful mix of some rather funny types and a kind of peak-through-the-hands unbearable poignancy. When Mrs Sutherland describes selling off all her possessions and shows off the few knick-knacks she has left as ‘her treasure’ it’s hard not to feel a strange, sonder-riddled sympathy.

Sister Stuff

The Reform MP Sarah Pochin gave a speech on Thursday in the House of Commons detailing her mother being forced to give up a baby in a closed adoption process organised by the Church in the 80s, which Pochin only found out after her mother had died. A rare moment of interest for Pochin, who has become a slightly wayward advocate for women’s rights in Reform; last month, she encouraged England to continue doing well in the World Cup in the hopes it would stave off domestic violence. Anyway, the point is: what must it be like to realise that your lost sister is Sarah Pochin?

It’s not bad enough to have been a victim of one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in Britain – you now have to have a relationship with someone who gave a conference to TalkTV about being driven mad by seeing Asian people on TV. Her Instagram is a veritable treasure trove of troubling sister content, including some edited shorts of her walking around Runcorn Old Town lamenting the existence of Turkish barbers.

In Case You Missed It

It’s here and it’s the piece of the year. Gabriel Pogrund’s piece on George Cottrell might well end Nigel Farage’s political career.

Our new favourite quiz show

Nicolas Sarkozy’s prison diary.

The only England-Mexico pre-match hype that matched how good the game was.

Those American football fans sure can ruin a good thing.

A street preacher fit for Róisín Lanigan’s description.

And Finally

Last week Penelope Keith – a TF-coded icon – died from complications related to cancer. Of course, everyone has been talking about her spectacular run on The Good Life and To the Manor Born, and with good reason, but there is a whole offering of morsels from her very long career on YouTube, including her fantastic advertising work. It’s not the first time we’ve spoken about actors and comedians doing adverts in this newsletter, but this is a particularly compelling pair.

For the Parker Lady Pen (RRP £9.95), Penelope Keith played a school mistress teaching girls ladylike penmanship at the ‘Seurat School for Young Ladies’. Sitting in front of a panel of mint-green flock wallpaper and wearing a Liberty-style, oblong, silk scarf, Keith beams down at 12 pupils from a comically wide desk, before leaping up and pulling a sheet over the blackboard to reveal the lesson of the day, also covering the last lesson, which apparently detailed a list of the best vintage Champagnes. But today, they are moving on to the importance of filling out and signing Daddy’s cheques – with a Lady Pen, of course. ‘Signatures flow with a flourish,’ Keith trills, doing her best quasi-Margot. ‘Chequebooks open, girls!’ Everyone obliges, pulling out sheets from the ‘Richman’s bank’ book. Only one hitch arises. ‘Madam, does one spell pence with a “c” or an “s”?’ Keith smiles knowingly: ‘I don’t think you need to worry about that, dear.’

For slightly more wholesome fare, you might like Keith selling high-fibre soup for Heinz, showing her among a small coterie of children and a large cornucopia of organic vegetables. But, in our humble opinion, the Lady Pen reigns supreme.

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So we dismount from the bucking newsletter bull for another week, our hides hardened and are minds all shaken up. We can still think straight enough to remind you that we are pitchable on editorial@the-fence.com and willing to support you in your needs at support@the-fence.com, as long as its about the magazine. Bob Dylan once sparred with Sean Penn in his private boxing gym in Santa Monica. New Zealand’s has no native mammals other than bats.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows where the national off button is.

This is, excitingly, the last newsletter from us until the launch of the next issue. That’s right, 28 will be greeting the world at the top of next week. It features a brilliant investigation by our own Cormac Kehoe, tales of Shetland separatism and the longest, most ambitious feature we’ve ever published. Get giddy.

Of course, this means that it is an unusually good time to subscribe to The Fence, even more fantastic that it has been through all other moments of human history. This isn’t just because the new issue is coming out, but we also have the final run of discounts on subscriptions for the foreseeable future. 20 tokens have been printed and they are already running out. Soon there won’t be any left so use them up while they’re live.

Buy Now Regret Never

So, what treats do we have in store for you this week? Well, we start off with a story we’ve covered before.

Snakes and Ladders

We reported on the case of Yonas Girma, aka ‘TY from the Wyld’ at the start of the year. An aspiring ‘hood Steve Irwin’ – seen here harassing an anaconda – Girma was charged with murder alongside Ellis Heather, aka Rack5.

It was alleged that they had murdered Stephen Morrison, the brother of musician Morrison, the only white drill artist of any note in the UK. Girma and Heather had both been members of the 1011 crew, based in Notting Hill’s Colville Square, who had chart-topping rapper, Digga D, as their frontman.

After a trial at the Old Bailey, Heather has been convicted of murder and Girma has been found not guilty. The full details of proceedings can be read here – it is pretty astonishing how little coverage the proceedings have received, especially as the details are so lurid (for example, Heather stabbed Morrison under the influence of MDMA, a drug not known to encourage acts of violence.)

Girma gave evidence against Heather at the trial and has been held to have ‘snitched’ on his friend, but more compelling is the ‘self-snitching’ music video played in court, which found that Heather boasted about killing Morrison, which really doesn’t seem like a particularly wise thing to do.

Will Girma make a return to our Instagram reels manhandling some unsuspecting wildlife? We look forward to find out.

The Real Killer

Bruce Robinson, writer and director of Withnail and I and How to Get Ahead in Advertising, is back and better than ever, living in what appears to be one of the most spectacular and bucolic parts of England, and entertaining us all through the heat with some orchestral choreography of some very vocal cockerels and with a only very slightly bad-tempered description of his lifelong devotion to vanilla ice cream. He has always been endlessly interesting and carnivorous in both his interests and output, for instance when he got lively in front of a small film festival audience a few years ago, and then wrote a book about Jack the Ripper. And now, three weeks ago, he announced his intention to take off on ‘Innagram’, and he has certainly pulled through. He’s like standing in front of a lovely and cool fan on a very hot day.

Carts of Darkness

We greatly enjoyed stumbling back across this 2008 documentary following the lives of homeless extreme shopping cart racers out in the States. It’s a surprisingly heartfelt and sad story as well as being pretty bonkers and well worth the watch for the quotes alone: They don’t have shopping carts and hills in jail, That’s what they really take away from you.’

Hoggmanay

One of our real favourites from Issue 27 is now online for all to enjoy – the Guardian’s senior fashion writer Lauren Cochrane saluting the legend that was Pam Hogg.

Known to many simply because of her outstanding and extreme outfits as well as her presence on the glam party scene, Lauren’s piece digs deeper into the life of a legendary fashion designer, whose uncompromising vision, perfectionism and outsider status always kept her on the fringe of mainstream fashion. There are, of course, a great number of anecdotes which are too good to miss:

‘Hogg, who was living in King’s Cross, proceeded to tell all about the previous night, when she got picked up by the police for soliciting. Convincing the officer that she could prove she was, in fact, a fashion designer, she took them to her flat. She was then arrested for possession of a firearm and preventing a lawful and decent burial of a corpse.’

Get reading here.

Buy Now, Pay Later

The heatwave is doing a number on all of us, but especially the Brits who bought a house in a hot country mistakenly assuming that the UK would never fit the bill. How wrong they were! It’s possible that an entire industry and its resulting reality TV programme is about to collapse. We are referring, of course, to A Place in the Sun, which Eve Webster not only watched, but actually lived when she worked for a brief spell on the Channel 4 series. It wasn’t an auspicious start (to insiders, it was known as APITS), but it proved a meaningful and fascinating gig. As the producer said, ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated. Think of this programme: two Brits go abroad, they look round some houses, if they like one, they buy it.’

Lovely Stuff

You could spend £23 on a pack of Malboro Lights from a west London convenience store or on two large glasses of house white wine in a mid-tier central London restaurant. Or you could subscribe to The Fence with the code LRB25 and get four issues of the UK’s only magazine delivered straight to your door.

Enter LRB25 For 25% Off

It really is very good too as you can see from this wall of praise that we have made below from some of the most eminent names on either side of the Atlantic.

Who Is Running the Country?

Once again, Britain is between PMs, something that has become a remarkably common theme in modern British politics. In such times it is usually a comfort to think on that great British institution, the civil service who, come what may, keep the old ship afloat.

That is, it’s comforting to think that if you happen not to know anyone in the civil service. Plugged deep into the matrix as we are, we have no such luck, and recently we have been struck with the frequency with which dear friends in the service hit us up with daytime ‘wuu2’ texts; midday bootycalls for coffee that reveal the extent to which hybrid work is a cover for doing shit all. We’re not exactly work-obsessive over here, but it does get a little worrying when the work rate at an independent magazine and the backbone of the nation seem to be roughly equivalent. So who’s at the wheel? Maybe it is only Jesus, maybe it’s nothing more than hope…

Truly Essential

The Kingsland Road is the most cocktail-bar-laden place in London. Brixton’s phone-free Club Cheek really is worth a visit. Closing galleries in extreme heat should be forbidden. Ignore all cultural reviews in the Guardian and shut up.

No other London newsletter does it like our very own Capital Letter with everything you could possibly want to know about drinking, dancing, art, theatre and everything else in this horrendously wonderful city.

You should be reading it here.

It’s Blue, Actually

Andy Burnham’s home turf has had much good rap in the past two weeks, but not here at The Fence. In our ranking of ceremonial counties in Issue 26, Lancashire duly suffered for its ‘historic association with Manchester, the worst city in the country, perhaps even the world.’ If Burnham is on your mind, you might also be enjoying the competition of down-to-earth-ness currently playing out, which has been unexpectedly covered most doggedly by Russell Kane doing TikTok impressions of Burnham’s man-of-the-people routine.

In Case You Missed It

Mary Berry look-a-like enquiry.

What Keir Starmer eats for breakfast.

CeeLo Green’s fit checks are something special.

Ivy Wolk’s advice column.

Back when Men were Men.

Having a cup of tea at the lido.

A reminder of Jimmy Mac’s drinking advice ahead of the big game tomorrow.

And Finally

The Rare Film Archive proves itself again as a wonderful repository for wayward B-movies. There’s some outstanding Italian fare on there, not least H2S (1969), a European tale of an alternative reality in which a very chic regime is promptly deposed by a legion of revolutionary students. We’re told it’s despotic by the streams of sheeple clad in white. The regime actually seems to be managed by a squad of young women playing sort of agents of the guard, but with jaunty sailor hats and mini skirts. At one point, the born-yesterday hero sits in a waiting room in anticipation of a medical exam led by a woman in stilettos on a seat that is just a naked mannequin. Then we see a few cuts of mid-century furniture before all the young people rise up, allowing the protagonist to run away and live in an Alpine igloo with a girl he met in the thick of political upheaval. This also proves fraught, but we won’t spoil the perfectly Italian ending.

There’s also some only fractionally less bombastic English stuff, too. Devil Doll (1963) follows the story of an American journalist, Mark English (it’s already getting complicated), set on exposing the tricks of the magician The Great Vorrelli. But, English quickly finds himself in a web of lies and stolen identities that emerge when the doll starts to make designs on his heiress girlfriend, Marianne. A good start, and an enjoyable trope, too. There are, of course, some immediate questions raised with the conceit, the most thorny of which being why an editor would send a journalist to do an exposé of someone whose career is predicated on the free admission of deception. But, no matter – it works for narrative purposes, and the first third is excellent. The best scene is maybe when the magician is on stage and makes the heiress girlfriend do a jive with a grave face. That she is under hypnosis is indicated by the X-ray camera on him when he asks her if she is a shy girl and a good dancer.

Watch it here.

So much more on there, but if anything is missing, you can write in to the early-noughties-style forum pop-up on the home page. All niche suggestions are dutifully attended to by the admins.

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Remember there are less than 20 of those token left and then it’s back to full price from midnight tonight. Subscribe here. We’ll join you next Tuesday. At the age of 100, Mel Brooks is older than sliced bread.

All the best,

TF

Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that doesn’t mind hot weather as long as there is air conditioning. Which is, alas, not in supply in Studio Mathias Clottu in Islington, which is where we join you from on this ludicrously hot day.

Important news: Issue 28 is being sent to print tomorrow and will be with subscribers soon. What this means is this is your last chance to update your address on your account on our website so you can receive the magazine safely and securely. You can be assured that this is the best one yet, and we look forward to telling you more about it next week, and in great detail.

The photo competition has been won by an entry from the Sycamore Gap, but that hasn’t stopped people sending in photos of the magazine, and here it is taking in the view at Lake Malawi.

There has never been a better time to subscribe to the magazine. If you sign up today, you’ll get Issue 27 this week, and then Issue 28 thereafter – two pieces of post in seven days from a quarterly magazine. We’ve also got another five codes giving you 25 per cent off a year’s subscription. Just enter the code LRB25 at the checkout.

Subscribe! Pull That Trigger!

With your subscription presumably purchased, we can move on to today’s events. We’ve got much to say about Starmer and Burnham and some wonderful content from Brian Sewell. But first, off the US of A.

La La Land

The broadcast of this World Cup has had much to hate. The hydration breaks are an obvious money grab that has seriously impacted the flow of the beautiful game, most of the sponsors are ludicrously evil in some form or another and we are constantly forced to watch Gianni Infantino get paid to watch football and cosplay as an Ozempic-addled Kingpin.

None, however, have quite captured so much rage as ITV’s token American correspondent, Alexi Lalas. His annoying, uninformed opinions (shouted at full volume) have so excised British minds that the subject has been tackled in a near 2000 word piece for the Guardian by Aaron Timms.

We get it. The man is an idiot, a prime FOX plug, and it is a genuine pleasure to watch Henry and Ibrahimovic hate to be around him – Forget the words, nothing was funnier than them refusing to pass the ball to him in a fun studio kick-around. But we would argue that sometimes ignorance is a virtue, and if Lalas has one saving grace is that his lack of comprehension around whether certain English words are broadcastable or not gave us this moment where he described James Corden as a ‘full kit wanker’ live on air. It remains Lalas’ only accurate take of the tournament, but hey, England have been proving for 60 years now that one great win is enough to secure a reputation.

Denys Lasdun’s Lament

It’s been a pleasure to see the Carbuncle Cup make the rounds of the internet. Intriguingly, the Farnham ventilation pipe has become a sleeper success on our Instagram. The sweet fumes of the train station flow directly back onto the roof in a loop of pollution that is strangely moving. With warmest thanks again to all nominees and nominators, and to chair of judges, Cath Slessor, who wrote about the importance of the CC here.

Everyone Says We’re Great

The coming of a new issue always gives us a moment to pause and rudely congratulate ourselves on what a great job we’re doing, to be humble about it. More earnestly, it is such a pleasure to see so many of you subscribing to the print magazine, we really do feel it is going from strength to strength.

And indeed, it is not just us who think so, as this illustrious list of praise would suggest, with a lovely recent addition from William Boyd whose wonderful fiction is set to appear in the print mag shortly.

All of this is to say, SUBSCRIBE! It really is remarkably inexpensive, and an offering that will please any reader of this mail out immensely. It also makes a phenomenal gift and with discount code LRB25 it’s only a shade more than £20 for the whole year.

They Call Him Nostradamus

It’s all over baby blue for Keir Starmer who can nonetheless stand tall as the longest serving Prime Minister since Boris Johnson, falling just sadly short of the two-year mark that has proved so difficult to break over the last few years. Indeed, having another strong, brave candidate fall so swiftly to the political sword has had an oddly reassuring quality to it, as our politics draws ever nearer in resemblance to our reality TV. We look forward to future seasons of I’m A Prime Minister, Get Me Out Of Here!

But what has excited us most is that the seemingly inevitable coronation of the King in the North is one that has been predicted for months now by none other than Harry Hill. The legend of TV Burp has been enjoying a nice online resurgence with his really rather good and typically strange comedy podcast, The Harry Hill Show. One of its features which was just funny some months ago, but now looks prophetic, is his bit of getting his guests to stand up and do ‘The Andy Burnham Dance’. Both Nish Kumar and Ed Gamble have given their renditions, and we look forward to the first dance done with AB in the driver’s seat. Until then, ‘Pipe the Buttercream!’

Naughty Boys, Willing Boys, Lascivious Boys

This publication is now long in the tooth, but in its salad days, it was given to delineating its inspirations and influences, such as this essay by Jonathan Coe on British political satire or this piece by Zadie Smith, entitled ‘Fences’ (!), which came out in the wake of the Brexit referendum.

Truth be told, it wasn’t just blockbuster essays by boldface names that made us want to start a little magazine. What we really needed was a place to share Brian Sewell videos. Clips of the late art historian’s 2005 TV series are perhaps the most popular things we’ve ever shown. Entitled Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour, it follows the provocateur as he retraces the steps of the 18th-century English aristocrat, discovering the crumpled ruins and secret pleasures of Italy.

There are many riches within. We are not alone in hailing the segment from the Pitti Palace, which you can remind yourself of below:

Then there is the Venice episode, where Sewell’s snobbery reaches a truly operatic scale, as he attends a masked ball, ‘full of bitter resentment’ to be surrounded by ‘fat lesbians’.

It’s come to our attention that the rest of the series has now been deposited on the World Wide Web. It’s all a bit rich, and dare we say, a touch middlebrow when consumed as a whole, but we would be totally remiss in our duties if we did not direct you to this clip of our dear, departed friend outside the Colosseum. Enjoy.

Cringe Crawl

All this talk of Andy Burnham has us thinking about Manchester and a very different crawl than Burnham’s to number ten – when Joe Bishop toured the city’s cringest spots, including bars that resembled ‘a child’s idea of an adult’s indulgence’. As we have slowly learned in real-time observation of Burnham’s activities in the city, all our ‘highfalutin London posturing about Manchester simply doesn’t work in 2025. The capital has been morphing into a version of this for the last decade, with its blank new builds, expensive pints and nightclubs with interactive clay pigeon shooting.’

When You’re Tired of London, You’ve Forgotten to Read The Fence

Our other newsletter offering, Capital Letter, continues to go from strength to strength. The last issue (#33) featured some serious gold including a guide to travelling around Southwest Asia and North Africa without leaving London, courtesy of the ever-popular Sama Ansari Pour, whose Instagram you have almost certainly come across. It also featured more great advice from G’s Selections for the best places to get your music fix in London (have you heard of Shai Space?) as well as a wonderful art review from one of Issue 27’s feature writers Phin Jennings.

It also included some history of Lucian Freud’s time in London which included the prophetic sentence, ‘David Hockney looks set to die in France.’

You should be subscribed and you should be reading it.

Lady Hale’s Brooch

While it easy and correct to blame David Cameron and George Osborne and Jeremy Corbyn for the events that led to the Brexit vote ten years ago, Steve Bray’s tragic megaphoned intervention at Starmer’s final press conference yesterday reminded us that the FBPE clan had their part to play in leading us to our current situation. In Issue 5, Séamas O’Reilly wrote a sterling piece on Remainiac delusions that sadly reads all too clearly today.

Stunting in the Bando

The phrase ‘cuckooing’ sounds innocent enough, but in contemporary parlance refers to when a gang of drug dealers exploit a vulnerable adult and take over their living space to shift their supply. Which is exactly what happened to Will Kaye, who was living in an HMO in Tottenham with a certain Julian, a 52-year-old poet and schizophrenic alcoholic. It’s one of the best personal essays we’ve run in a while and is available to read here.

What’s Happened to Andros Townsend?

Does anyone know what’s going on with Andros Townsend? The former footballer turned pundit was a pretty standard, lower-table side player who would turn up in an England shirt every couple of years. But his online presence has become increasingly strange from his newfound obsession with chicken feet (possibly as a replacement for a series of ‘pills’ he was taking every day), his shirtless promotion of raw beef, musings about whether sunglasses are an implied affront to god and whatever the hell this is. (We did consult our editor-at-large and priest Fergus Butler-Gallie on this matter but the results were inconclusive). Has the man always been like this?

In Case You Missed It

David Hockney’s first boyfriend, Peter Schlesinger, has an Instagram account that is a veritable goldmine.

Sedate police chase.

Andy Burnham’s arrival in Euston.

Andy Burnham’s AI arrival at Number 10.

An important drinking game for those watching the World Cup.

The 42 reasons why Sir Keir Starmer failed.

And Finally

In these politically turbulent times, we often like to turn to silly, slightly informative, videos as a means of feeling better about things. And a real recent favourite has been the work of one Chris Spargo. He makes some really wonderful, non-political, easily enjoyable stuff. Did you know, for example, that Britain used to have many nationalised pubs, with a civil servant behind the bar, until Ted Heath got rid of them in 1971. Chris visited one – The Greyhound – in Carlisle. Likewise, Chris has made videos getting to the bottom of the ‘Peter Pan clause’ and why it is that we have colour-coded milk. He’s got 300,000 odd subscribers, it’s a nice time.

All of this is perfectly lovely and un-noteworthy. In this relaxed manner, we recently booted up a video of him discussing the video game SimCity 4. Centred around simulating building a whole city from scratch – like Magnitogorsk – the game is fundamentally based around US urban planning systems – unlike Magnitogorsk. Chris asked the question, what would it look like if it used UK systems? And why would this prove to be a disaster? We were quite contented with this quasi-informative pap, until the end of the video, where he said he had a special guest he’d been chatting to, who might know a few things about this. And then the camera cuts. And it cuts to Keir Starmer.

What makes this bizarre jump scare even more bizarre is that it came out just five days ago. For whatever reason, Starmer’s comms team, who clearly are (were?) the best in the biz, felt this was a core market to target. So it comes to pass that one of Keir Starmer’s last acts as PM was to appear in a video about city-building video game. He has truly left a remarkable legacy.

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Well, go on, get! Get out of here! We ain’t got nothin’ more for ya, ya dirty rotten scoundrels. But do of course come back again next week and remember to subscribe to the magazine, we do love you so dear readers. Until we parachute into your nefariously dull inbox next week we wish you the best and remind you that we can be reached on editorial@the-fence.com for pitches and support@the-fence.com for your other needs. The only distinction between a herb and a spice is what part of the plant the item comes from: herb=leaf, spice=everything else.

All the best,

TF

Today we have a special one-off article to celebrate a collaboration between The Fence and Bungalow.

Bungalow publishes one series of stories per quarter, on something overlooked or just interesting (an uplifting tale about a suicide bomber, the evil of penguins and working in the NHS, for example) and lots of fun stuff in between. Today, we publish a story with them that settles a long-standing controversy and might even save democracy. TF readers who subscribe here get three months free.

Written by Bungalow’s founder, Ravi Somaiya, this piece asks and answers the question: does the President of the United States really have short fingers?

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On page 45 of the April 1988 issue of Spy magazine, there’s a satirical advertisement for Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Deal.

It picks the worst quotes from reviews of the book. ‘Exercise in self-congratulation.’ ‘Repulsive book.’ It jokes that Trump has been buying copies of it himself.

Right at the bottom of the ad is a throwaway line that has resonated throughout the years. In fake promo copy it boasts that the book is ‘by Short-Fingered Vulgarian Donald J. Trump.’ It was authored by the magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter, who had an instinct that the line would irk its subject. He was right. As recently as Trump’s first presidential run, Carter wrote:

‘To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him – generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them, he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.’

The insult resonates, partly because Trump’s hands are weirdly compelling, and partly because, like all the best derision, it’s a bit unsettling.

There’s a whole pseudoscience around finger lengths, in which some apparently quite clever and qualified people posit that because genetics, and hormones in gestation, dictate the ratio between those lengths, it can also indicate certain personality traits.

The only other person I’ve seen use the insult, and to some extent explain its resonance, is Orson Welles, as cited in Henry Jaglom’s wonderful book, My Lunches With Orson:

‘Don’t you know there’s such a thing as physical dislike? Europeans know that about other Europeans. If I don’t like somebody’s looks, I don’t like them. See, I believe that it is not true that different races and nations are alike. I’m profoundly convinced that that’s a total lie. Sardinians, for example, have stubby little fingers. ­Bosnians have short necks.’

Jaglom replied that that was ridiculous. Welles responded: ‘Measure them. Measure them!”’

At first, the suggestion that Jaglom abandon lunch, get a ruler and ask whatever Bosnians and Sardinians he could locate to hold still struck me merely as a wonderful piece of conversational egomania. But then I realised Orson was pointing the way for me to fulfil a long-held ambition: to measure Trump’s fingers and settle the argument between him and Graydon Carter once and for all.

Welles was just waiting for open-source intelligence (OSINT) techniques that can draw measurements from images with great accuracy. Specifically, photogrammetry – the art or science of using photographs to glean precise measurements.

It’s used in forensic journalism to identify who shot which missile at whom, among other things. I consulted an expert, Barry Basnett, who said that it is also used to measure cracks in nuclear reactors or on weird parts of bridges, where people cannot go, or to help with crime scene analyses.

He told me that it can be incredibly accurate under the right circumstances. Enough to stand up in court, or to enable engineers to tackle complex problems. Certainly accurate enough to adjudicate a decades-old battle over an insult.

To me, there’s a moral impetus to do so. The true horror of Trump is that he turns those who fixate on him into versions of him – willing to warp the facts to achieve some idiotically petty end. If we can settle this scientifically, perhaps it will restore the notion that there is such a thing as reality, and that it’s not just all political debate.

I started by establishing a baseline. It turns out that people measure the finger lengths of other people en masse for all sorts of reasons. Prosthetics, robotics, the pseudoscience mentioned above. So there’s data. They all measure from the crease at the bottom of the finger, to the top.

There are, of course, a lot of variables. Fingers vary in length between hands. Finding the exact midpoint of your finger crease will cause you to philosophically wrestle with the limits of science. And total hand length is closely correlated with height. Trump is 6 feet 2½ inches, and I am confident of this because I stood next to him at a bar once and noted that we were exactly the same height.

Anyway, I averaged out all the academic studies I could find for the hands of men about Trump’s height, and did some measuring, and came up with the following numbers for men over 6 feet. Shorter than these is, for our purposes, short-fingered.

Thumb: 66.7mm

Index finger: 75.2mm

Middle finger: 82.1mm

Ring finger: 77.3mm

Little finger: 63.7mm

Now all I had to do was measure Trump’s hands. The most accurate form of photogrammetry, according to Basnett, involves a special rig with two cameras that are a fixed distance apart, on a pole of fixed height. Because the software knows those fixed distances, it can calculate other lengths and distances accordingly. I’d just have to build one (not hard) and get close enough to the President to use it (very hard). I am bearded, and Ugandan Indian. But in practice, I’m more Arabic or Pakistani-looking. Wielding a suspicious rig at a public event in the America of 2026 did not seem like a good idea.

The alternative is to find objects of fixed size in existing images, and use those to find other lengths either by building what is effectively a 3D model or using a calculation known as pixel height. The latter measures how many pixels make up a length you assign on the image. It can then extrapolate from that to figure out the length of something else in the same image.

I then looked at maybe 500 images of Trump’s hands to see if any would work. By the end of it, I was thoroughly unsettled. When he’s not gesturing, they hang from his sleeves like crepe rubber gloves filled with yoghurt.

It was hard for me to shake hands with anyone for a day or two afterwards. But I did learn, joyously, that Trump is often pictured holding sheets of paper in US letter size, or Sharpies, which are a standard length, at his desk. The nature of putting your hand on paper on a desk means that 1) the paper is flat, 2) so are the subject’s hands and 3) both are as close to being in the same geometric plane as possible. This meant I could get a pretty solid pixel height measurement for each of his fingers.

It was painstaking work. Frustrating work. I came home, and told my wife about it, and she casually told me that Trump had once given a handprint to Madame Tussauds, and that I could see and measure it just a few blocks from the Bungalow office. This was both welcome information, and tragically deflating, to the extent that I had a small lie-down. Especially because when I searched, I found I didn’t even have to walk the 15 minutes to measure the print. There was a perfect replica of his hand available online, had I thought to look.

But! But! Nobody had used it to specifically address the issue of finger length. And maybe fingers shrink with time or something. So here (as averaged from both photogrammetrical analysis of his fingers as pictured contemporaneously, and measurements taken from a handprint he gave in 1998), are the official finger lengths for the 45th and 47th President of the United States, Donald John Trump:

Thumb: 53.3mm — 13.4mm shorter

Index finger: 65mm — 10.2mm shorter

Middle finger: 76.5mm — 17.1mm shorter

Ring finger: 65mm — 12.3mm shorter

Little finger: 54mm — 9.7mm shorter

When I did this calculation, I became alarmed, and also felt oddly sorry for Trump. He’ll never play the harp, or do sleight-of-hand magic as well as he might.

But for the first time ever, we can officially say that Trump is short-fingered, and Graydon was right, at least as far as this analysis goes. I consider this a victory for truth, justice and Canada.

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We hope you enjoyed that, and a reminder that you can sign up for Bungalow, for free, here. It really is excellent. We’ll be back with a conventional Off The Fence next Tuesday.

All the best,

TF

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.

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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