Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a cheap and cheerful newsletter to accompany our lavishly assembled quarterly magazine. Over the last two weeks, Kieran Morris has been at the helm, and Issue 12 is shaping up to be an absolute pearl under his stewardship. It’s going to be launched in early July, and has a string of features from established writers and some eager newbies too.
At the moment, we’re running a competition. The winner gets a bottle of Champagne and a copy of Issue 8 – a genuine collector’s item with a beautiful Paul Cox cover (and likely to be worth quite a bit in the years to come). All you need to do is to take a photo of Issue 11 in a W H Smiths and tag us on either the Twitter account or on its more beautiful cousin, Instagram.
There’s a full list of stores here, and the competition runs until June 1. The winner will be chosen by a carefully selected independent party, and you can’t say fairer than that.
To business. Today, there are some bits on Louis Theroux, Fred Dibnah, but we lead with a dispatch from the editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie.
Written in Earnest
In the Orient Bar at the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul – a strange, silver-papered, oligarchical fantasy of a room – there hangs a framed photograph of Ernest Hemingway. While the author definitely drank there – and anywhere else he could, for that matter – he spent most of his time in the city at a hotel with a lower star rating a little up the hill, the Grand Hotel de Londres.
However, there is no photo of Hemingway at that hotel, possibly because he blamed them for giving him malaria. The author’s trip to Istanbul is not considered to be one of his formative experiences. He was sent, in the autumn of 1922, to cover the occupation of what was then Constantinople by British troops, who had been dispatched there to try and avoid the ethnic cleansing that had occurred in Smyrna and elsewhere as Ataturk’s nationalist forces descended on the capital.
It was, in many ways, an episode typical of Hemingway’s life in Europe. The spectre of war, the gung-ho journalistic instinct to be on the ground, the real horrors of the 20th century's catalogue of ethno-political conflict– these were all themes to which he would return again and again. His trip to this most ancient of cities had it all. And yet, his time has left no real mark on the place, nor, it seems, did the place leave much of a mark on him. Even the canvas on which this episode was painted, the Grand Hotel de Londres, bears little trace of his presence. The hotel website makes reference to him only in passing as the prime exemplar of the ‘artsy-fartsy’ crowd – their words, not mine – that continue, clearly to the owner’s irritation, to make up a majority of guests there to this day.
That’s not to say that the hotel doesn’t have its other attractions. Indeed, what began as a quest for Hemingway soon became a deep dive into the oddness of the Grand Hotel de Londres. The decor is deployed with a schizophrenic nonchalance. In one corner, an old print of fin-de-siècle Constantinople is sandwiched between a metal sign declaring ‘ASTON MARTIN PARKING ONLY: ALL OTHERS WILL BE CRUSHED’ and a sticker bearing the legend ‘Skateboarders – proudly annoying pedestrians since 1972.’ Next to this collage is an ominous sign that reads ‘Always Remember To Give Goodnight Cuddles’. Hemingway would probably approve of that, at least.
At the heart of the Grand Hotel is the resident’s drawing room and bar. It’s the sort of space that makes the set of a Wes Anderson film look like an exercise in kitchen sink realism. The drawing room is draped in thick, red velvet curtains, like a coffin lying in state. The furniture is a cross between Louis Quatorze and Dollywood. If you move any piece of the ensemble, it becomes clear that its placing – seemingly the work of an unidentified pervert who gets off on stubbed toes and bruised shins – is in fact a complex floorplan designed to cover multiple mysterious stains on the carpet. In the corner opposite the bar there is a jukebox which, on closer inspection, contained a discography of German marching songs. The only permanent residents of this space are two African grey parrots that whistle at female guests and swear in Turkish.
Other rooms are just as bizarre – there is the business centre, which contains one, unconnected, desktop computer of the late 90s vintage and, inexplicably, two Harley Davidson motorcycles. My bedroom described itself, aspirationally, as a suite. In truth, it was comfortable and clean but far from luxurious. The air conditioning unit transpired to be unusable after somebody had stuffed its vents with folded cardboard and the wallpaper peeled where the former gas lights had been crudely wired to the mains. One night an amorous couple tried to slink into the room and were only seen off by the sight of me emerging from the dark in my Calvins. They were very apologetic and, in fairness, l realised the next morning that there was no number to the room, nor any other indicator that it was a hotel room and not a conveniently situated bonking cupboard.
The service is pretty atmospheric as well. Imagine what might have happened if Orhan Pamuk had been a script consultant for Fawlty Towers. Having initially booked the suite specifically because it contained two beds, my friend and I were told on arrival that ‘a family is in there’. We were first shown to a room which was ‘exactly the same’ but in fact contained only one single bed. Eventually I was shown up to a former servant’s chamber, where I spent the night listening to an increasingly frantic German man try to plan a sex party over the phone in the room next door. Another guest complained of a lack of hot water. ‘Next time’ came the response, ‘perhaps you could book a room on a higher floor? Then the water will be better.’ It’s a reply so perfect in terms of its bending of both the laws of physics and of the hospitality industry as to be unanswerable.
I sat on the roof terrace of the Grand Hotel and smoked a cigar – it seemed a healthier tribute to the man than indulging in one of his other vices, like being vile to my family or shooting my own head off. I rather respected the place’s refusal to acknowledge its famous guest. Then again, if you’re only just conceding the advent of the electric light, why would you pay attention to the inventor of the new American prose style? I have resolved never to stay anywhere else if fate brings me to Istanbul again. Below, in the square round which the once grand hotels of the Pera district now moulder, a crowd chanted loud slogans in support of Ukraine, against ethnic cleansing, and in defiance of nationalism. Hemingway’s Europe maybe isn’t so far away after all.
You should follow Fergus on Twitter here.
The Sweet Cup of Victory
Last Thursday, The Fence won its first award – Henry Jeffreys took home the title of Best Drinks Writer at the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drinks Awards, and here is a lovely photo of Henry with the trophy (3D printed with ‘sugar and wood’ according to the upstart new CEO).
Fans of Henry’s work (Jeffrinis? Jeffersonians?) will be delighted to learn that he has a plonk-related article in the upcoming Issue 12. In the meantime, you can read his prize-winning piece right here. We are very interested in extending our vinous tentacles, so if you work in the wine world and think you might have something for us – a pitch, a tip or perhaps a case of Burgundy – do get in touch via the usual channels.
Why Are You Asking Me This?
Around ten months ago, we asked a series of inane questions to a bunch of eminent minds, and collated the responses into a compendium that proved extraordinarily popular. At the last moment, Ian Martin, legendary screenwriter and all-round excellent egg, helped us with a load of superb queries to a posse of famouses.
He didn’t just contact some excellent names - Michael Palin and Hugh Laurie would, we fear, have left us on read otherwise – he also crafted many of its most excellent questions. Certainly, we feel that Do you save those little bags of dessicant you sometimes get in electrical goods packages? should become a journalistic staple.
We should have given Ian greater acknowledgment at the time, since his entries really elevated the piece from a goodish one to a great one, but it gives us enormous pleasure to do so now, not least so we can give another push to one of our favourite things we’ve ever published.
Tom Stoppard’s GCSE Project
It’s always a pleasure to see jewels from our archive get a second spin on the online discourse mill, but we didn’t expect this little compendium of literary jokes we wrote two years ago to make such a splash again. It was also very funny – at least to us – to see it being reviewed with such analytical fervour by the good burghers of Metafilter, a website that seems to function as a sort of wildly pretentious Reddit board.
Anyway, the piece scored 11,000 page views last week, but only four subscriptions, and we do need people to keep signing up at the very reasonable sum of £25 for the year to keep things ticking over nicely. If you value independent journalism, please do subscribe today.
Those Pesky TikTok Teens!
Louis Theroux has found a new tier of global fame, as a rap he made in a BBC series 22 years ago has become a global dance craze. In some ways, it’s funny to see a well-educated white man in his fifties freestyle, but in truth, Theroux has a deep and unheralded knowledge of the world’s most influential music genre, since his 80s schooldays as an Eric B and Rakim fan.
After some rather heavy stuff about addiction, Theroux has come back to his playful best with a superb docu-series which came out earlier this year. ‘Forbidden America’ has one stand-out episode, where the gawky Louis heads to Florida, the frontline of rap music. There are many moments of comic genius, and it’s all available on iPlayer in the link above.
In Case You Missed It
Anna Merlan asks, quite reasonably, why The Believer is now owned by a sex toy company
The data behind cultural drift – Adam Mastroianni charts the oligopoly that’s taken over Pop Culture
Now he had opps: Daniel Trilling reviews Ciaran Thrapar’s excellent new book about his time as a youth worker in south London.
Emily Shugerman writes an eye-popping profile of Luiz Capuchi, a wannabe Crpyto-Kingpin
It’s been nearly ten years since Gary Willis’ Our Moloch, his searing and sadly still relevant, treatise against gun violence.
And Finally
If you think about it, the viewing figures for this 1970s clip of Fred Dibnah climbing a chimney overhang suggest that all might be right in the world. 3.7 million people logging on to watch an elderly Yorkshireman climbing a very big ladder? Yes, it’s all that and more. In truth, this video deserves 370 million views. Do watch it to see a genius broadcaster in action.
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We’ll be joining you next week with a dispatch from a rave on a landslip in the Isle of Wight – the editor has had a refreshing fortnight’s break. If there’s anything you’d like to talk to us about, do get in touch by replying to this email, and we look forward to joining you at the same time next week.
All the best,
TF
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