Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence. We’ve got a handy newsletter for you today, lots going on. Some of you will be marooned in the office, some will be swearing never to drink spirits again and nearly everyone will be trouping around town picking up presents for the deserving and undeserving people in your life.
It is mandated, of course, that we mention that there is no better gift for a close friend or a difficult relative than a subscription to our own publication. Today and tomorrow, we are going to offer Issues 19, 20 and 21 free in digital form to everyone who signs up for the year. That’s free three magazines. It doesn’t come naturally for us to talk about how great we are – genuinely – but do have a look at these quotes below to encourage you to subscribe.
Today, there’s a truly heinous video featuring Brooklyn Beckham, but let’s point to the compass north first, to the bucolic and sparsely populated county of Lincolnshire.
We Plough the Fields and Scatter
It is peculiar when the leaders of the free world forget who they are. Joe Biden is desperate to forswear his English heritage, despite being a son of Sussex. Recently, Keir Starmer was on BBC Radio Lincolnshire, where he was bluntly asked, ‘Do you have a problem with Lincolnshire?’. This question was prompted by the government’s ‘anti-farmer’ tax proposals, but also the planned erection of a hulking pylon system starting at Grimsby, and spreading down the spine of the county.
The Prime Minister splutteringly replied ‘No, the county of Lincoln is… underappreciated… and I’ve been there a number of times.’
An eccentric response, some might say, especially given that Keir Starmer’s great-grandfather was born in Lincolnshire, in the village of Martin, just south of Horncastle. For the 120-or-so years that records show, villages of Starmers were living in Mavis Enderby, Candlesby, Raithby and Hundleby.
The Lincolnshire Starmers toiled in grinding poverty as agricultural labourers, and then worried about pheasants for plutocratic landlords. For a left-wing political leader, it’s certainly a better, and more truthful, narrative than ‘My father was a toolmaker’. Maybe an idea for the Labour leader in 2025 might be to lean into his Yellowbelly origin story? Morgan McSweeney, you can have that one on us.
April Is the Coolest Month
Our spring 2025 issue is shaping up beautifully, and there are some truly intriguing pieces planned, the type that any publication would love to run. It’s going to be a bit bigger than the current issue, too, up by eight pages or so. All exciting news.
We do have space for one real head-turner of a feature, a marmalade-dropper, an audible exhale kind of piece. Do have a read of our updated pitch guide here and do read these pieces by Mark Blacklock and Tim Wyatt to get a sense of the ambition and reporting depth we are looking for. Even better, get the latest issue and check out the cover story by Natalie Berry.
We will need copy by the end of January so do send your pitches through to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll take it from there.
La Divina Nicotina
We’ve only get four of these beautiful Paul Cox ‘Soho Map of Vogues’ left. They really do look magic, and at £40 are astonishingly decent value (signed by the artist, and only 50 were made, have a gander on the internet to see how much a Paul Cox print usually costs).
Like with the ‘Soho Map of Cokes’ we won’t be reprinting these, but there will be much more ‘merch’ from us in 2025, and there will be other very exciting things launching at the start of next year. All will be revealed in time...
Crooklyn Clan
If you can’t write a snarky mini-profile of Brooklyn Beckham, then can you really call yourself a journalist? Does Mr Peltz take more pelters than is strictly fair? At the end of the day, he’s just a gormless child of privilege, not a U.N-sanctioned warlord or an international arms smuggler or what have you.
And yet. And yet… in this recent interview with Sotheby’s wine expert, Lukas Dempsey, we learn that Brooklyn is now a hot sauce impresario (a saucier?) and is also collecting some pretty serious vino. Dempsey, as a former sommelier, is puppy-trained to deal with rich people talking neat drivel about wine, but even he is sent sideways by Brooklyn’s inane observations. Watch it if you dare:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F6m0C8hvIE
Down at Daymer Bay
Cornwall, or Kernow, was home to Clive Martin for a number of years, and his piece about England’s most remote county has been plucked from Issue 22 and placed on the website, and you can read it here. It’s a typically brilliant dispatch from ‘Mr Big Night Out’ on the beautiful and berserk energy that pulsates down the River Tamar.
If you’re in the mood to overdose on Cornish eccentricity, then allow us to direct you to the Instagram account of John Mappin, the QAnon-crazed jewellery scion who lives at Camelot Castle above the beach at Tintagel Beach.
2,000 Light Years From Home
As many of you will know, we are trying to cap a bonza year for The Fence by netting 2,000 new subscribers for 2025, and we are now up to 1,793, which is pretty good going.
If you’re an existing subscriber, why not share our appeal on Twitter here or on Bluesky, where Patrick Radden Keefe has added to his generous acclaim of the mag with the following: ‘With so many outlets scaling back or shutting down or making $15 million apology payments to the President of the United States, it's encouraging to see a new magazine – an actual paper MAGAZINE – as brash and beautiful and funny as The Fence.’
Frankie Goes to Aigburth
The Fence’s second city is Liverpool, and we’ve been delighted to publish extensive coverage of the city, not least the ‘Definitive Guide to Scouseness’ by Josh Mcloughlin, but also this cacklingly funny piece by Thomas Gorton, where he remembers working as an alien in Seacombe.
Thomas is also a musician with God Colony, and their latest single Loss Is Not Infinite is a cosmic encapsulation of Scouse style, and the video features the most haunting Mr Blobby you will ever see. It couldn’t be more up our street and it’s been getting some deserved love on Radio 6 too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31-8gg9bN24
In Case You Missed It
Ed Zitron with another excoriating attack on everything Big Tech has taken from us: Never Forgive Them.
Sunjeev Sahota on the inauthenticity of class discourse, AKA Publishing Respects Your Foodbank Usage.
Them slags at GQ spoke to officially minted national-treasure Danny Dyer about becoming a sex symbol.
Simon Hattenstone really gets the goods from his interview with Matt Goss for the Guardian.
And, courtesy of a reminder from Caspar Salmon, please enjoy Christmas Calendar by Fay Weldon, possibly the worst short story ever written, but definitely our favourite to re-read every single year without fail.
And Finally
It is our job to be cheerful, even when don’t want to be… luckily, we can outsource that job to our favourite archive telly Grinch, Clive James.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1MWwlTXqJQ
Here’s Clive on television from Christmas 1987, featuring our Antipodean misery guts looking, basically, the same age he looked from 1965 until his death.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taosxHHzLj8
It’s a salutary example of the lost art of TV-on-TV violence, and a useful antidote to any ‘things were better in the old days’ prattling from oldsters who fail to remember that 90% of television was unrelentingly dire until about 2006. Or thereabouts.
We’ll be back again on Saturday morning with another newsletter, a little review of the year, if we please. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, please get in touch at support@the-fence.com – and do remember that we are offering three free magazines today and tomorrow. Enjoy the rest of the week if you can.
All the best,
TF