Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a fun little venture. We’ve got our summer sale launching today, which is exciting news for all of you. There is 30 per cent off subscriptions for the year with the code ICECREAM30, but quite a few of these have been licked already, and we’ve only made a handful of them. There’s ICECREAM20 for those a bit slower off the mark.
Issue 24 continues to provide delight, accompanying a seaside picnic, in the rain at Eynsford, with a turtle and on Simon Akam’s table, who went on to call us ‘Britain’s most innovative magazine’, which is pretty handy.
Keep sending those photos through, either tagging us on social media or to editorial@the-fence.com and you can win the bubbly.
Our newish mail-out, Capital Letter, grows ever more popular – on Thursday, we’re going to crown the worst wine list in London, which makes a break from all the pub content. We also now have a Substack chat room, which, at the time of writing, has no rules. Go wild, but not too wild.
Let’s get it going. Today we’ve got a series of treats for you, as is our wont.
My Friend, Jeffrey
The news that Il Duce’s great-grandson is about to make his Serie A debut is exciting news for tabloid journalists, but it made us think back to John Phipps’ piece back in 2020, when he interviewed a series of people who share names with some of the worst monsters in history.
There are a number of pieces we published from that period – our salad days, when we green in editorial judgement – that still read wonderfully well today, like ‘12 Rules to Get Your First Book Published’ or this piece from someone who worked alongside the Special Air Service or inside the BBC during the Brexit debate. This dispatch from a former Moscow governess has some golden moments, too. All worth making the time for if you haven’t done so already. Amusingly, Yung Mussolini’s mother had a brief venture as a Tokyo disco singer, and was in the headlines recently for her spat with Jim Carrey. The rich tapestry of life, and all that.
Cremer v. Cremer
One of the real treats of the current issue is now live on the website. Gary Fairfull was a Glaswegian charmer who, at the turn of the millennium, ran a series of shebeens in east London that were so popular that it was said Gary ‘invented’ Shoreditch. His friend, Will Buckley, remembers a life well-lived. Read it here.
Lady Bamford’s Pleasure
In our new pub book, Clive Martin travels to Charlbury, to visit The Bell, part of Carole Bamford’s pub empire. It’s not the first time that TF has covered the burgeoning Bamford empire in the Cotswolds – Claudia Cockerell provided a memorable dispatch in Issue 21. Lady Bamford is busy as ever this summer: here she is making a ‘deliciously simple’ dish with a bandana’d Thomas Straker.
Pints with the Pintlord
The publication date for our book about the pub, nattily titled The Pub, launches on 14 August, which is very exciting. If you pre-order a copy through our friends at Backstory you could win a tote bag, a year’s sub, or you could win a pub crawl with our pints correspondent himself, Jimmy McIntosh. There have been hundreds of entries so far to the raffle so far but the competition still rages, and we’ve even made a video below. Use promo code UKSONLYBOOKSHOP for free delivery and a ticket in the tombola.
Where’s Sir David?
A glance at the most popular ‘public figures’ – as differentiated from the coarser cohort, ‘entertainment figures’ on which more later – makes sore reading for republicans. Six of the top ten are royals – the four outliers being Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Richard Branson – with the late Queen topping the poll with 86% popularity. High finishes for Kate, William and Princess Anne seem par for the course, but one may baffle slightly at the notion that Sophie, Countess of Wessex and Zara Tindall are ninth and eleventh most popular figures in the UK, respectively. Nestled between them, in tenth place, lies our glorious king.
Away from crowns and cabinets, in the entertainment sphere, we’d have considered it a canny guess to find Sir David Attenborough at the top of the popularity pyramid. Alas, anyone so gambling will be disappointed, as the nation’s favourite broadcaster is in second place, beaten to the top spot by beloved actor Morgan Freeman, in a top ten that also includes Steven Spielberg, Julia Roberts and Rowan Atkinson, and suggests these surveys were taken outside a Blockbuster Video in 1998.
We don’t quite know their methodology, of course, and hope we never do. We’d rather keep it in our hearts and minds as a pointillist portrait of the country’s hidden id; the royal-mad, DVD thriller-loving throngs of this strange and sceptred isle.
The Last of the Dame Hunters
Last week, we asked you if any of you encountered the deceased playboy, Rupert Deen – yes, we are still ‘on deen’ and someone guided us to his official entry on the Olympics website, which really does make for invigorating reading. We welcome any more memories and anecdotes via the usual channels.
Start Spreading the News
Our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, is launching his fourth book soon. As many of you will know, Fergus is also a vicar, and his forthcoming title tells a history of Christianity through 12 churches scattered across the globe. It is obviously very funny yet also deeply interesting and you can order a copy here.
Dean Kissick Has a Third Space Membership
We continue to have a wonderful time on Instagram, where our most recent entry, a listicle of meaningless status symbols, has ‘done numbers’. You can gorge yourself here, and also note how the author of the piece, our own Róisín Lanigan, was unfairly besmirched as having attended private school.
On the Road to Kandahar
As the Afghan asylum scandal continues to roil through the news, it’s worth revisiting a documentary that captures the exact commencement of the 21st century British misadventure in Afghanistan.
Filmed by a Dutch TV crew, Horse Soldiers is filmed in the maelstrom of the Battle of Qala-i-Jangi, as Anglo-American special forces try to overcome a Taliban uprising. A truly shocking documentary, filming machine gun shootouts and CIA interrogations with an intimacy that has never been repeated, at least for public consumption.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3zdczaYDs0
Madferit
The one silver lining to the summer of Oasis gigs is that it has produced embarrassing windows into Oasis fandom. One man was spotted buying tickets to see Alanis Morissette while Oasis were playing, another making sure he had the lyrics up on his phone.
And then there were the lads, the fellas, grabbing every last drop of Britpop glory, vicariously remembering the halcyon days where everything was permissible through their icon, Liam. There is an oddly religious feel to the Liam love, with a series of posts of him on stage carrying captions like ‘my £400 on stage blessing himself with a pint’ and comments reading ‘Godlike, celestial, biblical, majestical, spiritual, icon, legend, RnR star…’ Their zeal was most in evidence in several scenes of fights breaking out over the god-king Liam’s tambourine.
Speaking of that tambourine, Liam’s classic move of balancing it on his head did become slightly undermined by its propensity to fall off his head. Perhaps it had something to do with his rather fetching hat, of which he had a few points of clarification for the audience. For those of us struggling to deal with all of this, the good news is they leave the capital on August 3, and the country a week later. The bad news is they’re back at Wembley in September.
In Case You Missed It
An iconic cinema in New Zealand has come under fire for screening a 10-minute AI-generated trailer featuring racist caricatures and Russell Crowe.
The calming call of the Eider duck.
Why Reddit is one of the last things still functioning on the internet.
Assess your character with the help of this definitely scientifically accurate phrenology magazine from 1902.
Uganda’s Finance Minister is hilarious.
And Finally
Neil Warnock is the true archetype of an English football manager. For him, the game is 80-90% man management, none of this micro-tactics systems-based stuff. Just tell the lads to ‘fucking tackle’. Always kitted out in full tracksuit, Warnock has trod the touchlines for 44 years, in which time he’s done a lot.
He once played a backup defender as his striker because his wife, Sharon, had a dream that his right-back would score. Danny Butterfield was duly sent up front, where he had literally never played, and in six minutes and 48 seconds, he had scored a hat-trick. Warnock also alleges that Sean Bean, then a member of the Board of Sheffield United when they were controversially relegated in 2007, barged into his office and told his wife and five-year-old child ‘It’s your fucking husband that got us relegated. He’s a fucking wanker.’ Mr Bean denies the allegations.
He is also the manager responsible for the infamous Battle of Brammall Lane, where Warnock was accused of trying to avoid defeat by getting as many of his own players sent off as possible, forcing the referee to abandon the match. Losing 2-0 and with his goalkeeper already sent off, Warnock brought on two substitutes, only for them both to be suspiciously sent off immediately afterwards, one for a flying double-footed tackle, the other for headbutting one of the oppo so hard he started to bleed all over the pitch. Warnock was unfazed by the cheating accusations. ‘I was happy with the effort my lads put in’.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J9iITMjAAY
Really, with Warnock, the excitement always lies with him, more than the football. Thankfully, someone decided to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the man in 2005, predating any of that modern all-or-nothing Amazon series rubbish. It is full of gold, including Warnock taking his team for a fun mid-season break, in winter, in Scarborough. It is well worth a full watch for all his rantings and ravings, but for those in need of a quick fix, someone has made the excellent decision of splicing some of the best clips from it with some from a documentary about Pep Guardiola and Manchester City, a clash between two meteoric opposites made all the better by the fact that Warnock seems to be something of a cult hero among the petrodollar fuelled baddies of modern football, with Erling Haaland being star struck by his fellow Yorkshireman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcYNAIPL8ZI
We’ll be back next week with another juicy dispatch. Do send us photos of the magazine ‘in the wild’ and remember that we have our sale on, but not for very long. Sign up for a discounted subscription here. Scotland has the highest proportion of redheads, globally. Speak soon.
All the best,
TF