Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter currently delighting in reaching the 25,000 mark. That’s a quarter of a hundred thousand subscribers to this mail-out, which is pretty neat, and our average open rate is still above 50 percent, which is also pretty neat. To celebrate, we’ve got a sale on for the rest of the month and into February.
The first 30 people to sign up for the print magazine (or print and digital) using the code FEB20 at the checkout will receive 20 percent off their subscription for the year. Hurry, hurry, hurry – these stocks won’t last long.
For those slacking behind, everyone who subscribes to the print (or the print and digital) will get Issues 18, 19, 21 and 22, AND a beautiful tote bag, RRP: £12. Click on the image below.
Now, as we now do literally contain multitudes – and because quite a few of you have asked – we are going to launch advertising in this newsletter. We have a rate card here with further details, if you are interested. 50,000 eyeballs could be yours.
Let’s get it going with a curious little tale from the Mayfair set.
Under the Hammer
If you look through the website and the social media platforms for the vaunted art dealer, Richard Green, there is a palpable sense of the importance of family ties. It is, as they emphasise, a fourth generation business, with CEO Matthew Green taking over the Bond Street HQ from father Richard, where he is joined by his second son, Charles, who it seems, is very much in charge of their digital outreach – he’s the fresh-faced lad here with the comically patrician vowels and 90s Hugh Grant-style curtains.
But there’s little mention of naughty uncle Matthew, who has been charged with fraud and is, we are told, currently hiding out on the continent. But he’s not keeping a low profile – he was spotted roaming the stalls at TEFAF Maastricht last March.
Do you know anything about this story? We do all love a bit of dodgy dealing in the art market. Well, love to read about it, at least. Send us an email at editorial@the-fence.com if you have any tips.
Who’s Down with HTB? (Yeah, You Know Me)
They ravaged Lutfur Rahman, lanced Lord Lebedev, and now, British longform’s most dynamic young duo, Miles Ellingham & Cormac Kehoe, have fixed their sights upon disgraced Anglican congregant, Justin Welby, for their third and most ambitious profile together. Taking the former cleric to task for his hand in the French oil trade and his welcoming of Paul Marshall money into the Lambeth Palace fold, among many other charges, the piece is every bit as excoriating as is deserved for the worst Archbishop since Lollard-torcher, Thomas Arundel. You can read the profile in question by clicking here.
That Natural Feeling
The chef-patron of The Yellow Bittern – the irrepressible Hugh Corcoran – makes no secret of his disdain for the contemporary age, running a restaurant in King’s Cross in which bookings must be made by telephone, where there is no website, and which is only open from Monday to Friday at 12-2. We have covered his works at some length before, noting that were it not for his frequent Instagram screeds that his bizarre plan might, just might, have a chance of success. Over the weekend, Hugh enjoyed a trip to Paris, to dine at Le Baratin, a legendary bistro that one local food blog ‘can no longer recommend’ owing to ‘the pervasive hostility of co-owner Pinouche Pinoteau’.
But as you can see in the post below, Pinouche was uncharacteristically welcoming to Hugh, who enjoyed a meal of calves’ brains with a nice bottle. A very nice bottle, actually. We haven’t read Borstal Boy for some time, but we don’t recall there being such magnificently priced vintages in the text.
Gentribot-500
You know those Instagram accounts which ‘satirise’ trendy London life? The ones that have crept to such a lofty follower count that they can partner with mid-level fashion brands for lucrative partnerships? Yes, those ones.
After the rollicking success of Kieran Morris’ ‘Small Plates-o-Matic’ at the end of last year, as we watched the notifications stream through, we got a taste for the Meme Life, and so Róisín Lanigan has written a really very funny guide to gentrifying pubs in London. It’s on Instagram and the crowds are going wild! The whole thing is a lot more satisfying – and a lot easier – than publishing and posting ‘serious journalism’. Make of that what you will.
Beezus Fafoon. Beezus Fafoon? Beezus Fafoon.
We’ve made great hay in the past from our love of unusual names, not least in issue 13’s News Bowl, which ranked newsreaders by their daffy appellations. (Hats off, as ever, to tournament champ Opheera McDoom, who famously defeated no. 9 seed Chris Ship in a very competitive final).
We’ve never considered it from the other side, however. Do YOU have a name that generates titters and snorts, a god-given soubriquet that rivals Toast of London’s most memorable monikers? If so, please let us know at editorial@the-fence.com and the best will be entered into a poll, to win a treasured place in these pages, and a year’s subscription to our mag.
Brand Synergy
As fiercely protective as we are of our turf – that is, waffling on about London; a concept we created – we sometimes have to hold our hands up and give credit to another creator in ‘the space’. So, a full TF endorsement to pseudonymous train YouTuber, Jago Hazzard, whose deceptively premised videos on London’s rail history are pure nerd fuel (complimentary).
Start with ‘Why do we stand on the right on Tube escalators?’ and go from there: what you end up getting is a thoughtful wander through 150 years of London’s civic history, choc-full of the needly details that make our eyes pop out like Tex Avery. Then go find out why Highbury & Islington is as bad as it is, why Canary Wharf is as bad as it is, and why Britain can’t have double-decker trains like the rest of the continent, and before you know it you’ll be as hooked as we are. Seriously, terrifyingly addictive.
Long and Stable
We were over the moon this morning to discover that the lead feature from Issue 22, Natalie Berry’s ‘In the Shadow of the Mountain’, was selected as this week’s Editor’s Pick on the Ronseal-branded Longreads.com. Natalie’s smash-hit story, retracing the lives and tragic deaths of mother-and-son mountaineers Alison Hargreaves and Tom Ballard, is really worth settling into for the next bit of narrative longform that you treat yourself to; as achingly poignant and revealing of human motivations as you could hope for in a feature. It’s available to read right here.
But that’s not all. We’ve been turning out longreads at breakneck pace these last few years. There’s Max Daly on the Hackney Murder Mile; Tim Wyatt on corruption in the Diocese of London; stirring deep-dive profiles of rebel priests, Cromwell defenders and hapless plutocrats. We’ve had three exposés of broken educational institutions (Brompton Manor, Queen Ethelburga’s College; the Institute of Art and Ideas). And just you wait until Issue 23 – we have plenty more classics coming your way in the year ahead and beyond.
All of this, plus that cracker of a sale we have on, means there’s really never been a better time to subscribe. Join today for 20% off a year’s subscription.
Cash Injection
We tried to tell you! Well, Margaret McCartney did, back in Issue 20 last year, when she wrote about the pernicious methods used by pharmaceutical companies to ingratiate themselves with overworked, underpaid medical staff. And so it has been shown, this week, with Novo Nordisk – the Danish pharma giant behind the Wegovy weight-loss jab, mentioned in the piece – copping to paying out hundreds of thousands in unreported cash ‘to pharmacy firms, obesity charities, training providers, professional bodies and patient groups’ over the last seven years, per the Guardian.
If you want to read about precisely how the men in white coats wheedle their way into our medicine supply, McCartney is the person to read.
In Case You Missed It
Olivia Acland on the island paradise that became addicted to shipwrecked cocaine.
Art! Fraud! Rockstars! Normitsu Onishi with a great Canadian artworld crime story, for the NYT.
Jason Koebler on the developer who created an infinite rat maze to trap and exhaust AI.
An oldie and a goldie: David Grann on the 20th century’s most legendary stickup man and escape artist, Forrest Tucker.
Bloomberg Technology breaks down the nine pod bros who boosted Trump’s campaign.
And Finally
As much as we do revel in plunging into the BBC archive for some dusty black-and-white masterpiece, every so often, today’s TV bods sew together something worthy of this slot, and so it is with this truly barnstorming episode of 24 Hours in Police Custody, in which a meth ring in Norfolk is taken down. We start with the search of a car: a sleeping cruiser named Toby has been awoken by the local constabulary on a layby. A Chinese takeaway, a duffel bag of cock rings and a buffet of baggies are swiftly discovered. Soon, an East Anglian riff on Breaking Bad unravels in one of the most gripping documentaries we’ve watched in months. One to devour in a sitting – unlike poor Toby’s Chinese takeaway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRTy51vPJlk
That’s it for this week, we hope you enjoyed it. Please do give it a ‘like’ below if you did. Or you can go one better and buy a subscription – remember we’ve got those deals on for the rest of the month. Or you can buy a map, magazine or a tote bag from the shop. Sell, sell, sell. Always be closing. Until the next time.
All the best,
TF