Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that’s been written today on an iPhone, as we’re at Studio Mathias Clottu, sending Issue 27 to print, proofreading with pencils in hand. Is it the best one we’ve ever done, you ask? Yes, it definitely is, a veritable slammer of an issue, and we look forward to telling you all about it in due course.
This is your last call to make sure that your address is correctly updated on your account on our website. If you’re not yet a subscriber, there is a final sprinkling of tokens giving you 20 per cent off a year’s subscription, that’s print, digital or both. The code is MARCH20 – this generous offer will not be repeated soon.
Capital Letter sprinkled some Haslam energy with its latest outing. What are London’s coolest restaurants? You can find out here.
And will you look at this, The Pub, our beautiful book about the pub, is in prime position at Piccadilly Waterstones, in what the booksellers should really call ‘the banter basement’. What a joy.
To business, albeit with a shorter outing.
Back on the Beat
James Sharp is one of the remaining court reporters in this country. He recounts an average day here – which includes an encounter with a former Arsenal footballer with a short temper.
A Bigger Splash
We’re absolutely delighted to see John Banville’s outstanding feature on his days as a subeditor syndicated in Harper’s.It’s the second time we’ve had the honour – the first time was a few years back, in Issue 11, when Jamie Fewery wrote a cacklingly funny insider view on the 50 Shades of Grey mania.
Six Years On
While many of us have tried to memory-hole the pandemic, others are not so fortunate. Ted Monroe writes beautifully here about living with Long COVID as a young man, and the trials that brings.
It’s a Dog’s Life
In the splashiest fashion news since Johnathan Anderson’s Dior debut Vogue (high fashion publication) is suing Dogue (canine fashion publication) over trademark infringement. Dogue, whose most recent issue featured a Bichon Frisé sporting a Gucci print collar is being accused by Vogue’s (whose April issue stars Doja Cat in Saint Laurent suiting) publisher Condé Nast of clearly trying to confuse consumers with their logo, which they claim is ‘obviously intended’ to suggest a relationship between the two. Olga Portnaya, the creator and EIC of Dogue, is gamely taking on the fashion behemoth despite her far smaller operation with 25 issues to date and a circulation of less than 100, as the 37 brand publisher claims Dogue is ‘likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably’. As Portnaya’s lawyer David A. Makman told the NYT ‘My client’s magazine is a parody that features humorous pictures of dogs, while Vogue is a fashion magazine that features serious photographs of human models’, continuing, ‘I don’t think anyone would have difficulty recognizing the difference’.
In Case You Missed It
Sean Penn is given an ‘Oscar’ made of rail metal by the Ukrainians.
Al Purdy reads his poem ‘At the Quinte Hotel’
Andrew O’Hagan is obviously very, very good on Prince Andrew.
And Finally
You all know that we have a special fondness for words, text and the physical act of being in pubs, but these clips from an old Sky One programme called Britain’s Toughest Pubs are objectively stellar. The first takes place on the Isle of Man in a pub called The Heron, which bills itself as a bastion of pro-Manx (i.e. anti-everyone) sentiment. It’s a seriously hard boozer. There’s a bloke with a ‘Love/Hate’ knuckle tattoo ala Do The Right Thing (or originally Night of the Hunter for all you film neeks out there), and the patrons hatred of ‘come-overs’, those moving to the island for work, is fierce, matched only by their nostalgic longing for the punitive wonders that were worked by the birch before ‘some do-gooder in the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights stopped them doing it, and that’s where all the trouble started’.
The Sky cameramen’s work may not be high art, but they knew their job well on this one. As a local tells us his thoughts, we have a close up of what may be the world’s flattest, tiredest-looking dog, gently stepped over by a drinker on his way for a piss. One local’s self-description of the Isle of Man as ‘72,000 alcoholics clinging to a fucking rock’ is excellent work, and would have made our Ceremonial Counties list if the island’s Manx population weren’t as fiercely anti-everyone, but there we are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKvAyK-j2CI
Perhaps even better is their dispatch from the Granite City from a place called Peep Peeps Bar. It is a misleadingly cute name for a small bolthole located very close to a local redlight district. It’s a place that’s all about its landlord, Chris Cummings, one of those special old-style publicans who are fundamentally happiest when there’s absolutely no one in their pub. There are signs reading ‘no cheques changed, even good ones’, and everything has been left exactly as it was when Chris first started. This includes a drinks board which he refuses to change the lettering on, preferring instead to remind inquirers that ‘there’s nae Babycham, there’s nae fucking wine… what a heap of shite.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZwiI-3j5-w
Needless to say, this wasn’t Sky’s most PC piece of programming, and the respective hardness of the pubs has likely been amped up for the cameras and heightened in the edit, so take that in your stride. All the same, both clips are fundamentally compelling viewing.
That’s that for this week, and we’ll be back with a full-length outing for all you freeloaders next Tuesday. Remember that there are some discount subs to be had here. Between the years 2015-2022, only 28 children in the UK were given the name ‘Nigel’.
All the best,
TF