Dear Readers,
Good evening and welcome to Off The Fence, the weekly newsletter arm of the quarterly print magazine. We’re busy pushing and preening Issue 11, which promises to be our widest, boldest and stupidest outing yet. If you fancy it, you can subscribe here at the very reasonable sum of £25 for the year, and join our growing band of fans across the country – and for some reason – across the world.
Last year we were commissioned to write two pieces for other publications Firstly, we were tasked by Dirt to look at the British origins of a certain iconic TV show, and then in October, The Face magazine sent us to Frieze week, where we offered up a dispatch from London’s biggest art fair. Both of these collaborations were immensely enjoyable – and we would like to do some more.
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Today, we have a last round of detail on how the government wasted time and resources on Pen Farthing – a subject that has greatly vexed us. Plus, we have some lighter, brighter material on Johnny Knoxville and The Libertines. But we begin with a brief, booze-soaked sally across The Channel, courtesy of Kieran Morris.
Calvados is a State of Mind
There’s never been a stranger time to cross Calais. Fishermen are engaged in pitched battle on either side of the Channel, jostling for trawling space in an impotent display of geopolitical pantomime. A near-static thread of lorries, crawling along roads built for mutual economic benefit, adjoins France & Britain at a point when separation was meant to be clear and permanent. Omicron – the vaccine-busting portent of another bleak Midwinter – persists, although declining, with Emperors Macron (Jupiter) and Johnson (Augustus) meting out carrots and sticks to speed up the booster roll-out.
I had accepted – as we of this parish are inclined to disclose – an invitation from a PR company to visit Normandy, and toast the 200th anniversary of Père Magloire Calvados. What better time to revive these travelogues? You don’t get far if you turn those offers down, and I am nothing if not a service journalist. But aside from answering the question you’ve always had in your head (‘How much Calvados can a man drink in 24 hours?’), I went in honour of the great A.J. Liebling – the finest prose stylist of the 20th century, and a man whose commitment to destroying himself with food and drink I can only admire. In Between Meals, his memoir of Parisian eating which you should buy from any of these links right now, Liebling rhapsodises about the stuff, celebrating its capacity for rousing the senses, and breaking down even the most decadent meals. And although he warns that good Calvados is never sold legally, he omits to note how it goes down if given out for free.
After getting the Eurostar to Gare du Nord, I headed out to Lisieux – a town I know only through their local saint, St. Thérèse, a Carmelite nun who gave my mum her middle name. There, at the station, I was scooped up by a van and taken out to Pont-l'Évêque, and the ‘Calvados Père Magloire L'Expérience', as they call it: an immersive museum built on the site of the oldest Calvados maison in France.
Et quelle immersion! I’d expected a dry, perfunctory, and entirely Francophone tour of a factory, and was instead taken through a series of painstakingly reconstructed Norman village scenes, with the history of the spirit blasted into my mind. For brevity’s sake, I will not tell you here how Calvados is made, but the information was so roundly cudgelled into me that I can relay, in great detail, every step of its production. Email me privately and I’ll reel it off to you.
At the close of the tour came a cocktail bar, for a taste of the spirit that I now knew literally everything about, and a small reception with the assorted industry figures you usually meet at these sorts of events. Behind the bar was an appropriately highfalutin mixologist from a local five-star hotel; he mixed us a cocktail that he alleged was Johnny Depp’s favourite – Calvados, champagne and mint. A social media manager scanned the room, camera in hand, recording the moment. I was eager to drink – it had been a long day – but was unsure how I’d handle my first one. Wanting to repay the generosity of my hosts with enthusiasm, I took a bashful swig at the very moment that the camera came my way. Reader, I spluttered, before croakily reassuring the room that I hadn’t just given verdict in the rudest way possible.
Thankfully, my invitation to dinner was not immediately retracted for this faux-pas, and I was able to put Liebling’s theories to the test by eating myself half-to-death before calling on Calvados to revive me at the last moment. Dinner was in Trouville-sur-Mer, a sultry little resort town that feels like Brighton in a ball gown, even in the bitter throngs of Norman winter weather. Our restaurant was the host’s favourite, Les Vapeurs, a seaside dame that specialised in fish, fish, fish, fish and fish. Naturally, we went for the fish: first, a plateau de fruits de mer so vast that it’d make Poseidon blush, and then a more humble grilled dorade, all of which was paired with a Pouilly-Fumé that the host said he orders by the caseload.
I was faring well, balanced on the right side of sated, until dessert, a slice of tarte aux pommes as thick as a King James Bible, and clotted cream so ruinously rich that it should be kept behind supermarket counters, lest children shorten their lives with it. It was so stupefying that one Calvados couldn’t fix it; three, however, did the trick. Liebling should’ve made that clear.
The next day was a blur. We were taken to meet Père Magloire’s cellar master, a legend in the Calvados community so it goes, for a tour and a tasting that I was too fragile to be ready for. It was sensorily overwhelming. It smelled so much like Calvados. That might not be easy for you to recall, but it is for me now – I will know the smell of Calvados for the rest of my waking days, let me assure you. We began the tasting at around 11am, which is allegedly the optimum time to undertake such a task. Liebling test number two: can it restore me at my time of need? I’ve never been too great a believer in the hair-of-the-dog philosophy, but again – free Calvados. And in the service of journalism.
The cellar master took us through the entire Père Magloire collection, from VSOPs to XOs, to a pandemic-specific blend, to the unaged, undiluted eaux de vie that they use as a base. We tried cuts of Calvados that were fifty years old; others that were stored in all manner of different barrels, drawing different flavour notes, and then, the 200th Anniversary version, which had taken the cellar master a decade to perfect. I finished every glass, nine measures before midday. And it worked!
Temporarily, anyway. I was invigorated for maybe two additional hours, before the Calvados smothered me and I slumped asleep, blissfully, in the cab back to Lisieux, where I awoke to a hangover in the middle of the afternoon. I pottered around a cathedral, so tired and emotional as to temporarily become Catholic, before drifting back towards Paris, and then the Eurostar home.
My plan, after buying macarons for my girlfriend and various untaxed sundries for The Fence editorial team, was to settle into Between Meals on the train back and hope that a line would jump from the page, the perfect quote to save me from the hard work of actually finishing my own pieces. But 15 minutes into the journey home, the Eurostar halted, and the driver told us over the tannoy that we would be held at the Eurotunnel for an hour: fishermen were fighting in the Channel again.
Kieran Morris is The Fence’s deputy editor. You should follow him on Twitter here.
The Sad Tale of Biro Halfpence
As we reported during the fall of Kabul, the government had to provide an extraordinary level of assistance to Paul ‘Pen’ Farthing to help evacuate his cats and dogs from the clutches of the Taliban. It’s quite hard to provide a definitive timeline on how it exactly it happened: there is an email from the Foreign Office stating that the Prime Minister authorised the airlift, which seems to corroborate the evidence supplied by the whistleblower, Raphael Marshall, who in submitted evidence to Parliament, writes that on August 25 a senior official ‘called forward’ Farthing and his menagerie, after receiving clearance from the PM. Boris Johnson dismisses these claims as ‘total rhubarb’.
According to our source in Whitehall, the Prime Minister was present at a COBRA meeting where, we are told, discussions about Nowzad took up ‘ten per cent of the meeting’. Sir Ben Key, the First Sea Lord, who was in overall charge of the military evacuation, gave evidence to the Foreign Affairs committee last week, in which he stated that he had to give the ‘majority of a day to manage the narrative and outcomes of Nowzad’ (we recommend you watch the whole clip here, the relevant bit starts at around 15:34:40.)
Key’s barely contained fury hints at a broader picture: the government’s resources were stretched, time was finite, and the decision-making process was being interfered with by someone in Downing Street. This caused significant levels of stress, especially as intelligence was received that ISIS were planning an attack at the Kabul airport (the suicide bomb – which did occur despite frenzied efforts – killed 130 people). We are told that during another meeting, which featured high-level political figures and senior military officers (but not the Prime Minister) one official exclaimed ‘Shall we move onto Dr Doolittle now? Or shall we go onto something important like NATO and save the dog-man for the comedy act at the end?’
Farthing, who claims he doesn’t know whether the Prime Minister helped authorise the journey, has been busy online these past few weeks, either begging publishing companies to sign him up, or telling an Afghan refugee who has dared to criticise him that he is ‘a pawn in all of this’. Good luck with that book deal, Pen.
What Became of the Likely Lads?
Those pesky TikTok teens! Reports are bubbling that Gen Z are bringing back the early 00s indie aesthetic, with its skinny jeans, winklepickers and wounded sense of superiority. Now, we haven’t seen any firm evidence of this yet – if anything, it seems that Young People Today are still pretty keen on 90s streetwear (a strong look, if you ask us), and to be honest, we’re hoping that this latest exercise in nostalgia doesn’t break back into the mainstream. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett writes acutely about the scene as it was, perfumed by stale cigarette smoke and fronted by diffident men who reckoned themselves to be the second coming of Lord Byron.
Down Carnaby Street Way
Last week, we published another feature from Issue 10, in which Sally Howard visited the Bishopsgate Institute, which holds an archive with a focus on the East End, the labour movement and freethought. It also maintains an archive of all the lost handbooks of London, which range from the jarringly twee (A Walk Through Princess Diana’s London) to such titles as London’s Good Girl Guide, which seems to function as a Baedeker for predators. In all of this, though, it’s worth pondering what the Londoners of 2062 will make of us 40 years down the line. You can read Sally’s brilliant article here.
Welcome to Rusbridger Country
Another week, another Anglo-American media Twitter beef, as the good burghers of New York magazine dripped scorn on the new ‘Prospect Grid’, a British version of the inimitable ‘Approval Matrix’. After the dust settled, there was a particularly interesting exchange between a couple of print veterans about the anxiety of influence in late 20th century mass-market publications. You can read the whole thing here, if that’s the sort of thing that floats your boat. For our part, let us reiterate that we’ve lifted things wholesale from the Spy archive, namely this glorified listicle which we updated with a couple of decent jokes about Cormac McCarthy, Mark E. Smith and Taylor Swift. And the whole idea of the ‘secret chef’, whereby we tasked an anonymous restaurateur with analysing the broadsheet critics for their knowledge of cuisine, florid penmanship and general bonhomie was entirely inspired by Spy’s regular column in which they reviewed the reviewers. Of course, we would ask Harold Bloom what he would make of this all but unfortunately – he is dead.
In Case You Missed It
The Fence’s features editor, Séamas O’Reilly, goes in search of Werner Herzog for Vulture, in a bid to solve a riddle that begins with an intriguing viral video clip and ends with some answers from the venerable Bavarian director himself.
Michael Schulman talks about the process of writing his masterful profile of Jeremy Strong for the New Yorker.
Dan Milmo digs into the anti-vaxx scribes making an estimated $2.5 million a year from Substack.
Confused about NFTs and really *don’t* want to know what they are? Mint the opposite instead, with Ryan Broderick and co.’s very enjoyable Super Fungible Tokens project.
Unexpectedly fascinating work piece of the week comes from Sophie Elmhirst, who talks real estate and surreal prices with Gary Hersham, Britain’s most successful estate agent.
And Finally
Phillip John Clapp – better known as Johnny Knoxville – celebrates his 50th birthday in March, and has led his ageing band of skatepunks into one more cinematic outing: Jackass Forever. To his detractors, his work is tedium, grossness and puerility, but we reckon him to be one of the funniest comedians of the 21st century, the cackling heir to Buster Keaton.
Here we have two clips from the archive to cheer you up on the last day of the longest month. First up, a prank of perfect simplicity against a posse of furious golf club members; next, the ‘toro totter’, in which four men wearing little hats and sitting on a giant see-saw try their hardest not to be gored by a rampaging bull. And if that doesn’t put a smile on your face, we don’t know what will.
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All the best,
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