Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that acts as the digital arm of the quarterly print magazine.
Issue 14 is selling out at a rapid rate, and there is a diminishing supply of copies. Soon, we will be hanging the ‘SOLD OUT’ sign above the webstore, and, like nearly all the issues that have preceded it, this little beauty will be unavailable for our retail sale. Move with haste to www.the-fence.com/shop and secure your copy, or, better still, subscribe so you can get every issue as soon as it lands, and with no added shipping costs.
One particular note of business: we’re getting to making our Instagram a lot more active. More posts, more stories and a little bit more behind the scenes action. You can follow it all here.
Today, we’ve got some bits on Lord Longford and Terry Eagleton. But we kick off with a gentle enquiry into Gen X.
Reach for the Lasers
An interesting little scoop here that hasn’t got traction elsewhere: Tony Colston-Hayter, the 57-year-old rave pioneer, could face jail after admitting to two breaches of a serious crime prevention order (SCPO). Acid House’s ‘Mr Big’ has been detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure before, serving custodial sentences for theft and fraud in 2014 and 2018.
As Dorian Lynskey outlines in this fascinating profile, Colston-Hayter is not an insignificant figure in British culture. A ‘hooray henry’ with a passion for a profit margin, he relocated acid house from underground south London clubs to massive open-air raves around the M25, bringing a genuinely counter-cultural movement into the mainstream, and popularising ecstasy use among young Britons – and giving the tabloids the ammunition to foment a genuine moral panic.
He was helped along by a publicist by the name of Paul Staines, who has since made a name for himself at Guido Fawkes, the right-wing political website. Now, it does give you pause to think, when you remember all those breathless documentaries with various Gen-X talking heads muttering on about how ‘Nothing was ever the same again: raving helped changed the world!’ as they’re interviewed in the snooker room at The Groucho.
We’re not going to pass judgement on whether raving did change the world for the better, as there’s a risk we might enter Peter Hitchens territory. But maybe that’s where we’re at right now.
Grammar and Syntax
Mark O’Connell’s piece on the troubles of a botanic garden paints an odd picture of Ventnor, one that has irked locals in the kooky and friendly Isle of Wight town, who find it odd that a journalist who visited it in the height of winter, is so determined to depict it as a ‘dead town’. (Ever heard of the band Wet Leg? Doing quite well in the charts? They played their first gig there).
Anyway, the piece is even odder when it comes to its subject, the American multi-millionaire, John Talbot Curtis, who bought Ventnor Botanic Garden ten years ago. He’s presented, at length and in vivid colour, as a well-intentioned eco-activist battling a grumbling, elderly mob of hatched-faced pensioners determined to harass him at every turn. Would Grauniad readers be so sympathetic to his cause if they knew if he was Master of the Isle of Wight hunt, or visitor numbers had declined from 265,000 to 40,000 in just three years. Or that Curtis tried to charge for a children’s playground (as with the above, omitted from the piece).
Anyway, it reads very nicely, and that’s the main thing. But we can’t help but wonder whether the Guardian are doing a PR campaign for the Curtis family, as the daughter, Morgan, featured on their pages a few months ago, in a profile that followed her in her attempts to redistribute her inheritance to grassroots social justice movements. Well, we invite you to have a look at Morgan’s quest in greater detail here, as she promotes her campaign on Instagram by the graves of her forefathers – Pilgrim Fathers, no less.
The Task of the Critic
Last week, we brought you news of Terry Eagleton, legendary academic of Marxist bent, enjoying the ambience at The Union, a private members club in Soho. Now, we learn that the Professor Emeritus at Lancaster University insists on filing copy in his own unique way, despite being furnished with an email account by his employer, as one anonymous hack relays below:
‘Terry Eagleton files via post. Originally, he would file his essay as a long printed-out series of pages. As he became more regular, he would send a USB. This would have to be sent back to his home in Northern Ireland so he could file again. If his USB was slow in being delivered back to him, Eagleton would send a letter demanding the swift return of his USB.’
Seven Pints Deep with Sir Leonard Cheshire
One of our finest and funniest pieces since All Possible Plots is now available online. The BBC’s 2002 poll on the 100 Greatest Britons is still something of a ‘talking point’ 20 years later for various reasons (it includes three Irishmen in the list, for a start).
But we’re not moved by mere discourse, rather we wanted to ask one simple question: would these legendary Brits be honest value in the pub? The whole thing – all 100 Great Britons – is right here for you to savour over a lukewarm can of Fosters and a stale pack of peanuts.
Lord Longford’s Left Shin Pad
Matt Hancock is one of the strangest men active on the scene, of that there can be no debate. Over the centuries, the Mother of Parliaments has attracted the biggest weirdos in the British Isles to come preen and prance over the body politic. But how would Hancock measure up against the freaks of years past? How would he measure up against your John Stonehouses, your Tom Dribergs, your Enoch Powells? Well, we’d think he slot right in in central midfield – and here’s our Parliamentary Freaks First X1 in a 4-4-2 formation, drawn by the hand of Davey Jones. The whole feature, replete with squad profiles, is available to read in Issue 14. We’d love to know who you would put in your team.
Two pointers: this is post-WW2 only, and we’ve only put MPs who served in Cabinet. But imagine the talent waiting to emerge from the backbenches…
Miss Peabody (Gym) is Both Fair and Tall
Last week, after her inbox was deluged with responses to her excellent piece, Sarah Haque invited readers to share their funniest memories of life at an all-girls school, and the winner came courtesy of Megan Kenyon, and we reprint her entry in full below:
I can remember when we were all told we had to have the HPV vaccine. We were in Year 8, so we were about 13. I don’t really know why, but the whole experience induced mass hysteria in my year. A rumour went round that the nurse would use three needles simultaneously to do the injection, and a girl in the year above told us that she’d lost the use of her arm for two weeks after having the jab. When the time came, it was like someone had opened up a pandora’s box of teenage anxiety. Girls were crying, screaming or fainting in the sanatorium. One girl had to be pretty much dragged into the nurse’s office to have the jab. In the end, it wasn’t even that bad. And there definitely weren’t three needles.
Bad News for Blofeld
We know that there are a few thousand of you who read this newsletter each week, and say, outloud, while stroking a blue-eyed white Persian cat: ‘Ha, these idiots don’t know what they’re doing. They can ask me to subscribe till they’re blue in the face, but I’m going to keep enjoying the way they put the best bits of each issue online. Hahahaha! I love reading quality journalism for free. Hahahahaha!’
I’m afraid we are the bearer of bad news. In two weeks, we are going to implement a paywall of forbidding severity. (Existing subscribers will have a log-in, of course.)
Now, aside from comparing some of you to Bond villains, we don’t want to insult our readership. We are in it for the long haul, and that’s why we keep our annual sub cost at the low, low sum of £30 for the year, more affordable than our competitors, and much cheaper than most Substacks, too. If you want to keep reading The Fence, subscribe today.
The Coravin Cowboys
The Estrella Damm list of Britain’s 100 Top Gastropubs certainly does make for diverting reading. We’d like to see The Camberwell Arms a bit higher up the list (and given that SE5 is the postcode with the most TF subscribers, we reckon most of you would, too). The Eagle in Farringdon – the OG in the game – should definitely be in the top 20. But here’s the thing: most of these places are charging more than a central London joint, and for unimaginative cooking, usually served by nervous gap year students. Quite a lot of these gastropubs are just serving standard pub food, but with a slightly broader wine list and a £10.50 burrata to start with, if you want to feel fancy.
If you’re interested in where British cooking is now, then we recommend you take a trip down Haymarket and visit Fallow, where the editor and free lunch editor* enjoyed a slap-up meal last Wednesday. The decor is agreeably mad: seaweed hangs from the corrugated ceiling, and the ambience is buzzy and smart; the service smooth and polished. The food? Yes, it’s very good too. Mushroom parfait, smoked beef ribs; venison tartare – all top notch, all sourced sustainably, if that’s the sort of thing you go in for.
There’s nowhere else quite like it in London, and come to think of it, Fallow could only really exist in the capital. The set lunch menu is sensibly priced, too, and if you’re looking to cheer yourself up with a meal in town, make a booking today. The critics love it, and we did too.
*It goes without saying that The Fence did not pay for their meal. Nor did they choose the set lunch option.
In Case You Missed it
The first 11/10 piece of the year is here: it’s Andrew O’Hagan on Prince Harry.
Mark O’Connell (the same one as above) served up an excellent take for Slate, on the light farce/high drama dichotomy offered by Oscar heavyweight Banshees of Inisherin.
Insider’s Mattathias Scwartz chimes in with the best crooked con caper of the week with his tale of Charles McGonigal, the high-spending FBI Spy Hunter who was playing both sides.
In an NYT missive sure to earn the ire of the Grey-Lady-phobic UK press, David Wallace-Wells discusses post-Brexit Britain’s place as a cautionary tale for the outside world.
Just how weird is the oft-cited memory vacuum left by the Avatar movies? At the ever excellent Garbage Day blog, guest poster Adam Bumas runs the numbers.
The brewer’s art: Ana Kinsella takes nine ways to look at a pint of Guinness.
And Finally
Usually, we’re not in the business of recommending music – it’s a bit of a try-hard thing for journalists to do. But we make an exception with this number from The Rhythm Method, a beautiful tribute to the joy of watching television, made with a charmingly lo-fi video. How it is only sitting on 4,700 views is a mystery – but we hope they keep the vid when the album is released at some point in the future.
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That’s the lot for this week, and we’ll be back again next Monday (or Tuesday!) with another tranche of clips, tips, links and featurettes. If you’d like to speak to a member of the editorial team, or if you’d like to enquire about orders, then reply to this email. We look forward to joining you soon.
All the best,
TF
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