Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to a bursting edition of Off The Fence, a newsletter that people have described as ‘much better than it needs to be’. Some important business: Issue 18 is scheduled to arrive this week, so this is your last chance to make sure your address is correctly updated on your account on the website – you can manually update it there, and if you’re having any problems please email subscriptions@the-fence.com and we will attend to you promptly.
To celebrate the arrival of the redeveloped website in May, we put an introductory offer in for subscriptions, whereby they are discounted for the first year for £5 – so a digital subscription is £14.99, a UK sub is £24.99 and so on and so forth. We are going to halt this offer very, very soon, so this is your last chance to save yourself a fiver on a subscription to the magazine.
A Lorra Lorra Laffs
Next Tuesday, we’re excited to bring you something we’ve been carefully compiling for some time now. We’ve asked contributors, friends and some celebrated names from the worlds of film, television and broadsheet journalism a question: ‘What is the funniest thing you’ve seen all year?’
We’ve got a pumping Google doc bursting with clips, books, films, memes, plays, vintage videos and real-life anecdotes. 2023 may not have the most amusing year, but there’s enough top-tier material in this mail-out to more than make up for it – and you have the chance to feature within.
All you need to do is send through an entry to editorial@the-fence.com of no more than 150 words detailing the thing that made you laugh the most this year. We will need your submission by Sunday evening at the very latest.
The Enfield Blazers
Jade Angeles Fitton is one of our star contributors and her piece from Issue 17 on the pigeon fancying communities of London is now online for you all to enjoy. You can also pair it with Grace Linden’s dispatch on the pigeon rehabbers from last year, too. Have we reached peak pigeon at Fence Towers? Very possibly. But if anyone could procure us an interview with this particular avian aficionado then we might open to pitches.
Beware Of The Evil Eye
Sarah Haque’s charming piece about superstitions in the 21st century is online, too, and we commend it to you wholeheartedly. What is the most commonly-held superstition in modern day Britain? Possibly ‘don’t walk under ladders’? Who knows. If there’s some research out there, we’d be keen to see it.
The Sport Of Kings
Once very much a ‘minor’ sport, real tennis is enjoying something of a revival at the moment, except for in Ireland, where there is an almighty racket about the status of the only real tennis court left on the mainland of Ireland – Archie Cornish’s report from Dublin is here for you to enjoy.
(Interestingly enough, there is another real tennis court in the Republic, on the island of Lambay, a private demesne four miles off the coast of Skerries. The island has a Lutyens-designed castle and a horde of wallabies, too. Perhaps the ideal location for a Hibernian-tinged take on Saltburn?)
Nestling Underneath The Tree
It goes without saying that a subscription to The Fence magazine really makes for the ideal gift for a beloved partner/ diffident aunt/ truculent godchild – four issues of prize-winning writing and playful design, and all at a really very reasonable price, if we may say so ourselves.
It’s easy to make the magic happen: just go down to the link below, and after ‘selecting your region’ and ‘selecting your plan’, click ‘purchase as a gift’ and it should be simple enough to fill out the form from there. And remember that the price is going up next week, too, so you can buy yourself something lavish.
SHARE THE FENCE WITH SOMEONE YOU LOVE
In Case You Missed It
GQ have compiled the 50 best British TV episodes of the 21st century.
An unbelievably impressive investigation from the NYT tracks the fates of the Russian prisoners of IK6, who left their cells for the battlefields of Ukraine.
In a stonking bit of reportage, Amelia Tait asks: who decides which countries get which crisp flavours?
Tom Whipple speaks with the man who’s had an unexploded bomb in his garden all his life.
Mark O’Connell tackles the agony and ecstasy of Werner Herzog’s memoir.
Joel Morris laments the sad state of British scripted comedy, and argues we need more, and need it more than ever
Chris Godfrey speaks to Nando Parrado, who survived the Miracle of the Andes, 50 years later
And Finally
Two weeks ago, we profiled the parlous state of parkour, and we have further news from the arena of extreme sports, as Ken Stornes has broken the world record for ‘death jumping’ with a 40-metre sideways leap into an icy fjord.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVyspiUy-Vs
Stornes, who is a former Norwegian Army soldier, is having something of a moment in 2023 – you can see him here screaming, before belly-flopping into a pool while holding two plastic axes in either hand.
While it is all very impressive, we’ve got to say there’s nothing particularly hip about a short, bald man bellowing in his underpants over a death metal soundtrack. A peremptory glance around the various social media channels of a certain Austrian beverage company suggests that it’s been an underwhelming year in the world of extreme sports – there’s a wakeboarding-to-BASEjump vid doing the rounds that is certainly novel, but loses those vital cool points for taking place on a Dubai skyscraper. Where’s the G-force thrill of a Candide Thovex clip? The truly palm-clenching terror of a three-wave Nazare hold-down?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSO1gltbg0o
Thank you, then to Valentin Delluc, who is very much keeping the French end up. We last profiled this suicidal Gaul a few years ago, when we shared his video of his midnight Alpine descent, where he descended a mountain via parachute and skis – at night.
Valentin’s urge to meet his maker is decidedly non-seasonal. Here he is performing a wildly unnecessary somersault out of a hot-air balloon. On home territory in the Haute-Savoie, he performs a 130mph-plus speedrun through a treeline. And here he grinds on a chairlift cable on skis, while parachuting and dressed as Santa Claus. Valentin, we salute you – but please do look after yourself.
We usually say ‘that’s it for this week’ here but this is not it for this week – we will be back on Thursday, where we are going to launch Issue 18 and also we might do one of those naff gift guides that have become very popular lately. So lots to look forward to.
In the meantime, if you’ve got a funny 2023 story for us, send it to editorial@the-fence.com; if you’ve got a question about an order, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com. Speak soon.
All the best,
TF