Dear Readers,
Welcome back to the latest instalment of Off The Fence, a fortnightly newsletter of entirely original content.
Another lockdown has hit. It is likely, we are told, to extend until April. That’s not great news for the country, and really not great news for an independent print magazine. If you’ve been enjoying our work, then please do support us by subscribing today. We’ve got a series of featurettes on the US election, a tribute to the late great Geoffrey Palmer, but first a report from Old Compton Street.
Last Orders: Soho Locks Down Again
On the night before lockdown, in Soho, the streets were thriving. A city had congregated to help the pubs sell out their stock before last orders were called. Some chains were offering pints for just 99p. We bought a round of five pints for £14.15 – prices last seen in London in the days when Lehman Brothers still traded on Bank Street. This lockdown goes by the same name as the last one. But the deserted streets and palpable unease of the spring was nowhere in evidence.
We’re supposed to be inside for the next month. Are people planning to break the rules? It depends how you put the question. The question ‘Are you planning to break the rules this lockdown?’ will elicit a flat ‘no’ from anyone. Even the slightest change in tone reveals a more deep-seated ambivalence. Asked whether he was planning to bend the rules, one man replied ‘How do you mean?’ Another said, ‘Well, break the rules in what way? I’m not gonna go to a house party or anything, but sitting in someone’s garden...’
Most agreed that they would be keeping a little more to themselves, but still seeing friends occasionally. Others speculated that compliance would diminish as time went on. ‘It’ll be nice to get a break from the COVID-anxiety for a bit. but the third week, the fourth... It gets hard. I wouldn’t be surprised.’ But judging from the streets, the atmosphere and the still-fresh memory of Halloween – when about half of young London was very audibly attending a house party – it’s possible that people were planning to do more than sit in a garden.
We asked a man at the other urinal if he was planning to break the rules. ‘You fucking bet I am,’ he said. Revisiting the urinal, we asked again, and received roughly the same response. Whether people are more honest at urinals, or whether the people who will answer a journalist’s questions while both of them are pissing, is unclear at time of writing (though definitely, we think, of anthropological interest).
One group – all key workers, who worked for a homeless charity and spent the lockdown working face to face with other people – insisted that it was everyone’s duty to follow all the rules. We asked them why, if that was the case, they were very clearly sitting in a group of seven. They laughed.
The homeless themselves came by with the same regularity they used to. In the spring, most had been housed in hotels or hostels during the spring. There seemed to be no plan for them this time. Readers will remember the relief with which the nation learned that the risk of outdoor transmission was very low. None of the people we spoke to knew where they would be sleeping. One asked for change, and was met with a flurry of regretful head shaking, the silent patting of changeless pockets.
‘Card,’ said one man, shaking his head, ‘what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?’
A half mile away at Downing Street, demonstrations were being staged beyond the gates to protest the passage of the lockdown bill into law. At another bar, a woman asked us if the lockdown had been passed into law that evening. We told her it had. ‘Well I’m still going to work tomorrow,’ she replied. ‘Can’t lock me down!’
We asked if she had stayed home in March and April. ‘Well,’ she said quietly, ‘it was different then.’
In the spring we washed our hands until they bled. We wore gloves to the shop and disinfected the post. Now, with London officially locked down, Holland and Barrett, Rymans and Poundland are all open for business. Where we live, Snappy Snaps is open. While the national death toll traces a parabola past the 50,000 mark, infection rates are beginning to fall in most London boroughs. The capital’s pubs and churches may be shuttered, but its high streets seethe with nonchalance.
On lockdown eve, it seemed that rule-breaking was more a matter of careful judgment and etiquette than the life or death affair it had been. It had become, at least in part, a social performance. At 9:30pm, as the lights were coming on all over London: groups of people who’d sworn to us they were eager to stick to the rules began to pile into Ubers en-masse, heading off to continue their night elsewhere. This was all happening in sight of a police station. No one cared.
The recent news of an effective vaccine is cause to celebrate. With any luck it will change the world – or change it back, at least, to how it was. But it won’t change what happens in the next few months, as a prolonged second wave of COVID-19 ravages the NHS and public apathy – the dreaded ‘lockdown fatigue’, used to justify the government’s fatal dithering in March – really does take hold.
As for young people? It’s likely that this time next year, the under-50s will still not be vaccinated. Government spokespeople say that social distancing regulations will continue until next winter. Whether they will be willing to postpone their lives for that long is another story. For people who are bored, who are heartbroken, who are trying to lose their virginity, who are losing their beauty, who have gone to university to make new friends, who want to travel, who have young children or who are running out of time in which to have them – for people who are young, and will not be young forever – eighteen months may simply be too long to go on like this.
The current lockdown is supposed to end on December 2nd. If the government continues to pursue a worst of both worlds approach, suppressing economic activity without suppressing the virus, it’s likely that more lockdowns, more fatigue and more resentment are right around the corner. Until then, The Fence will be following the rules to the absolute letter. Just like everyone else.
Son of Albion
Much has been made of Joe Biden’s pride in his Irish heritage. How will it inform his dealings with a Tory administration determined to unravel the Good Friday Agreement? Will Gerry Adams take tea at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as Boris Johnson is left on hold?
Now, we’re not going to say the President-Elect is ‘one of ours’. But given that his great-great-grandfather, William Biden, was born in Sussex, he’s not *not* English. And the Special Relationship, despite the editorials, will endure. It has little to do with the personalities of the key players in the executive branch, and everything to do with the intimate military and intelligence relationship between the countries – a relationship which grew stronger under the Obama administration. And you have to leave London to see its most visible outposts.
On the coast of North Cornwall, GCHQ Bude intercepts the communications of the transatlantic cables that carry internet traffic. In 201l, it received a £15.5 million grant to pay for its upkeep from America’s National Security Agency (NSA).
The fall of Muammar Gaddafi was directed from RAF Digby, a nondescript base in the flat farmland of Lincolnshire, where GCHQ and the NSA intercept communications and direct Predator drone strikes.
The Special Relationship permeates much of the world, in the form the ongoing and baleful War on Terror. The Americans prize the capabilities of Britain’s special forces, and Whitehall cherishes that acclaim. In 2015, Parliament voted not to deploy troops to Syria. Yet in 2019, the Government was forced to admit that Staff Sergeant Matt Tonroe of the SAS had died fighting ISIL in Syria, alongside a soldier from the US Navy Seals.
There are whispers of deployments throughout Africa and the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, it’s all very secretive. It’s also, perhaps, the last example of British hard power, as its global reach rapidly declines.
He’s a Painter at Heart!
Last week, as Donald Trump refused to concede the presidential race, pundits looked back to the halcyon days of 2008, when John McCain conceded the race with characteristic good grace. And there were other calls, too, for George W. Bush to intervene.
Bush’s status as the kindly patrician of the GOP is, perhaps, at odds with his oversight of a prolonged CIA torture campaign which featured ‘rectal rehydration’ on suspected Al-Qaeda leaders who, to this day, remain imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay.
Torturing enemy combatants would have been unimaginable had John McCain triumphed in the 2000 Republican run-off. And 20 years ago, he was breezing to victory in that race, until George W. Bush’s campaign team pulled out the mother of dirty tricks campaigns, suggesting that his nine-year-old daughter, Bridget, who he adopted from Bangladesh, was his mixed-race lovechild. Bush cleaned up in South Carolina, then pushed on, past Florida and to the White House. (The past is a different country, they do things differently there. Etc.)
Poor Jake
Marjorie Taylor Greene is overwhelmingly likely to win a seat in the House of Representatives for Georgia’s 14th congressional district. A businesswoman, she has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshipping paedophiles is running a global child-trafficking ring, while plotting against Donald Trump, who is fighting this cabal.
Unfortunately, this makes her only the second maddest Republican in the state. We’re afraid that Governor Brian Kemp is unshiftable in pole position. Here’s his campaign video from 2018.
Hey, ‘Hipster’!
Everyone likes taking the piss out of young trendy people in Hackney, Clapton etc. But the problem is that many of the people doing so don’t live in East London (or London for that matter) and that most of these edgy satirists remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. Call it the Have-I-Got-News-For-You-ification of the discourse, in which tired old comedians trot out the same tropes, ‘podcasters with beards riding fixie bikes’ and so on. So three cheers for a long overdue corrective.
Three Cheers for Jimmy
Global icon Sir Sean Connery died on Halloween. And last week claimed another great, as Geoffrey Palmer passed on to the stage in the sky at the age of 93. If you don’t know his name, then you’ll definitely know his face, probably from cameos in Tomorrow Never Dies, Paddington, A Fish Called Wanda and Blackadder. Readers of a certain vintage will know him from his role as the bonkers ex-army officer Jimmy in the absurdist 70s sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, a particular favourite of ours.
Leonard Rossiter, another underappreciated genius, plays the title role of a middle-aged middle-manager sent deep into madness by his hum-drum suburban existence. In the second series, Reggie, having faked his own death, reveals his identity to his brother-in-law, Jimmy, who has been busily hoarding an arsenal of weapons to take down the Labour government of the day.
What follows is just one of the great comic scenes of British television, one that has eerie resonance to the way we are living today (though in the twilight days of punditry – what doesn’t?) But it is still, at the same time, just very very funny.
The Infinite and the Go-Pro
To end with something cheerful then, we’d like to talk about a Frenchman with a deathwish.
In 2005, French pilots experimented with parachute and parafoil kite designs, to create a new sport that melds skiing and hang-gliding, and that uses rockfaces as obstacles. They called it speed-riding.
50 speed-riding pilots have died since 2006. Most resorts have outlawed the sport. And yet, it has produced perhaps the most astonishing video you’ll ever see, in which a young man called Valentin Delluc flies off a mountain, all alone, and in the dead of night.
For centuries people have dreamt of what would happen if man took flight. Now, we can see it.
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That’s it for this week. We do like to hear from our readers, so if you would like to get in touch with us, you can do so by replying to this email.
Issue 6 is being sent to print today, and Off The Fence will be back in a fortnight for its last instalment of the year. We’re ending with a belter: a special investigation into the murder that haunts Whitehall. See you then.
All the best,
TF
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