Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that longs for summer holidays. Can newsletters long for holidays? Strictly speaking, no.
Issue 20 has been seen far and wide: in Liverpool; in Corsica; at the cricket; at the West End blood donor centre; at a certain Soho pub; on the sofa; at the pub quiz and with a pug. We were particularly taken by this snap with a cat called Pedro (pictured below).
If you’d like to score a bottle of Bollinger Champagne – who amongst us wouldn’t? – then simply send through a snap of Issue 20 ‘in the wild’. The winningest snap will take the prize.
A reminder that we’re celebrating five years in the print media game, and that if you subscribe to today, there’s 20 percent off all subscriptions – print, digital or both. All you need to do is use the code 5YOFENCE at the checkout. Click on that link below.
Today, there are a few things on the agenda, including a really very good BBC archive clip at the bottom. Let’s get it going.
Skip To The Good Bit
Jordan Stephens – the man who put the ‘rizzle’ into Rizzle Kicks – is the latest challenger to take on our excellent series, 146 Questions. With just 146 seconds on the clock, Stephens smashed through 22 of our most inane and insane inquiries beating our previous interviewee's Adebayo Akinfenwa and Dolly Alderton by a country mile. For the answers to the questions you've always wanted to know, but never dared ask, including: ‘How annoying does Jerry Seinfeld have to be before the show Seinfeld starts being impacted by association?’ take a gander here.
Like Taking Candy From A Baby
In sugar-coated news this week, our list of thoroughly goodc**ts (in the most Scottish sense of the phrase) made it to the attention of ex-reality star turned confectionary supremo, Jamie Laing. The charming bleached-blonde Old Radliean everyman said of our description that it ‘Might be the best compliment I've ever received.’ And the J-Hive were quick to get their two cents in on social media. Paloma Faith confirmed our classification, calling the candy king: ‘the most likeable unlikely candidate for my adoration I've ever met.’ But not all celeb pals were convinced by our bestowing Laing with the GC credentials. Peter Crouch’s wife, Abbey Clancy, commented simply: ‘What the hell.’ You can't win ‘em all, unfortunately.
All Of The Fluids Or None At All
Dressed as a teenage boy’s idea of a female construction worker, Katy Perry crooned ‘it's a woman's world and you're lucky to be living in it’ in the music video for her latest pop offering last week. And self-described ‘femcel’ Bertie Brandes quite agrees. On one condition. That said women deign to embrace voluntary celibacy. Or, if that's not your cup of tea, how about a cup of something else? Drinking your own piss: who, why and wherefore? Fiona Mozley finds out. Take a swig of that here.
Serving Cat
Do you like cats and wine? Of course you do. As do we. Which is why we like this illustration by John Broadley which features both of them. If you are interested in buying a print of it, then perhaps you can do so at John’s shop here. Just £19! (plus shipping.)
Speaking of criminally good deals, our editor-at-livin’-it-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, has curated a case of wine especially created for chic dinner parties, perhaps with your equally chic feline companion curled at your feet. To enjoy the selection for 15% off enter the code FENCE15 at the checkout here. And we would hurry, there are only a few of these cases left.
It Is Still Our Birthday, Yes
Not sure if we have mentioned this, as we are so very modest indeed, but we have been celebrating five years of The Fence. Well, we have been celebrating for quite a while, truth be told, but as birthday girls that is our prerogative. The celebrations have taken the form of sharing 50 of our best articles from the past five years. This week we’ve revisited a short story about a gay bull named Rambo, by Claire Lowdon, Charlotte Ivers’s pub crawl through time and also Soho, Harriet Rix on long lost rainforests, a return to the long-lost time that was quarantine with James Bloodworth and an anonymous insider who revealed to us just what the fuck was going on over there at the BBC.
As a selection, it indubitably slays, and if you want to read it at leisure – or indeed if you would like to join in wishing us a happy fifth birthday – then remember that you can subscribe to The Fence at the link below from just £15.99 for the year with that discount code.
In Many Countries It’s Actually A Delicacy
For Issue 20, Eva Wiseman penned a wonderfully icky story about a woman who serves herself up for schooltime lunches. It begins quite humbly with a thumb(ly), and then progresses to braised shin, glazed thigh strips on sourdough bread and, naturally, some calf meat ham sandwiches. As it is lunchtime, and as we are sick to our back teeth of the sheer amount of impossible-to-get-a-reservation-for, indiscriminate and indiscriminately priced small plates restaurants in Soho, we have decided to share this delicious story with the world.
We would love to have a story of this quality in the next magazine – email us at editorial@the-fence.com if you’d like to be the (fictional) star of the show in Issue 21.
In Case You Missed It
Deputy editor Kieran Morris takes a sojourn from TF towers to go on tour with the Bootleg Beatles.
Martin Pollack confronts his family’s Nazi past in a fascinating long-read.
The excellent London Spy on what happens when TikTok sends London caffs viral and food queues out of control. We really would recommend that you subscribe to their Substack.
How we all learned to stop worrying and love the NDA.
And Sachin Kureishi recounts the time he gave an unconscious crack addict mouth-to-mouth on his doorstep.
And Finally
‘The Perisher’ is the name given to the submarine command course undertaken by naval officers wishing to rise to the role of submarine captain. Comprising months of intensive study, nerve-wracking simulations, and actual high-risk deep sea maneuvers, it looks like a very, very bad time indeed.
In 1984, a BBC crew descended into a Royal Navy tub with four hopeful candidates as they were put through their paces, in one of the most grippingly tense exercises in old-school documentary-making we can remember watching. Narrated by John Nettles and saturated with that potato-peel film grain common to footage from that time, it’s a masterpiece of faded tension. It doesn’t hurt that its opening score also features one of the greatest slabs of synthery seen this side of a giallo flick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1LF2I3fTbY
Central to the doc’s charms are the characters who present themselves throughout, from candidates themselves — vacillating between earnestly confident and utterly terrified — and their command instructor Dai Evans, a case study in steely benevolence whose single-strand combover is, itself, an engineering work of which Her Majesty’s Navy should’ve been proud.
All of which is mere ballast to The Perisher’s true motivating horror: the consequences of failure for any of those taking part.
If the sleepless weeks, the confined spaces, and the almost unbearable stress of command itself were not enough, failure in its tests is permanent. If you pass The Perisher, you get a submarine command. If you fail, you are summarily removed from your officer position and will never serve on board a submarine again.
600 metres below, it seems, the stakes are perishingly high.
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to speak to us – the editorial team – then you can email editorial@the-fence.com. If you’d like to ask about an order, then email support@the-fence.com.
There are two separate email addresses but it is very much likely that the queries will be answered by the same person. There we go.
We’ll catch you next Tuesday with another buffet of vintage clips, and with another helping of gossip. Until then.
All the best,
TF