Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, summer is here and the weather is fine; fine, actually, if you’re in the newsletter-writing game. We’ve got a plump edition for you today.
A reminder that we’re celebrating a half-decade in the print media maelstrom, and we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the coupon below and get after it, or click the button beneath to get after it there – gorge yourself while you can.
Issue 20 is arriving next week. And can we just shock you? It’s the best one yet. Full details to come next Tuesday. Now if you’re an existing subscriber, and you haven’t already done so, make sure your address is up to date on your account on the website. Very important detail, that.
Over the last three months we’ve been running a competition in which we’ve asked readers to wing through the winningest snap of Issue 19 out and about. Now the winner has been chosen – it’s Gerry Cox, who took the magazine along to Mauricio Pochettino’s farewell press conference, and then again to Turkey v. Georgia in the Euros a few weeks back. The bottle of Bollinger will be winging its way to you, Gerry, lovely stuff.
The admin is over. Let’s get cooking. Today we’ve got mysterious crimes at Camberwell pizzerias, and a dispatch from the heart of the NHS. But first, a return to the foundational rock upon which this very magazine was built: being rude about people at festivals.
I Just Want To Go Home
What’s the one thing about Glastonbury that no one talks about? The phalanx of Scouse paramilitaries – numbered in the tens of thousands – with an Escobar-like grip on narcotics supply? The dreary dirges of Avril Lavigne and Shania Twain being somehow repurposed in the ‘legends’ slot? The waves of West Country landowners who are given reams of free tickets every year? The £40,000-for-a-weekend Winnebagos?
One thing we learned that no one is talking about: the BBC – who provide multi-platform, 24/7 coverage to the festival – have their own huge tent and hospitality area. While the rest of our poor, lumpen commercial media have to cohabit a tiny press zone – resisting the urge to sleep with one another – Auntie’s minions chow down on the freebies inside their gilded canopy, lighting handfuls of taxpayer’s money on fire between mouthfuls of rare animal.
It certainly wasn’t the greatest line-up this year, especially if you compare it to the 2014 edition. Has ‘Glasto’ got too big? Even for the 66.5 million of us who chose not to pitch a tent in Michael Eavis’ fields, there was no escape from the North Korea-style coverage of how ‘it was the best, best, best one yet’.
Away In A Manger
A real marmalade-dropper in last week’s Popbitch newsletter, which relayed the frankly astounding story of Ben Wallace – former Defence Secretary and spurned, would-be NATO chief – turning up at the home of Zara and Mike Tindall after a day out at Cheltenham Festival in a ‘well-refreshed’ state.
After ‘lavishing’ the King’s niece with ‘a lot of attention’, Wallace was carried outside to sleep it off by ‘a very unimpressed’ Mike Tindall – the former England rugby captain – in an adjoining stable.
It’s a pretty astonishing story. Now, we usually think people firing the blunderbuss at parties in late middle-age is A-OK, but it is a different story if you were Defence Secretary for Her Britannic Majesty (and you behaved badly at her granddaughter’s house).
Lots of questions abound, not least which other outlets will be looking to report this episode.
Lunch with Tony Hayers
Three summers ago – christ, three summers ago – we panelled a selection of the country’s finest freelancers to tell us the very worst pitches they’d ever sent to editors, for the Issue 8 classic, ‘Monkey Tennis’. Three summers later – christ, three summers later – and we’ve got a second series, handily titled ‘Cooking in Prison’.
There are some true howlers in this latest version (Joel Golby: ‘I always wanted to throw a melon off a motorway bridge.’) but much as they did last time, eagle-eyed editors have already been sifting through the garbage for gold. Helen Barrett’s ‘comment piece on the joy of ashtrays’ was snapped up by a broadsheet bod within hours of publication. Read the rest here.
Factory Girl
One Glastonbury reveller tells us of an amusing twirl from bohemian icon and festival mainstay, Sienna Miller, who spotted a paparazzi lurking with a long-lens camera in a tote bag.
The 42-year-old actress was by herself, so walked around in a circle, turning around and laughing with her non-existent friends so the photos would capture her looking carefree and happy. Who amongst us would want to be really famous…
Patterns In Repeat
A lot of Substacks are pretty dire. You know the type: over-the-hill opinion hacks playing the greatest hits to a slowly diminishing audience.
So it’s a real treat to see Laura Marling, one of the country’s most fascinating talents, launch a newsletter on the mysteries of songwriting. It’s the sort of thing that could be baggy and boring, but it’s drily executed yet rather moving, and just the sort of thing we like to read. Have a read of her latest newsletter here.
Club Couture
One of the many exciting ways in which we are celebrating our half-decade anniversary is by totting up the 50 best articles we’ve ever published. Kicking things off, we’ve got Jade Angeles Fitton’s memoir of her time working at London Fashion Week, then there’s a classique insider piece about how the sausage gets made at a nameless digital media behemoth. Of a more recent vintage stands Patrick Galbraith’s reckoning with the tragic legacy of his favourite school teacher.
If you’re thinking that it would be great to read all of these pieces without being hassled by a pesky paywall, do remember that subscriptions are on discount at the moment – starting at just £15.99 for the year with promo code ‘5YOFENCE’.
They Just Make You Worse
Margaret McCartney is a general practitioner based in Glasgow, so has witnessed first-hand how the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry ‘Big Pharma’ and the NHS has mutated and metastasized over the last 20 years. It’s a cracking insider piece, loaded with detail, and we commend it to you all here.
The Camberwell Badlands
The final piece from Issue 19 is now up, and it’s a select slice of autofiction from Yoel Noorali, who tried to unveil the identity of a rogue glazier at a very-hard-to-identify Camberwell pizzeria. It’s wonderfully well written, and just the sort of curveball that we welcome in our fiction slot.
Drench Our Inbox
With Issue 20 set to arrive next week, it will surprise some of you that we’re putting together Issue 21 – set to land in the first week of October – right this second. Welcome to the crazy world of quarterly print magazines!
There are a couple of slots left in the autumn issue. We’re on the lookout for another insider piece in the Facts section, a five-star piece of reportage in Features, a short story in the Fiction, and something zany, wild and hilarious for Etc. There’s a full pitch guide here that’s worth reading.
Copy is required by the end of the month, and we pay at a very competitive rate. Send through your best ideas to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll come back to you promptly.
In Case You Missed It
Anna Russell meets Andrew O’Hagan in the heart of Bloomsbury, for the New Yorker.
Patrick Freyne’s moving confessions of a lapsed Catholic, in FT Weekend.
Getting a dinner reservation in New York sounds like hell on earth.
Confessions of porn addicts who also read The Guardian.
Rudiger Görner explores the letters between Ingeborg Bachmann and Max Frisch, for the TLS
And Finally
Did Glasto used to be a lot more fun? Today, you have Chris Martin serenading Michael J Fox with a heartfelt rendition of Fix You and 20,000 women all named Tilly fighting for elbow space at Jayda G.
In 2009 Sir Tom Jones, the-then-69-year-old Welsh casanova, played the festival’s legend slot, firing up the hungover Sunday afternoon crowds with back-to-back bangers. Luckily, someone has put the entire thing on YouTube, and you can skip directly to 42 minutes and 10 seconds to see him play Sex Bomb.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFnshsS4T8
The Guardian, somewhat predictably, gave this performance two stars. We give it six stars.
That’s that for this week. Join us again next Tuesday for exclusive details on Issue 20, as well as the links, gossip and froth you know and love.
If you have any questions about your order, support@the-fence.com is the place for you. Any tips, tricks or other little bits, head to editorial@the-fence.com.
And do not forget: 20% off any Fence subscription – print, digital or both – all summer long with promo code ‘5YOFENCE’.
All the best,
TF