Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence, our weekly newsletter-slash-propaganda arm. Issue 9 is now sold out, but there will be some copies remaining at stockists. Luckily for you, Issue 10 is arriving in just over a week, so do subscribe today if you would like to receive the next print iteration of Britain’s most exciting newish magazine.
Today, we’ve got a cackling funny slice of reportage from the west coast of Ireland, courtesy of our features editor, Séamas O’Reilly.
Desperately Seeking Dolphin
It’s hard to overstate how pretty Dingle is, but here’s my best shot. Seen from the sea, it stares back out to the Atlantic from the western tip of Co. Kerry on the very edge of Ireland. Choppy waters tug at the rugged landscape of the coast before the terrain coheres into the ordered precision of a quintessential Hibernian Tidy Town – all coloured gables and pastel shopfronts – before this postcard prettiness unravels into patchwork fields and open countryside which folds, ever upwards, into the more grandiose Brandon mountains that cluster inland. A picturesque hamlet squished between torrid sea and majestic hills, Dingle is essentially what non-Irish people think every Irish town must look like; a toothsome patchwork of handsomely painted homes and businesses, stretching pleasantly for a dozen or so streets, each of which is festooned with pubs, shops and multi-coloured houses. Depending on which guidebook you read, this town of 2,050 people has between 50 and 65 pubs, and roughly eight million shops that sell bespoke, seaside-themed bric-a-brac, almost all of which involve dolphins, and one dolphin in particular.
His name was Fungie, and for nearly forty years he was the town’s most famous resident, its tourism mascot, and a treasured family friend to all its inhabitants. That was until last year, when Fungie’s mace-like flipper grip on Dingle’s heart was released, and Ireland’s most famous dolphin sank below the waves, never to be seen again. No death notice was issued, nor body recovered, but in the midst of Ireland’s second COVID lockdown last October, Dingle’s inhabitants accepted that the age of Fungie had passed. A full year after his last sighting, I took to the streets of Dingle to ask about life before, during, and after, this decidedly different delphinid.
‘1983 was the first sighting’ says Helena, who works in the Tourist Information centre which looks out over the marina. It’s a good place for a Fungie investigator to begin their research, since it is situated directly beside the tour boats that used to go out daily to catch glimpses of the town’s most famous resident, and the life-size bronze statue which was erected in his honour in January, 2000.
‘He was unique in that he was sociable,’ she tells me. ‘There are lots of dolphins out along the coast, even out toward the lighthouse but they never really came into the pier. Whereas, just out around the mouth of the harbour is where you’d see Fungie. The other dolphins he would never mix with though, he was very separate.’
Fungie, it seems, made friends with humans, rather than with his relatives in the animal kingdom. And the humans loved him right back, with boats taking trips to see him several times a day, for tourists and locals alike. These are all now moored but still bear bittersweet insignia like ‘FUNGIE SIGHTINGS: GUARANTEED’.
Paul Dineen owns The Dolphin Shop on Dingle’s Strand Street, a tastefully appointed store that sells gifts and souvenirs, decorated by eight life-size bronze statues of Fungie in separate poses which dip and dive on its outer wall. He had them made to order by a master sculptor, who studied dolphin physiology before constructing and posing anatomically correct skeletons and casting bronze over them to create the desired effect. In the presence of this tribute, I mumble slightly when I ask if there could be any truth to the rumour – scurrilous and unsubstantiated, but present nonetheless – that the real Fungie may have disappeared long ago, and the town kept fake sightings going for tourism purposes only. His contempt for such a question is palpable.
‘Listen, man’ he tells me, in his rangy, East Cork burr. ‘There’s people who went out with Fungie, all day everyday. They know Fungie. I spent some time with him, and you know Fungie straight off. You’d know him, you knew him like you knew people, like I know you standing here in front of me. People saying Fungie wasn’t for real, it’s like saying climate change is a hoax or COVID doesn’t exist.’
‘There wasn’t anybody in Dingle who wasn’t touched by him,’ he says, the thing is – you didn’t just see Fungie, he’d come up and look you straight in the eye and keep looking at you. When he was looking at you, he was looking at you, he was saying hello to you. You got to know him, as a person.’
Aideen McConville of Dingle Books tells a similar tale. ‘I had a personal relationship with Fungie,’ she tells me, ‘sure, I used to go out with him’. Such is the vehemence I have encountered for Fungie since I arrived, it takes me a second to realise she means ‘go out’ in the swimming sense. Like everyone else she doesn’t know what happened to him, but is sure that the end was the end. For her, signs of his old age had been clear for some time.
‘I’d go out to the bay with him and he had a swollen thing on his head which is, seemingly, what happens to dolphins before they die. He was wandering around, not being himself, losing weight, so all his extremities were exaggerated slightly. Someone saw him on the last day, and he looked a bit strange and then he just disappeared. He was at least forty five. So perhaps he just died of old age.’
DJ, broadcaster and friend of The Fence, Annie Mac is a regular visitor to Dingle, where she presents much of the cultural offerings for the town’s Other Voices festival, now in its 20th year. On a marina walk, she tells me of her own run-ins over the years.
‘I brought my children to see Fungie several times,’ she says. ‘Summer before last it was all a bit lacklustre and I thought, fuck, he’s not himself.’
I wonder aloud what this looked like, checking his phone with a fag in his mouth, perhaps?
‘Well it was more just like he was tired,’ she clarifies, ‘instead of doing the big jumps and flips, you just saw the tip of a fin and he was gone again. And then, obviously, you have the guilt because maybe you’re part of this machine of people going out and bothering him.’
Dolphins can live up between 40 and 60 years, so it seems likely that old age put paid to Fungie in the end. Certainly, it appears to be the accepted cause among locals, although other theories are cheerfully entertained. Two people said they’d heard he was spotted in Iceland, and another that he was picked up by a friendly pod to go travelling south.
‘One theory I have heard from experts,’ offers Paul, ‘is that when dolphins get older they lose their teeth, so within a pod of dolphins, the young ones look after the old ones because their teeth fall out, so maybe a pod did come and take him away to look after him.’
‘My own favourite theory is that he found an attractive tail out there,’ he says, with a conspiratorial wink, ‘and he followed her out of the harbour.’ He trails off slightly, as if his attempt to convince himself has had no luck.
Whatever the cause, last October Fungie flipped his last, and the prettiest town in Ireland, already traumatised by the pandemic, had to reckon with the loss of its most famous son.
‘I’ve never experienced anything like it in Dingle after he died,’ Paul tells me, gravely. ‘There was a blanket, a greyness over the town for a long time. There were people I’d talk to about Fungie and tears would come in their eyes because they didn’t want to talk about it. It was the beginning of lockdown that he left, and hasn’t been seen. All I know is, we woke up one morning and he wasn’t here anymore.’
So would he be astonished if he did pop back into their lives, maybe with a wife and kids in tow? ‘Well, a friend of mine was out on the boat and Fungie came up to him the day before he left. This guy is out on the boats every day, and Fungie came up to him, stuck his head into the boat. For a few minutes. He told me that was it: he knew Fungie was saying goodbye. I’ll not tell you who it was, though. He told me that in confidence.’
If, for some reason, you don’t follow Séamas on Twitter, then you can do so here.
The OG Hypebeast
The premature death of Virgil Abloh, Louis Vuitton designer and self-styled ‘maker’ is a real tragedy: not only does he leave behind a young family, but in an industry that ignores, facilitates and even encourages intergalactic levels of bad behaviour, he was renowned for his kindness, decency and for the time he dedicated to helping young designers find their feet.
Even though he lived between Chicago and Paris, Abloh’s influence is quietly palpable around The Fence’s office in Soho. Among the sex shops, massage parlours and advertising agencies there mushrooms an ever-expanding cluster of streetwear shops: the big brands of Supreme, Stussy, Palace, Patta and Carhatt are all in and around Brewer Street; then there are the secondhand shops, like Proxyeed, which sells used trainers wrapped in plastic (a pair of pre-owned Nike x Off White trainers, designed by Abloh, retailed for £350).
While Virgil Abloh certainly didn’t invent streetwear, he was at the beating heart of its reinvention as a luxury good, and it’s hard to think of one cultural figure in the last decade who has had such a significant influence on the way Londoners shop today.
Back of the Class!
If you didn’t read it last time, do try and find the time for Francis Martin’s bravura long-read into Brampton Manor, the state school that has been lionised by the Prime Minister and broad swathes of the media. It’s the most ambitious piece of reportage we’ve ever published.
A Nu-Soul Classic
Joe Muggs’ son’s former teacher, Joel Culpepper, has become a bona-fide star. But it wasn’t always easy: you should read Joe’s piece on how Joel had to fight to record the music he wanted to do, why the industry wanted to bracket him within safe, approved lanes, and how Joel’s success is part of a wider picture of black British creative excellence, of maverick artists feeling part of a collective movement.
Joe has also made a super playlist of all the major players who are making the UK soulful in the early 2020s: you can listen to it here.
In Case You Missed It
Charlotte Higgins speaks with three of the eleven members of Array, the extremely likeable, eleven-piece Belfast art collective which just scooped the Turner prize.
For our ever-charming cousins over at NYC's Dirt, Helen Holmes interrogates the blasphemy, boredom and Bisexual panic of Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta.
Kory Grow and Jason Newman document the gut-wrenching allegations against Marilyn Manson, the monster hiding in plain sight.
Bridget Read attempts to underline the horror of the US Supreme Court's abortion decisions.
Ed McConnell saw that 96 readers responded with a laughing emoji to that paper's post about the deaths of more than thirty asylum seekers in the channel. So he asked them why.
And Finally
The owners of Berghain are looking to join the Taj Mahal, Stonehenge and the Colosseum as being registered as a Unesco site of world heritage. The infamous Berlin nightclub is known for its strict door policy and even stricter ban on cameras: very little footage of the club is available online.
One of the few exceptions is this interview with resident DJ Marcel Dettman, where cameras are allowed to look inside the club in the daylight hours. But what about those long, long nights that turn into days? How do the crowd keep dancing? Dettman supplies the most Germanically precise euphemism in this clip here:
*
If you would like to speak to a member of the editorial team, or enquire about the state of your subscription, then do reply to this email and we will come back to you promptly.
We are also open for submissions for another week, but please do send those through separately: there have been some excellent pitches thus far, so please do keep sending them through.
We look forward to joining you earlier next weekend.
All the best,
TF
We are also delighted to offer a subscription service. For £25 you will receive all four copies of the magazine per year, delivered to your door.
