Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, your dependable dispatch from The UK’s Only Magazine. Which is, for new readers or people at the back, The Fence.
Just one week from now, we will be unveiling the teamsheet for our upcoming – and best ever-ever-ever – issue, the sparkling 23rd edition of our gorgeous magazine. We’ll share one big bit of news now: our cover, this time around, has been drawn by one of our favourite cartoonists, the redoubtable Ed Steed, who you may have seen doodling on the pages of The New Yorker over the last decade. This one cartoon of his, in particular, has been an office favourite for years.
We’re delighted to be welcoming him into our pages for the first time, tackling the cover and the feature section in trademark Steed style – worth the RRP alone, if we do say so ourselves.
We’ll be rattling off our usual buffet of tips, links and ephemera very shortly, but first – something to celebrate. Our contributing editor, Róisín Lanigan, has just had her first novel published, and it is a corker, so we are going to tell you a lot more about it below.
House & Home
You’ve no doubt heard great things about I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, the debut novel from author and TF comrade Róisín Lanigan. Glowing reviews have described it as a ‘housing crisis ghost story’ and ‘a gripping gothic novel for Generation Rent’, but we’d call it a funny, smart and extremely timely book about love, loss and London leaseholds, where mold miasmas bleed from the walls of rented Zone 2 tenements, causing all manner of despair for one beleaguered young couple, Áine and Elliot.
The book – which all the cool kids are calling IWTGHBIAT – showcases Lanigan’s rare skill for skewering the agonising trifles of modern life, elevated with lived-in characters and gripping, stylish prose. The result is one of the best, and buzziest, reads of 2025 so far, and one we can’t recommend highly enough.
A glance through the notices will show these are not merely our words, Carol, but those of every news organ that still remembers what books are and if/when they’re good. It’s deserved acclaim, which we are delighted to bandwagon while letting everyone know that we knew her first.
The book is available from all good bookshops, several bad ones, or can be purchased directly here, here and here.
It’s Hiiiiiiiiiiiiitchmassss
This Sunday marks the return to British Summer Time. We’re guessing that very few readers now actively change their clocks, relying on the ghost of Steve Jobs or whatever it is that lives inside your phone to do it for you, and so it passes you by with little or no real effect. Not so for long-time Fence object of fascination, Mr Peter Hitchens.
Hitchens, as devoted readers will know, has many peeves. So many, in fact, that we composed a toothsome grid of his greatest gripes for Issue #9, cross referencing the many things he has taken to print to decry as mysterious, ridiculous, hideous, evil or feeble.
Of all the things Hitchens feels aggrieved about – and there are many – nothing comes close to his endless war against clocks. Hitchens appears twice a year to bemoan what he has referred to as the ‘fraudulent’ practice of daylight saving, something he has referred to as both ‘Kaiser Bill’s clock-meddling folly’ and an ‘official falsification’ which is responsible for ‘widespread health problems’.
Do check his social media output this week, this most magical time of year. As is often the case with Hitchens, what might prove to be the most mystical aspect of his maniacal time obsession, is the lurking sense that he might actually be right. Even a stopped clock, etc etc.
Wedding Bells (Derogatory)
Instagram was aflutter this week in reaction to our very own Insufferable 2025 Wedding Checklist, which isolates annoying and/or omnipresent facets of modern matrimonials. Referring to your new spouse as your best friend; white Converse under the dress; tables named in theme with a suite of insufferable in-jokes. It’s all there.
It’s a list that Telegraph writer, and careless laptop proprietor, Ed Cumming has described as ‘Full Haslam (complimentary)’ and we cannot disagree. It’s an unjustifiably catty rejoinder to what nice people choose to do on the best day of their lives, so we invite you to laugh, cry – and cringe along, once it gets to a bit that you sheepishly recognise from your own wedding. We are none of us blameless. If you feel appropriately wounded by our little lashing above, join us on Instagram for plenty more.
Signal Failure
The press world was rocked yesterday, when The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, revealed he’d been accidentally added to a NatSec groupchat on Signal with senior members of the Trump administration. Originally presuming it to be a hoax or scam of some description, Goldberg hung back and let events play out, until it became clear that the members of the chat were, indeed, cabinet luminaries like Vice President JD Vance and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth. The full article is every bit as bonkers as you might imagine, replete with screenshots showing explosion emojis, and Vance and Hegseth going off on their European allies. Of course, you’ve likely already read it, since the piece buzzed with such ferocity that it all but swamped the juddering servers at archive.is – or so, ahem, we’ve been told.
If that’s left you jonesing for more militaristic meanderings by an even greater news organ, then we’re honourbound to remind you of some of our very own defence industry dispatches. In Our Man In Hereford, an anonymous contributor wrote on goings-on inside the most secretive corner of Britain’s military, nestled in England’s countryside. For War Games, Jake Warren met with the Mozart Group, the shadowy tech cabal hoping to revolutionise the world of mercenary warfare.
We’re always on the lookout for more odds n’ sods from the frontlines of modern war, so if you find yourself in just such a foxhole with a story to tell, get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com, or WhatsApp, or franked post or carrier pigeon. Just not Signal.
Mr. Fenceorium’s Wonder Emporium
One might forget, for how much we love the sheer act of writing for its own sake, that we are – at the end of the day – in the business of commerce; that is, selling stuff. And we sell good stuff, nothing but good stuff, from pretty prints and trendy totes, to yearly subs and ever-rarer back issues, in our shop.
But wait, there’s more. There’s booze. We’ve partnered up with the lovely folk at Emile Wines who have picked out – and plied us with – a beautiful white Burgundy for TF readers to imbibe. Our new house bottle, the La Croix de Montjoie, Vézelay Élégante 2021 (£25.75), needs to be quaffed to be believed: a zippy, zesty little number which more than stands up to a 1er Cru Chablis at half the price. Very elegant, as our beloved art director, Mathias Clottu, would describe it, and absolutely the kind of bottle you should be having at hand this spring.
Tap the enormous bottle above and cadge yourself a taste of that good-good, a deal that can be made even sweeter with promo code EWXFENCE15, which’ll snip an extra 15% off your bill (provided you’re not using it on already-discounted bottles; don’t be naughty).
Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
In last week’s magnificent missive, we pointed to this wonderful tour of Francis Bacon’s studio, conducted by the man himself for a documentary project we could not ascertain.
Thankfully, our readers are a discerning and learned cabal of nerds, and we have Regional Pasts to thank for pointing us in its direction. ‘The Bacon interview is from 'Francis Bacon and the Brutality of Fact' (1985, dir. Michael Blackwood)’ he typed, shortly after publication. ‘You used to be able to buy it in the Tate shop on DVD, and perhaps you still can’.
We can’t confirm whether it is still available on those prestigious premises, but we also haven’t had a disc drive in eight years. Luckily, we did find the full documentary down a neglected side alley of YouTube, where you can watch it, at your leisure, below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMPmwO_l4Uw
In Case You Missed It
Andrew Chamings on the 50-year-old murder mystery that haunts his family’s farm in Devon.
Didier Eribon takes to the Guardian with a difficult, compassionate survey of his mother, the racist.
Graham Hornigold also speaks to Big Hatters at the Guardian about his mother, the con artist.
Daniel Drezner isolates an underrated problem with Musk & Trump: they’re ruining sci-fi.
And, from the vaults: this impeccable Vanity Fair piece by Nick Tosches, profiling Sidney Korshak, the man who kept secrets for presidents, kingpins and Hollywood royalty.
And Finally
Behold, this wonderful British Pathé reel from 1957 called The Soccer Rumpus – proof, sadly, that the word ‘soccer’ was not some Yank perversion, but a homegrown term for the sport we resolutely call football.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYMJPX06s6A
The clip captures the beautiful game at an inflection point in its history, from a sport of spirited amateurs to the ever-splashing money spigot it has become today. Its subject is the Sunderland payments scandal, where it was revealed – to great horror – that the Mackems had been paying some players in excess of football’s maximum wage of £15 a week (around £400 today) in order to keep them turning out in red & white stripes.
Come for the shots of jolly old boys, Tom Finney greasing a lugnut, and crowds of men in flatcaps, but stay for a debut interview from the young Fulham midfielder & chair of the players’ union: Chinny Reckon himself, Jimmy Hill. Have you ever wondered what the young Jimmy Hill looked like? Well, wonder no longer – we beckon you to marvel with us at the unique, Habsburgian physiognomy of one of the game’s most influential figures.
That’s it for this week – you may not wish to wait ‘til Tuesday for another, but you must. Make it plain if you enjoyed any of this by dropping a ‘like’ in the comments below. In last Tuesday’s League One game between Rotherham and Wycombe, both sides featured a player named Cameron Humphreys. If you’d like to speak to us for any reason, drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com. Do buy a tote bag or a magazine or one of the maps here – doing so will fulfil your wildest desires.
All the best,
TF