Dear Readers,
Good evening and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that keeps on going. It’s all happening right now. We have our début podcast, Money’s No Object, going into its second episode tomorrow – do have a listen to the first outing here. Capital Letter is landing on Thursday, and there is a very big project to announce next week, the product of more than a year’s unstinting labour on our parts.
With regards to the magazine – that old thing – there are now no Issue 23s left on our webstore, and the next one is a month away, so we really do recommend subscribing with the button below so you never miss out. We’re not upping the circulation for at least two issues, and we’re selling out quicker and quicker these days – move now to avoid the fate of a Fenceless life.
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As for this week’s mag sightings: Issue 23 has been seen lording over the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall (Two halls! One week!) and in Belfast, by the beach. The competition for the Bollinger is entering its final stretch – do send us your best snaps through and you could win that fizzy, fantastic prize.
To business. Right up top, we’ve got a drunken Florentine dispatch, and remembrances of hangovers past, from our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie.
Consider the Vodka
I remember my first mouthful of vodka. It was on a bench by a tennis court. I must have been 15, I think. Next to me a couple were licking each other’s faces. I took a mouthful, direct, from one of those small bottles which you normally see slipping from the hands of tramps insensible on the benches near Embankment. It was warm, and it burned. It was not a pleasant first encounter.
Since then, I have had other brushes with the drink: most notably, the 100-gram vodka-vases they serve in the restaurant carriages of Russian trains, which come, for some unknown reason, with little dishes of apple sauce. I spent three days between Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk, lost in the miasma that consuming this combination – and nothing but this combination – induces. This experience didn’t ensconce it in my affections either.
I suspect I am not alone in these unpleasant early memories of vodka. But am I of a generation doomed to taste the baleful and warm harvest of the unrefrigerated shelves of a Londis when confronted with what is supposed to be the purest of spirits?
Recently, I found myself drinking vodka in Italy. The world’s most beautiful country. Grappa, Aperol, Limoncello – those weird colourful bitters which I remember mistaking for Fanta in a minibar as a child: these are Italy’s spirits. Not vodka surely? Yet, in the search for a healthier relationship with the ultimate spirit, I was prepared to give anything a go.
Images of braining myself on the side of a yacht whilst wearing a flowing chiffon muumuu, White Lotus-style, were put to the back of my head as I packed my bags for Florence Cocktail Week.
Now the Italians, uncharacteristically quietly, have been slowly dominating the world of spirits over the last few decades. Almost all cocktails worth drinking were devised by them.
Yet Italy’s love affair with spirits is about more than just a cultural suitability. It is also a country brimming with the raw materials for spirits production.
The Roman poet Horace wrote about Apulian wheat and how it produced ‘Panis longe pulcherrimus’, ‘The longest lasting and most beautiful bread’. That might have been 2,000 years ago, but it has taken until now for someone to take the leap and use that wheat to make vodka. That man is Frank Grillo. It was he who had invited me to Florence to try the results.
Frank Grillo is a man to whom impetuous decision-making comes naturally. ‘I once saw someone with some blue hair and thought, “I’ll try that” so I dyed one bit blue and now look at me.’ Frank’s hair is the same colour as those Blue Raspberry Slush Puppies. ‘One day in lockdown, I was living in Atlanta and thought, why not move to Italy?’ So he did.
Once there it was a combination of a love of cocktails and the bread of Altamura which inspired him to start making vodka in Italy’s baking south. What was even better than bread, he reasoned, and the answer came: vodka. He repeats the mantra found on metal signs in dive bars across mid-state America: ‘No great story started with a salad’.
We are served Altamura vodka in a dazzling variety of ways: savoury cocktails, sweet ones, to the strains of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and to pulsating club anthems, in the late afternoon and in the early hours of the morning. It might have seemed counter-intuitive to ask Italy to embrace vodka production, but judging by the singing and slurring that went on underneath the statue of David, it has been a ringing success. After all, the Italians never do anything by halves.
When a Knight Won His Spurs
So, arise, Sir David. It’s worth noting which other famous sportsmen have been awarded that same longed-for accolade. Convicted wifebeater and ‘greatest living Yorkshireman’, Geoffrey Boycott, got the nod from Theresa May. Boris Johnson went one better and ennobled Ian Botham, who once tweeted a dick pic to his followers, but blamed ‘hackers’ for doing so. There’s even David Fagan, knighted for winning the Golden Shears competition a record 16 times (we’re not making this up).
So why did David Beckham’s knighthood take so long to arrive? While he didn’t win anything as England captain, he has been a rainmaker for UK plc over the decades, and that’s usually more than enough.
The decades-long star wattage of the Beckham brand is dazzling. Almost 15 years after he retired from professional football, he remains one of the most famous people in the world, and probably the most famous living English person, with the possible exception of the King, Prince William and Prince Harry. He has more Instagram followers than Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles or Dua Lipa.
But the royal comparison is pertinent. The Beckham family are, in many ways, a lot like the Windsors of the 1990s, providing much-needed entertainment for us all with their toe-sucking cringiness. Who knows what the future holds for them?
Hello from the Real World
Around 15 years ago, lots of people in television were trying to make Hugh Hendry a household name. Hendry, a Scottish protégé of Crispin Odey, was running Eclectica Asset Management, and was given to bombastic appearances on Newsnight, back when that programme really mattered. Watch him pique Jeffrey Sachs’ oceanic self-regard with some cutting remarks here.
Rather than entrust his fate to the producers in their Paul Smith floral shirts, Hendry has been trying to become a celebrity on his own terms, with decidedly mixed results. He’s now largely based on the Caribbean island of St Barts and is decked out in permanent Burning Man garb. As you can see, his life is documented via multiple social media channels. Here he is, at the age of 56, dishing out gnomic life insights while skateboarding through his Paris apartment. Should have listened to the professionals, Mr ‘Acid Capitalist’ – this ain’t it.
Dispatched
Over at Dispatch, the newest magazine on the block, you’ll find a healthy dose of frontier spirit. Think reported features on crumbling prisons, Californian weed farms and the hyper-libertarians refusing to pay council tax. Last week, Derek Owusu – one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists – laid bare his experience of living with borderline personality disorder.
With a paywall on the horizon, be sure to snap up its early-bird offer: 25% off monthly and annual subscriptions.
The Wrong Brush
Ever wanted to hang a watercolour painted by someone who knows how to drill into a safe? You have? Really? In that case, we have some great news for you, in the form of this feature from Nick Thompson, who ventured into a subterranean Spitalfields art space stocked with works from some of Britain’s most infamous criminals. We wanted to give it the title, ‘A Rogues Gallery’, but we couldn’t, because that’s what they’ve called their gallery. Anyway, Nick spent some time at a round-table with the ex-cons, and you can read all about it here.
Ghost Writing
Alex Taylor discovered his unique ability when giving a eulogy for his yoda-like, cigarette-smoking grandmother. The man was a natural paean powerhouse, and used his abilities to give genuine consolation to the bereaved – much to his own surprise. He tells us what it was like to make ends meet through paying tribute to those who had met their maker, and their ends, while he was a student.
Run the Jewels
For many years, we’ve kept our postage rates at a comically low level, and we’re going to update them to a higher price later this week. So this is your last chance to unfurl your purse and pick up a lorry-load of back issues for diddly squat in P&P. There are only a handful of Issue 17s left. ‘The Sex and Nature’ special, no less.
In Case You Missed It
Gideon Rachman spoke to Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, for a fascinating and revealing hour of pure Atlanticist discourse.
Pico Iyer’s fantastic essay on shepas from 1999 has been republished by the New York Review of Books, in the wake of legendary sherpa Kami Rita breaking his own record for Everest summits – 31 – a few weeks ago.
Think you’ve read Samuel Pepys’ diary? Well, hark at the hidden parts of Samuel Pepys’ diary.
Funky lunatic Sly Stone has died, and, along with his music, he left us this brilliant encounter with interviewer Timothy Crouse.
And Finally
Orson Welles always had a flair for the dramatic, and it has produced some excellent viewing over the years. Take this fantastic clip of him performing a magic trick where he wordlessly produces a goose from a large silver receptacle; or, if you’re so inclined, one of the 127 films he appeared in over five decades on-screen.
As is well documented, Welles increasingly struggled for cash to fund projects in his later years. To try and get the cash he would schmooze whoever he could, and though he famously demanded that his tombstone read ‘He never did Love Boat’ – a terrible sitcom known as a shore for ex-stars to wash up on – he did at one point sign a contract to appear in one of its episodes for $75,000, only to back out later.
All these money-making efforts have produced some brilliant footage. Best of all is this champagne ad he did for Paul Masson. Clearly bored out of his mind and completely hammered, these outtakes stand as some of the titan’s finest work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvxwf1jxdaM
Do let us know if you enjoyed that outing, and we will be back with Off The Fence next week. If you have had a good time, why not hammer that heart button below, or leave a lovely comment. And your tidbit this week: The Scottish airline Loganair offers the world’s shortest commercial flight, a hop between the Orkney islands of Westray and Papa Westray – it takes 90 seconds and costs as much as a year’s subscription to The Fence (print-only). Catch you soon.
All the best,
TF