Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that knows a grand doesn’t come for free. There is a brief lull in proceedings as we have sent Issue 28 to the art team, who are adding the daubs and dashes that make it look beautiful.
In the meantime, Issue 27 continues to be seen in places high and low, receiving praise from a man known as the ‘Shoreditch Sketcher’, riding on a horse called Flossie, walking among the Lake District’s lambs, on the lookout in Canada, attempting some risible meta-banter and well-positioned at the lido.
Some of you may have seen this rather wonderful advert that we have taken in the London Review of Books. Now we printed off 50 of these tokens giving 25 percent off for a year’s subscription and there are only a handful left. Enter LRB25 at the checkout and you’ll get that bona fide discount, and that applies across the board, and to gift subs too.
It’s a bit of a London special today, and on that note, do sign up for Capital Letter – our most recent outing was possibly the best one yet, and crowned the coolest new bar in London, and had some things to say about an old friend of this newsletter, Hugh Corcoran. Let’s get on with it.
A Dance to the Music of Time
Francis Boulle’s energetic campaigning for Rupert Lowe’s Restore party has made us take stock of what the original(ish) cast members of Made in Chelsea are up to now. Jamie Laing – who is a legend, by the way – is making some of the best short-form video content in the country while also featuring on a show on parenthood commissioned by Disney. Ollie Locke has been evicted from his home yet claims his toddlers have to travel by private plane after being ‘scarred’ by flying economy. Spencer Matthews is sober and runs ultramarathons. Binky Felstead got blasted by a baker after asking for free cake in return for an Instagram post. Ashley James is a feminist activist. Georgia ‘Toff’ Toffolo married the ‘equity punk’ and Brewdog founder, James Watt. Andy Jordan runs a clothing brand based in south Devon. Victoria Baker-Harber’s husband, Inigo Philbrick, was arrested in Vanuatu after going on the lam for a multi-million-dollar art fraud. We could go on.
It’s all very much like a great Victorian novel, and speaking of which, Dolly Alderton, whose career started as a story producer on MIC, is the showrunner on the upcoming Netflix production of Pride and Prejudice, and the trailer does look very good indeed.
Calling All Plonkers
Thank you to everyone who has written in to tell us about the cheapest bottle of house wine in the country. We have shared the appeal on Twitter here – you can send in your entries to editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll share the results next week. It seems that ‘Little Portugal’ is the place to go for those in search of some cut-price vino…
Jennifer’s Body
Last week, we revealed that Alain de Botton is on the dating apps, which prompted Chris Coates to write in to remind us of the 1,400-word ‘thought experiment’ published on de Botton’s website entitled ‘Jennifer Lawrence Is My Girlfriend’. While the website is no more, the Wayback Machine is, as ever, your friend.
After that, you might enjoy Chris’s own musings on the Botmeister’s erstwhile publication.
The Bigger Splash
We were not alone in being moved by the plight of the swans on Hampstead Heath, who it seems are finally being left alone by the marauding basics who insist on sharing their pond. The Heath engenders strong feelings in those who live nearby and revel in its glories. Its 850 acres have provided a pool of inspiration to our writers, from Bron Maher’s infamous dispatch to Isobel Thompson’s reported feature on the Travelling Showmen who have made the Vale of Health their home for over a century.
On that note, we should add that we are looking for big, juicy stories for Issue 29 and Issue 30 – do have a read of the pitch guide here and send through your best ideas to editorial@the-fence.com and we will reply to you there.
The Hunting Call
The latest dogpile by bloodthirsty journalists on the benighted Soho Society gives us reason to bring up Francisco Garcia’s outstanding feature on the dwindling band of residents who call our neighbourhood home.
We will resist taking a favourite hobby horse for an extended gallop, but those radio hosts looking to book in Michael Kill as an objective voice on the capital’s nightlife would do well to engage with this article here.
That Politician’s Nothing but a Diminutive Boy!
We have greatly enjoyed following the short-lived political career of one Sadisu Buba Mahmud. Known locally as ‘The Wonder’, he recently shot into the spotlight during his campaign to become a member fo Nigeria’s House of Representatives in the northern state of Kaduna. He proved himself a canny social media operator, and his Instagram quickly racked up followers – he has almost 10,000 today.
There was, however, one big, big reason for this sudden interest in a local politician which was the fact that he is small, small, small.
Mahmud had always claimed that his stature was nothing unusual. He was, he said, simply a 30-year-old man with dwarfism. Recent reports by People’s Gazette have revealed the truth is, as ever, more simple and more strange. Mahmud, an official candidate for the incumbent Nigerian President’s party, is a 16-year-old boy.
The revelation has forced the little guy to withdraw from the race, though he made clear in his official notice that this was ‘not a sign of weakness, but a sacrifice for the greater good of the party.’ He may be young, but he clearly understands politics well.
But perhaps this strange occurrence was not as unlikely as it might initially seem. As some astute observers have pointed out, underage voting is a big problem in Nigeria, particularly in the north. It is quite routine for adults to introduce teenagers and children to the ways and means of electoral fraud early on and, indeed, Mahmud could not have gotten as far as he did without the help, or the full direction, of a few ambitious and fully-aged political actors. The story of the ‘The Wonder’ is then a striking, but not fully unusual in a country whose elections remain troubled by ‘irregularities’.
We can be thankful, however, that the whole affair has left us with this bizarre interview, some great Nigerian journalism (which proves writing in this country is unbelievably, unnecessarily dull) and some truly phenomenal photos.
Burning Cash at the Wah Wah Hut
Unless you’re Taylor Swift, it’s tough times for touring musicians, what with Brexit and the cost-of-living crisis. What motivates bands to take to the road? For her third article for us, Sarah Haque followed her fiancé’s band, Fickle Friends, across the country, and dug out some key statistics about how the bus keeps the wheels rolling – it’s available to read here.
Strategic Realignment
It’s gruelling working in marketing, and even more so when you’re meant to be selling a shirt that just went viral on FourChan for being worn during a beheading. This is what we thought of when we saw the Arsenal social media this week. This week was good, sure, but remember what happened in 2017? Front-page news showed the attacker on London Bridge wearing a pale blue training shirt. Needless to say, Arsenal has since changed the design.
One of the problems is that terrorists are often quite switched on to what will do numbers on social media. The other is that they’re frequently teenagers from London, which means they dress well and look great. Well-dressed and good-looking terrorists became a problem for the people of Primark and Stone Island in the same year when a young man was beheaded in Woolwich. The attacker was wearing a beanie and a puffer from the two stores. Both items were very in vogue at the time, apparently.
In fact, the marketing teams were seemingly so overwhelmed by terrorists wearing their clothes in the 2010s that they had to stop making specific interventions and instead now adopt a cover-all approach: when Googling to see screenshots of specific videos – for research purposes only – AI just throws up a statement that each brand is anti-hate, which is all very well but we do still want to see the jihadi wearing Nike Shoxx.
Nike even had to change their entire ‘Just Do It’ slogan after a video went viral of a suicide attempt which used the catch phrase urging action. It has now adopted the more philological ‘Why do it?’, which was justified as an invitation to ‘a new generation to reflect on their motivations, embrace the risk of failure, and find meaning in the challenge of starting.’ The same advice could be meaningfully offered to young extremists. Just do it, as they say.
In Need of an Alibi
If you attended the parade this weekend in a terrorist-associated shirt and now need an iron-clad excuse for your behaviour, perhaps you can cover your tracks by suggesting it was a stroll born purely out of your side interest in psychogeography. Happily, that would also make you squarely interested in Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s psychic exploration of the city via the London Psychogeographical Association. ‘To a particular type of counterculturally inclined fiftysomething, the LPA is one of the great lapsed European vanguards, London’s answer to Dada and the Surrealists.’ They also surely enjoyed the chants lifting from the streets of north London on Sunday.
In Case You Missed It
Peter Hessler remembers his paper route in early 1980s Missouri.
Zack Polanski inadvertently explains how journalism works.
Congratulations to the legendary Peter Geoghegan.
Sophie Calle discusses her taxidermy collection.
Memo to Americans: please stop being ‘into’ football.
That being said, this Arsenal x Tom Hiddleston link-up is a veritable war crime.
A refuse collector tells all.
A dog shot a woman in Nebraska.
The best cycling documentary of all time.
Meet some homophobic horses.
And Finally
‘Never have I seen one woman in whom every social grace was so lacking. Did I say she was primitive? I retract that. She’s feral. I’ve never spent a more physically destructive evening in my life. I am nauseated.’
This is how Elaine May’s character , Henrietta, in A New Leaf (1971) is described by the man who apparently wants to marry her. It was the first film directed by, and also starring, May. She is a wayward botanist heiress opposite the fussy playboy Henry Graham, played by Walter Matthau. At the start of the film, Henry realises that his debonair penchant for finer things has resulted in fast-approaching bankruptcy, and so he resolves to seduce Henrietta in pursuit of her fortune – antics ensue. It is a delightfully simple plot that makes much of May’s lopsided glasses, as well as Matthau’s ill-contained rage at his social debasement. It is probably also the film that May is now best known for, and one that everyone seems to continue to love.
But in her early career, May was better known in relation to Mike Nichols as his comedy partner, both on stage and later on television. They were so beloved for their Broadway show and comedy albums that in the late 1950s that GE Refrigerators hired them to do a series of adverts, allowing them to fall into a wonderfully mercenary tradition that was paved by Orson Welles with frozen peas and now is continued in damper, more depressing way by Gary Lineker with crisps and Helena Bonham Carter with sofas. The May-Nichols adverts are not very easy to find online any more, but there is still one to enjoy here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPGHQYutitY
Perhaps such skills in charm are best demonstrated by the televised sketches that got them hired. A particularly excellent example is their sketch transposing a Brief Encounter conversation onto an interaction between dentist and patient in the requisite old-timey British accents and fascinators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMyJ7SuzXUM
Well we’re off to dreamland over here for some well earned R&R as some big events loom. We hope you have enjoyed this faithful intellectual footstool that we proffer each week. If you need to get in touch there’s two ways to go about it: editorial@the-fence.com and support@the-fence.com. If you can’t work out which to use, you need to reduce your ChatGPT usage.
Do remember to subscribe to the magazine, it really is good and that discount won’t last much longer. Like seriously, if you like reading this we have no idea why you don’t read the thing we work much harder on, but who are we to judge? Anyway, Ringo left The Beatles’ trip to India early because he ran out of baked beans.
All Best,
TF