Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows how to have a good time. We continue to wade our way through the editorial-design-flatpan puzzle matrix as the push to bring you the shiny next issue of The Fence enters its final furlong. We hope you have taken up the poll position by your letterboxes and are getting ready.
Despite all of this busyness, the business of The Fence rolls on: we have now joined LinkedIn. Do please join us there. LinkedIn is known for being a mediocre platform full of peer-pressured self-promotion; we have plans to brighten it up a touch and (hopefully) unseat our Australian rivals. And speaking of social media, we have just posted our most popular post in some time on Instagram.
We’re glad to see that readers are continuing to flock to Nuneaton with the issue, given how lovely the sea is there at this time of year. This is the last chance to enter the competition; we will announce the winner of the fizz next week!
And, just because we are so generous, we’re rolling out a few more tokens for subscriptions to the mag. If you are weighing up whether to go for one of these, as we suspect a few of you might be, let this be your sign from the universe. Enter MARCH20 to get a full 20 per cent off at checkout. There are only five of these newbies minted so do move fast, and remember they apply to print, digital and gift subscriptions.
Most excitingly, after over 130 people applied for the role, we’re delighted to welcome Rachel Dastgir as our new editorial assistant. Exciting times.
This week, we have a history of Oscars no-shows and some stories you might have missed from the ongoing ‘situation’. But we get the ball rolling with a short piece about a master strategist.
He Loves a Cadbury’s Creme Egg
Gerry Adams is back in the High Court this week in defence of a claim brought by John Clark, Jonathan Ganesh and Barry Laycock, injured respectively by the IRA bombings at the Old Bailey in 1973, the London Docklands and Manchester in 1996. Acting for the claimants – who are seeking £1 each in ‘vindicatory’ damages – Anne Studd KC said their focus is ‘to prove on balance of probabilities that [Adams] was so intrinsically involved [in the IRA]’ that he was ‘as culpable for the assaults giving rise to these claims as the individuals who planted and detonated the bombs.’
Adams is on a reputational run of form, having defeated the BBC in a 2025 libel action (represented by Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer, Paul Tweed – Hi again Paul!) concerning an allegation that he sanctioned the killing of MI5 informant Denis Donaldson in 2006. The current High Court case offers Adams further reputational vindication, with the chance to lay the ‘ad nauseam’ IRA membership question to rest once and for all. Adams has always maintained a separation between the ‘Armalite and the ballot box’, distinguishing his role in the republican leadership as purely political.
Post-Good Friday Agreement, Adams has cultivated a fluffy image in the social media age culminating in The Negotiator’s Cookbook – a recipe book co-authored with prominent republicans Ted Howell and Pádraic Wilson – and My Little Book of Tweets, featuring a selfie of Adams and a goat on its front cover. Online, Adams recently announced his support for the English rugby team, and also entered a competition to win a Stone Island jacket.
Nevertheless, a polished media persona does not always translate to the witness box, as was apparent from Adams’ oral testimony in the criminal case against his brother, Liam, convicted in 2013 of raping and sexually abusing his daughter, Áine, over a six-year period beginning when she was just four years old. In a notably bizarre interaction during Adams’ cross-examination, Judge Philpott observed that he was taking notes, prompting Adams to claim he was ‘doodling’, to which Philpott instructed, ‘It would be better if you don’t.’ Adams then admitted, ‘When I say I’m doodling, I have written down one or two bits, yeah.’
During cross-examination Ms McDermott QC sought to establish that in an interview for UTV’s Insight programme in 2009 – in which Áine exposed her father’s abuse – Gerry lied that his brother Liam had left Northern Ireland after the family confronted him in 1987 about the abuse and lied that Liam was ‘out of [his] life more or less for about the next 15 years.’ Accordingly to Ms McDermott QC, save for a few short trips to Spain, Liam remained in Northern Ireland; kept in contact with Gerry; stood for nomination as a Sinn Féin candidate in 1997; lived with Gerry for six weeks in 1998; worked at youth clubs in Gerry’s constituency from 1998 into the noughties; and confessed his abuse to Gerry in 2000.
Ms McDermott QC put it to the witness that – while he had spoken to the police about his brother’s abuse in 2007 and 2009 – he did not report the specifics of Liam’s 2000 confession until just four days before he provided oral evidence to the Crown Court in April 2013. In an interview that year, Áine – who refers to Gerry as ‘The Beard’ – claimed her uncle ‘wanted to obtain a court injunction with my help to stop the story’ of her father’s abuse. ‘He said he needed to make sure it didn’t get into the press to protect me. Looking back, he was buttering me up. It was all about PR and his own image.’
I Couldn’t Possibly
Sean Penn deferred accepting his Oscar on Sunday to Kieran Culkin, preferring to be in Ukraine, according to sources at the NYT. Although said sources didn’t elaborate further, Penn is known to be prone to activism as well as vocal supporter of Zelensky’s, to whom he gave his last Oscar so it could be ‘melted down’ for bullets, naturally. Brad Pitt also missed it in what’s become a pattern for the actor, who spent the 2017 Oscars ‘holed up creating a sculpture’ in L.A.’s Frogtown district, not wanting to disturb his flow, having been ‘at it for nearly 10 days’.
Penn’s absence got us reminiscing about previously standout Academy no-shows. Marlon Brando comes out of the gate as the most notable – correctly assuming his Oscar was a cinch for The Godfather, he sent Sacheen Littlefeather to reject it on his behalf in protest of Hollywood’s portrayal of Native Americans and to draw attention to the ongoing standoff at Wounded Knee. Lesser known instances include both Anthony Hopkins and Eminem missing out on the fanfare because they were asleep, Paul Newman as he was wearied by it all after seven nominations and Michael Caine due to a scheduling conflict with filming of Jaws: The Revenge, saying later, ‘I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible.’
He Ran Iran
The current war on Iran, as with all big political stories these days, is developing at lightning speed, which means you may well have missed some truly fascinating aspects of the conflict. One such item concerns the sudden death of Ayatollah Khamenei. Speaking to Gideon Rachman at the FT, Sir Simon Gass, a former UK ambassador to Iran, pointed out an unusual factor in this death. During previous attacks on Iran, Khamenei was moved to a bunker, as happened in June last year. This was notably not the case this time round.
Exactly why this is the case is hard to tell. One line (that paints Khamenei in a gleaming light) is that he simply refused to do so, apparently saying to his security detail that if ‘you can provide safe shelters for the 19 million citizens of Tehran, then I am ready to leave my house and move to another place.’ Though the credibility of this is not rock solid, Gass was willing to suggest that a version of this might be the case. Khamenei was, of course, 87 and rumoured not to be in the greatest of health, and Gass suggested he might have made a conscious decision to call time on his leadership, knowing the value of being ‘martyred’ for the regime’s symbolism and certain of his son’s ascension to his vacant seat.
Inevitably, this is not an easy story to be sure of, but if it is the case, the Americans’ miscalculation about the efficacy of ‘decapitating’ the regime may have been even greater than it first appeared. The US is getting embroiled in another seemingly disastrous war in the Middle East and The Simpsons’ Ayatollah joke still works.
Call me a Cannonball
We’re delighted to have Naomi Wood in the fiction slot of the current issue, and her piece is one of the more inventive and amusing ones of recent vintage. Naomi is the author of quite a few books and an associate professor of creative writing at UEA so you can trust that you’re in good hands. It’s now available on the website for you all to enjoy.
Archive Jewels
Congratulations to Natalie Berry, whose cover story from Issue 22, ‘In The Shadow of the Mountain’, has been longlisted by AIPS Sport Media Awards, having already been featured by longreads and listed as a finalist in the Banff Mountain Book Competition. It’s a truly incredible story about a mother and son who were avid mountaineers both of whom would sadly meet their end on separate expeditions, 24 years and 100 miles apart.
It reminds us of the many great pieces floating around our archive which you should absolutely read or re-read as the agonising wait of the new issue reaches its apotheosis.
How about our own editor-at-large’s piece on the charms, and money-laundering capacities, of the Czech spa town Karlovy Vary? We might also recommend any one of these three excellent pieces from around the UK: a dispatch from an anonymous clinician in an asylum hotel, a profile of The Rose Hotel in Dalston and another anonymous work by a working-class escort and their London clients. And, in bringing up sex, we have to mention David Whitehouse’ s truly insane story of his time working for an early sexting service on the day of 9/11. It was the busiest day they ever had.
On Box Hill
Rolling Stone’s UK offshoot is known for its late payments of freelancers, as Private Eyeand others have documented. The publication is part of Stream Publishing, which also publishes Attitude magazine, and is located, we recently learned, in the non-metropolitan environs of the Surrey Hills, in between a paintballing complex and a business called ‘Pigsty Racing’.
We have been told that the magazine mini-empire is headquartered there so as to be convenient for the CEO, Darren Styles, who, judging from his Instagram feed, seems to be having a jolly old time in the country.
Castletown Diaries
It’s that day again: a global excuse to get drunk all in the name of a vaguely remembered Catholic saint and do all sorts of stupid shit like dying an entire river green. There is definitively nothing interesting to say about St Patrick’s Day. But, it is a chance for us to recommend more of Francis ‘The Viper’ Higgins’ work, so here it is, a video titled, simply, ‘st. patrick’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSthwKHChs0
Mi Casa, Su Casa
With the holidays around the corner you might want to check out Clanmark.
It’s a private marketplace for people who trust each other, somewhat like a clan. To join, you need to be sponsored by two existing members. No strangers, no scams.
Among other things, there are stunning small and large holiday homes, at prices cheaper than elsewhere. This is because you deal directly with the owners: no agents are involved.
To join, head to clanmark.com/signup. If you don’t know anyone on there yet, you can request co-founders Luke Birch and Remy Astie as your sponsors, and they’ll let you on as long as you say please.
If you haven’t planned an Easter break – or a post-April getaway – now’s the chance.
If you would like to place an advert with us, please contact cb@the-fence.com for further details. There are 60,000 eyeballs reading this newsletter, would you believe it.
In Case You Missed It
We recall N+1’s editorial on LLM’s which takes aim at the bots and those who write about them.
If you want to feel dropped into the middle of some NYC chaos, look no further.
An Italian raver goes out in style.
Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown plays the singing violin in ‘Leftover Blues’.
A 1985 large-scale gymnastics event in a strange display of Czechoslovakian propaganda.
And Finally
We’ve checked. We really have. As far as we can tell, this built-to-scale cat town, now with a functioning metro, is not AI. Which means we can happily recommend it to you here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRtyMCeDw8o
This is the work of Xing Zhilei, a Chinese man who has spent the last few years steadily expanding a project that puts Britain’s model villages to shame. Alongside the recently opened subway station, he’s built jewellery stores, a McDonald’s, a cinema, a snooker room and a garden paradise. The home he has built for his cat also has running water and a functioning cooker.
What marks Xing’s work out is the scope and scale of the creativity. By all means make a shop, make a house – those are gimmes. But a subterranean level of tunnels functionally moving water around to house a hamster and his dojo? To think that up and then build it is exactly the kind of nonsense this section of the newsletter was designed for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEvUBhFTF6o
So who is the man behind this excellent use of life’s brief spark? Currently, his online footprint (outside of his own content) is strangely limited. Online statistics trackers place his estimated earnings within the sharply defined boundaries of $37K - $586K a year, so we can safely say he earns an amount of money. His original idea was to build a mini-home for his young children. Having done that, and going predictably viral, he got a good reason to carry on when his wife opened up a pet shop. Xing seized on the opportunity and built a similar home for the cats (Mr Nice and Ting Hao) in the shop.
There is something rather wonderful about this piece of generational online content being both not AI-generated and also made by someone with a relatively limited online presence beyond said content. Perhaps there is a link: how many potential cat towns have we lost to the cold hyper-stimulating embrace of the doomscroll? We’re certain it would have claimed many a redoubtable freak, from the baked bean merch collector to the railway vicar. We’re glad this one slipped through the net.
Aaaaaaaand breathe out. Another week comes to an end, by our reckoning. We do hope the coming days treat you nicely before we meet again. A reminder of those juicy discount tokens and that we are always reachable on editorial@the-fence.com, or on support@the-fence.com if your problem is technical. Every human who has ever lived would fit in the Grand Canyon.
All the best,
TF