Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that is brimming with the spirit of self-improvement.
Issue 26 continues to be bagged and tagged around and about. Here with a celebrated diarist, now with a pooch and outside one of Soho’s newsagents.
Remember, you can win a bottle of something delicious and needlessly expensive (clue: it comes from a region around 90 miles east of Paris) by simply sending a photo of the magazine to us at editorial@the-fence.com or even tagging us on social media. The competition is very much on.
We have reached into our magic bag and pulled out another ten discounted subscriptions. Enter PRINT15 at the checkout, and you’ll get 15 per cent off a year’s subscription – that’s print, digital or both. It also applies to gift subscriptions, but do hurry if you’re feeling generous, as these tokens won’t last long.
Now for the main news. We are delighted to welcome two new columnists to the TF fold. The first is Sophie Heawood, the author of The Hungover Games – you might have read her truly definitive piece on Lily Allen recently, and you can follow her on Instagram here.
The second, John Niven, is the author of Kill Your Friends, and a whole host of other screenplays, novels, and soon a play about the infamous 90s rivalry between Blur and Oasis. You should also follow him here.
We’re delighted to welcome John and Sophie, and are honoured to have two writers of such range and renown in our humble quarterly publication.
Capital Letter is back this Thursday, in which we run through the coolest restaurants in London in a non-listicle format. Sign up here.
Now we promised that this newsletter would get a lot chunkier – not just funny videos and idle gossip. So here we are, a story that contains new information on the tussles in the Atlantic Ocean and beyond. We told you it would be big!
Tanks a Million
Documents obtained by The Fence reveal how an enigmatic Greco-Russian billionaire is transporting billions of dollars’ worth of sanctioned Russian oil and gas to Europe and beyond.
Roman Spirodonov, a grinning silver-haired Greco-Russian, is the man at the helm of Petroruss. Through his Dubai-based company, the 56-year-old orchestrates the movement of black gold around the world in rusting tankers. The company’s modus operandi is simple. Instead of carrying fuel directly from Russia to its destination, Petroruss carries it from the largest country in the world to the closed and tax-free domain of Dubai, before either exporting it abroad itself, or passing it on to another company to bring it to its final destination. As the country battles with the weight of sanctions, figures like Spirodonov have become increasingly vital to its wartime cash-generation efforts.
Import/export data obtained by The Fence for the years 2023 and 2024 show how Petroruss brought $3.3 billion worth of sanctioned Russian oil and gas into Dubai, which ultimately ended up all over the world. The shipping data indicates that shipments of Russian fuel sourced by Petroruss ended up in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal and Spain, with the Spanish taking Russian fuel valued at $142,697,067.20 over the two years in question.
In a sign of his burgeoning power, Russian media sites implicated Spiridonov in a struggle to take over St. Petersburg Oil Terminal last autumn. The attempted takeover of the largest oil terminal in the Baltic region was seen as an effort to commandeer control over the country’s oil supply chains. Unlike some of his more ostentatious counterparts in Putin’s realm, Spirodonov has largely managed to remain under the public radar. The Fence is the first established western publication to expose his vital role in Russia’s sanction dodging, though Spiridonov has not entirely managed to avoid the glare of international authorities. In 2023, Albanian authorities seized the Grace Felix, a Liberian-flagged tanker chartered by Petroruss, on suspicion of carrying smuggled Russian oil products.
We will have more on this story – one of international import – soon.
Chelsea, Chelsea, I Believe
Why is it that the ‘swinging’ King’s Road now has the energy and aura of a Basingstoke or Braintree? What happened to the infamous avenue’s vim and vigour? Why is it now so festooned with mobile phone shops and beige eateries? Jade Angeles Fitton goes some way to answering those questions in her piece on Café Picasso, the much-loved hotspot that sadly shuttered more than a decade ago. You can read the piece here, and if you have any memories of the Picasso as it was, we would love to hear from you via the usual channels.
Does Your Dad Work at Channel 4?
We all know them: those rapacious little go-getters with their colour-coded indexes of contacts and their cloying requests to ‘pick your brain’. Behold, our Sharp-Elbowed Bingo. (If you score any more than six entries, please don’t fire us in 20 years’ time.)
Events, Dear Boy, Events
On 5 February, Clive Martin and Antonia Bentel will be reading TF pieces at Stack Magazines live event at St Bride’s. Tickets are only £6.50 and are still available. There will be members of the editorial team there selling rare magazines from the archive – it was lovely to meet so many of you last time, and we’re looking forward to doing so again.
The Reviews Keep Coming Inn
While ejecting our cleats and scrubbing our reflective bib tights last week, we were delighted to find an adoring review for The Pub, our august volume on all things pubs and pubbery, within the pages of Britain’s best biking publication, Cyclist Magazine. We fully endorse Laurence Kilpatrick’s sentiments regarding the power and convenience of the Kärcher OC3 foldable power washer, but must save our most heartiest concordance for their description of our almanac as ‘a marbled mélange of illustrations, vignettes, rankings, asides, tangents on asides, and good old-fashioned opinion pieces about subjects as esoteric as service station grog holes. In fact, it’s so diverting, you’ll be too distracted to drink your famous pint.’
We would never preach temperance, least of all in January, so we will only advise that you read, and pint, with voluble responsibility. Moments later, we read George Pendle’s spirited review of same in Air Mail; ‘The wit is warm; the wisdom, diverting. Pour yourself a large one and sink in.’
The Pub is available from our dear friends at Backstory in Balham, although you can also find it at all the usual places and at some discounts too. It’s 99.5 per cent brand new stuff you’ll have never seen before, but if you simply must have a taste before you buy, you can read Clive Martin’s Cotswolds Odyssey here, to put any such doubts behind you. Cheers!
Must Be the Reason Why I’m King of My Castle
Congratulations to Adam Ramsay, who, in a Novara article decrying the ‘stolen imperial wealth’ that formed the landscape of the Scottish Highlands, was forced to concede that he grew up in ‘a large, castle-like house’ that has been in his family ‘for many centuries’. Thank you, Adam, for providing us with much joy during these trying times.
With regards to large castle-like houses, we very much enjoyed this short film on Brancepeth Castle and its sandal-wearing denizens and would like to see more – it’s like a Corbynite remix of The F***ing Fulfords.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GplBqmR_tlE
The Commander and the Grey Lady
The latest series of Industry has much to recommend it – not least no Ed Cumming cameo – it is, as the critics are wont to say, ‘a romp’, and by some distance the best thing on British television currently. Do dig into the first two episodes on iPlayer here, and read co-creator Mickey Down’s record-breaking entry on our 146 Questions questions format.
Communing with the Sofa
Now, here’s a message from some of our pals in print media. The Idler magazine is anti-work, anti-Big Tech, anti-smartphone, anti-Lime Bike and anti-Trump. We’re pro-loafing, pro-philosophy, pro-living, pro-drinking and pro-cat. Get a year’s digital subscription for just £14.95 - half the standard price. This also gives you full access to our website and free entry to our online ‘Drink with the Idler’ events, plus an e-version of Idle Thoughts by editor, Tom Hodgkinson.
Click here and use code FENCE25.
Talk to Me
Issue 27 is rammed with goodies, but we still have space for something in ‘Etc.’ and also a couple of ‘insider’ pitches – if this sounds like something you can do, have a read of our pitch guide here and send something through to editorial@the-fence.com.
Go Mbeirimid Beo ar an am Seo Arís
Like many of you, we are avowed fans of Hugh Corcoran’s Instagram grid – a much richer text than so many of the wan little husks of autofiction that populate the bestseller charts. Recently, he’s launched broadsides on Yotam Ottolenghi, the Guardian’s Dan Hancox and this very publication, which he correctly identifies as a ‘hateful barstool-gossip column’. There are photos of vegetables, the late Auberon Waugh smoking a cigarette and some outré Provo banter, and despite it all, the author is once more bidding his goodbyes from socials. We don’t want you to go, Hugh!
After the Afterparty
Want to feel old? Want to feel uncool? Try patronising a Gen-Z audience about how London used to ‘be’ when you were coming up in the world. But still it was definitively a different city by night in the 80s, 90s and 00s, when central London was blessed with heaving nightclubs that stayed open late. Clerkenwell’s Turnmills was the first club to be granted a 24-hour ‘music and dance’ licence, and their seminal gay night, Trade, opened at 3am on a Sunday morning, just as everywhere else was shuttering.
Filmed in 1997, this documentary follows regulars as they prepare for the weekend, and is very much worth your time, even if your hedonism only extends to one glass of wine too many every so often. One small note: the shift in what can be queer aesthetics in the last 30 years is, as you will observe, astonishing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZqmjV_IydY
In Case You Missed It
The Snackhomiez return: one of the funniest skits of recent vintage.
There is a ‘VIP nightclub’ in Newcastle operating with the following name: Club Brass. We have, as they say, no notes.
The best British Pathé black-and-white clip we’ve found of late.
Veronica the back-scratching cow reminds us of this classic NYRB-er from Tim Flannery, on the inner lives of animals.
What a moment: former TF staffer John Phipps makes his New Yorker debut.
Robert Jenrick’s week is going excellently.
We hear there has been just a little bit of snow in Kamchatka.
And Finally
The world of comedy back in the early internet days was a strange beast and most of its dragons now lie firmly slain from both political and comedy-forged blades. But one character has re-emerged from the thicket: Brian Badonde, a camp art critic who inserts the letter B at the start of many a word.
Badonde comes from a pantheon of characters that comprised Kayvan Novak’s show Fonejacker, a classic 00s show that Chris Morris accurately described as ‘just another tawdry example of the prank generation’. It had some semi-good gags and characters. There was Ja Fool, making his restaurant bookings, and the Cockney salesman Terry Tibbs. Other parts of the show have worn under time’s watchful eye, particularly Nigerian scammer George Agdgdgwngo. But Novak has been clever in his Lazarean experiment. He’s paired the character back and he’s reached for the medium of choice among the new blood: the podcast.
And so we now have the Brian Badonde Bodcast. It’s odd and yet strangely enjoyable. Novelty interviewing styles are, oxymoronically, hardly new. We’ve had between two ferns, Jiminy Glick, Eric Andre and the legendary Nardwuar, all of whom span a range of comedic and genuine journalistic talent. Jiminy possibly wins the best question award (asking Mel Brooks what his beef is with the Nazis), but for those of those inclined towards the boyish madness this form can often lean into, none made it quite as mad as Mr Andre did. Bringing out a fake double of your own guest mid-interview is top class work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zxxig_SOxBA
So Badonde is nothing new, but there is still more than enough fun to be had. And, as with all good novelty interviewers, he does the job of getting something a bit different that your standard straight-laced pod-jockey can. You don’t need to go more than 90 seconds into Grant’s interview before he’s talking about making a perfume aged 12 for a girl called Betsy Clapp. Good quality stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpr-zf8zK-Q
Hark! Is that the glimmer of evening we see before us in the yawning winter light? Time to depart, but not before reminding you that you can contact support@the-fence.com for any and all mag-related queries, and editorial@the-fence.com for anything resolutely pitch-shaped. Greenland lies east, west, north and south of Iceland, and also contains no ants. Pretty good newsletter, no? If you enjoyed it, please do share the word or celebrate our work in ‘like’ form below. Until next week.
All the best,
TF