Off The Fence 50
Dear Readers,
Today, we’re celebrating Off The Fence’s 50th outing, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to watch this mail-out expand to over 3,000 subscribers while also becoming a weekly affair. And we’re very proud that it still maintains an average open-rate of 55 per cent: there’s a stat for all you newsletter nerds out there. In order to keep this thing free-to-air, please do subscribe to the quarterly print magazine – we still have a healthy number of Issue 10s in stock, the perfect printed antidote to a bout of the January blues.
Today, we’ve got some bits on Candide Thovex, Walter Gropius and Junya Watanabe. Plus, we have a lead on Ghislaine Maxwell’s alibi. But first-up, here’s another dispatch by Nathan Risser, live from the City of London.
Searching for Patrick Bateman
A singular ‘bonus day’ doesn’t really exist as such – it’s more like bonus season. The large American banks inform employees of their compensation when the firm reports earnings for the previous year. Alone in a meeting room, a senior manager will call employees one by one – in descending order of seniority – and deliver their personal annual compensation figure, which in the industry is called your ‘number’. Goldman Sachs announced their earnings on Tuesday. On page 12 of their investor presentation, one figure grabbed headlines. Compensation and benefits was up 33% year-on-year. The bonus pool set aside to pay employees has provided record-shattering pay-outs.
Bankers don’t talk about their bonuses. And rightly so. If an employee shows signs that they’re happy with the number, it signals to their boss they won’t need to be paid more the following year. For no matter how well an employee thinks they’ve been compensated, there is always some colleague or friend who received more.
With Goldman Sachs reporting earnings on Tuesday and Morgan Stanley and Bank of America both reporting on Wednesday, I headed to the Square Mile on Thursday to see whether financial euphoria was manifesting itself in the pubs and streets of London. My first stop was Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, popular with employees of Goldman Sachs, whose new office is 100 metres away. The pub had run out of most kinds of beer – supply chain issues, not overconsumption – and we descended into its cold, underground drinking den only to find two confused tourists sitting in one corner and a group of shiny-suited recruiters in the other. It didn’t feel much like Wolf of Wall Street.
We decided to head to The Globe, a pub on the north-eastern corner of the City, where a few financier friends were congregating, but first I dipped my head into The Gable, a trashy pub-cum-nightclub, and lurked at the bar long enough to hear the punchline to a joke whose set-up I didn’t manage to catch: ‘J.P. Morgan traders!’ the man blurted out, which was met with raucous, heavy-bellied laughter. I zipped up my puffer jacket and departed.
‘This is my boss,’ a woman said to me in The Globe’s back bar as a man drinking straight Scotch approached, shook my hand and corrected her: ‘I’m her boss’ boss.’ The room smelled of beer and overwork. ‘We’re talking about dream jobs,’ the woman said, before asking the boss man what his dream job would be. ‘Boat with topless women,’ he replied. I asked him whether he would be the boat or the topless women in that dream scenario and he looked at me, blank-faced, like I had accidently miscalculated the yield-to-maturity on a bond, and then turned his back to us.
I talked with a group about Greek islands for a while (short Mykonos, long Paros was the takeaway), before I convinced a friend of mine to come to The Ned. We headed south down Moorgate, one of the arterial roads of the City. We passed the building that used to house Cazenove Capital – a blue-blooded firm that had a gun cabinet in its basement for anyone going shooting on the weekend – but had now been turned into a WeWork. Before we could wax too philosophical about the death of the City, The Ned and its sharply attired doorman appeared before us.
Situated in the old Midland Bank building – once the largest deposit-taking institution in the world – The Ned’s three bars and two restaurants radiate away from a central, circular stage on which a rotation of bands play throughout the night. We pressed our way through crowds of gilet-wearing punters, paid too much for two negronis and sat back to soak up the atmosphere.
‘It’s actually quite nice, isn’t it?’ I said. My companion pointed off into one of the high-ceilinged, dark corners: ‘they do a good brunch over there.’ There was no dancing on tables, no testosterone fuelled men barking at each other as junior colleagues eagerly listened and tried to get a word in edgeways. The dress code was casual, the group of women next to us were drinking white wine and eating a portion of chips.
Leaving them behind, we rounded Walbrook Street and headed into the underbelly of Bloomberg’s gargantuan European headquarters. Then we heard a yell and the door of Vinoteca – a wine bar, unsurprisingly – bursts open and a well-dressed punter launches a man half his size out of the premises and into the street where he promptly falls across our feet. A jostling group of men rush out, much yelling ensues and before one banker can crack a bottle of Beaujolais over another banker’s skull, police swarm in and separate the crowd.
The ejected man was sitting on a bench behind us, his hands in the air and saying, ‘I deserved it, I deserved it.’ Maybe he had just told the assailant his bonus. But who’s to know? People don’t talk about that in the City.
You can follow – and should follow – Nathan on Twitter here.
High Society
Ghislaine Maxwell is currently languishing in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as she waits to be sentenced in late June for sex-trafficking underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein between 1994 and 2004. Throughout that period, she was still a glittering firmament throughout west London’s drawing rooms: The Fence has heard from many correspondents that she was regarded as being ‘vivacious’, ‘funny’ and ‘popular’.
But how did she maintain this double life? One source tells us that she would host dinner parties in her house in Kinnerton Street, and as her guests would arrive, she would then swiftly leave her home. Her assistant would say that she was working as a currency trader, and that she had to react to the global markets. The dinner would then continue without her.
In all likelihood, her French exit was related to being in the employ of an itinerant billionaire paedophile, but it did also shade her with a sense of enigma among her old friends, and also, it could be reckoned, something of an alibi.
That Sweet Mountain Air
Candide Thovex (what a name, ey?) is a French freestyle skier, and is best known for schussing the Great Wall of China in this extraordinary collaboration with a German car manufacturer. While the tricks may defy the laws of physics, the ungainly dimensions of skis means that the sport lacks the easy, sensuous grace of snowboarding.
Now, as he approaches his 40th birthday, Thovex has pushed the envelope with a new clip of him pounding the Alps, in which he seems, finally, to have made skiing the aesthetic equal of its cooler younger brother.
Schmalfette Grotesk
We’re pleased as punch with this feature by Madeleine Bruster on the visual side of our little magazine. It’s a real honour to have such lavish praise from a publication as revered as Eye on Design, and to see Mathias Clottu’s brilliant designs given the coverage they deserve. If you’re wondering how The Fence got so pretty, do give it a read, and if you’d like to hold the real thing in your hands, then do pick some copies from the webstore right here.
Goldinger’s Quandary
In response to the pandemic, and the changing working habits that its enforced, there are reports that the insurers, Lloyd’s of London, will not be renewing the lease on their Richard Rogers-designed office in the City. The building is famously the youngest to be Grade 1-listed in Britain, which gives an opportunity to dig out one of the great Wikipedia pages (the list does, however, contain a few omissions).
Now, we’re not suggesting that the name of Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire, should be on the lips of every schoolchild in the country, but the level to which our national modernist heritage is undervalued is pretty astounding. And we have a few thoughts on the matter, which we will be sharing with you all in next week’s newsletter.
Canned Heat
90s nostalgia is now giving way, God help us, to 00s nostalgia, but that singular decade still powers a battalion of Instagram accounts, all featuring the same-old same-old Corinne Day shots of Kate Moss back in her heroin chic pomp.
In an act of beautiful cultural cross-pollination, the Devon-raised and Oakham-schooled Jay Kay formed the band Jamiroquai as a portmanteau of the word ‘jam’ and the Native American tribe, the Iroquois. Updating 70s grooves for the Blair years, Jamiroquai were the third best-selling UK act of the 1990s, before the permanently be-hatted Jay Kay retreated into retirement, to tend to his collection of sports cars.
Now, in collaboration with the band, and in one of the best videos we’ve seen all year, Junya Watanabe has teamed up with Carhatt, Pendleton and Benny Andallo to create the funkiest fashion show of recent vintage, in which the models breakdance in slick garms on the iconic set of Virtual Insanity.
In Case You Missed It
Tristan Kirk shares some stories of people who have been prosecuted for COVID rule breaches, whether they were aware of them or not.
Whatever happened to YouTube’s Brit Crew? Amelia Tait investigates in a brief but brilliant dispatch.
Brian VanHooker talks cetacean tackle as he analyses Moby Dick’s “whale penis” chapter.
BBC News presenter Ros Atkins was once a drum and bass DJ and was this week coaxed back behind the decks for this excellent 30-minute mix of post-jungle bangers for BBC Sounds.
It’s a year since we introduced you to the glory of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh making a ham sandwich, and feel like it’s time you treated yourself to it again.
And Finally
Whatever you say about the BBC – and people do have quite a lot to say about it – it is an organisation that can have a laugh at its own expense. And this tendency to self-parody almost reached levels of institutional hara-kiri with Harry and Paul’s Story of the Twos, in which the two veterans launch into an hour-long incineration of BBC2’s 50-year-long history.
Filmed in 2014, it’s still comfortably the funniest British programme of the last decade (and is, strangely enough, an object of veneration across the political aisles). Here are two clips to whet your appetite: an Alan Bennett x Joseph Stalin collaboration, and a pitch-perfect satire of Have I Got News for You with a wonderfully acute impersonation of Ian Hislop.
And if you’re looking for something to cheer you up this evening, then you can watch the whole programme at this link here. For some reason, it’s not on iPlayer.
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We’ll be back next Monday with our usual mix of dispatches, featurettes, gossip and tips. Currently, the office is humming with activity as we put together Issue 11, but if you’d like to speak to a member of the editorial staff, then do reply to this email, and one of us will get back to you promptly. Till the next time!
All the best,
TF
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