Dear Readers,
It’s a double iteration of the newsletter this week, as we are excited to tell you that our summer sale is here, on which more in a moment.
Issue 16 is arriving next week, Brexit border checks inshallah, and we will bore on at great length about it then. In the meantime, if you’re a subscriber, please check that your address is up to date at www.the-fence.com – log into the website and check that your account is all fine and dandy. If you haven’t logged in yet, you can do so by entering the email address associated with your account, and then click on ‘forgotten password’, and a new one will be generated.
Back to the sale. We’re only going to do this once: we’ve slashed print subscriptions for the year. The first 10 people to subscribe today will score one at only £12, a fifty percent discount. Then, the next 10 will score one at £14, and so on and so forth. There are almost 8,000 eyeballs on this mail-out, so do move quickly. There’s a link just here.
Give Us A Break
It’s a febrile, muggy atmosphere in London at the moment, and as the summer unwinds, there’s a disagreeable excess of tawdry rumours, lengthy emails and unsolicited pictures on which we will pass no further comment. It’s all a bit much, really. We know that some of you read this newsletter for gossip, but we have to confess: we’ve had enough. No more. We’re pivoting to 5,000 word essays on the radical urgency of Sybille Bedford. Actually, no. We’re going to drop beige dispatches from political party conferences with some gurning cartoons of the leaders of today. Anything for a break from this giddy, unrelenting gossip.
The Wool Trade
Paul Cox’s ‘Pride of Merseyside’ has been shipping out of the warehouse at a rapid clip, so if you’ve had your eyes on it, you can score your print here by scrolling down to the bottom – it really does look beautiful, and it’s in A2 size, signed by the author. Just look how gorgeous that is! There’s some more photos here, too. It’s going to be sold out very soon.
Chris Tarrant’s Naughty School Master
Some of you might have enjoyed the Twitter account, Great British Getty Images, which displays snaps from those long-lost Before Times that were the… 2000s. There are some absolute pearls, like this photoshoot, which was arranged for the 13th anniversary of Tesco’s ‘Computers for Schools’ scheme.
While this account does raise a few laughs, allow us to direct you to the original and the best, ‘Paul Danan Official’, an Instagram account purporting to be run by the former Hollyoaks star, which in yet another example of ‘less is more’, posts two or three times a year, with every single one a banger. The Chinawhite celebrity scene circa 2003 comes rushing back – but it’s all accompanied with texts of vivid, hilarious fantasy – our two favourites are the ones on Ben Fogle and Darius Danesh. Enjoy.
Rus In Urbe
Would you believe it, but we have two pieces on ‘sex trees’ in Issue 17 (the LRB came close in 1994 but Andrew O’Hagan’s copy needed another round of legalling). We gave our regular writers the prompts of ‘sex’ and ‘nature’, and two of them were able – somehow – to combine the two themes. We’re very excited to publish Harriet Rix’s quest for the ‘horniest tree in Britain’. Harriet, an eminent biochemist, wrote an excellent denunciation of Guy Shrubsole’s Lost Rainforests of Britain project, which you can read here.
Favour For A Friend
If you’ve been enjoying the print magazines so far, and you know someone else who might like them, then why not give them a subscription while the annual rate is at cut-price? To repeat: the prices will be jacked up again very soon, and we won’t repeat this offer this year. Dive in while you can.
In Case You Missed It
Friend of TF, Roisin Lanigan investigates the megachurch living that’s thriving in rural Northern Ireland.
Also in the FT, friend of TF (a pattern emerges?) Jimmy McIntosh, takes a trip to The Tarmon on Caledonian Road.
OpenDemocracy’s Benny Hunter spends a day watching asylum seekers being jailed in Canterbury Crown Court.
Over at AirMail, Vincent Fremont tells the winsome, sun-swept story of Andy Warhol’s Factory by the sea in Montauk.
Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto gives a brief timeline of every one of money reporter Matt Levine’s vacations Elon Musk has ruined.
Yasmine El Rashidi tells us how hip-hop fuelled Egypt’s revolution.
Scientist Katie Mack has a go, and mostly succeeds, at explaining why the recent news about gravitational waves is a big, big deal.
And Finally
There is a churning nostalgia factory of clips from the golden era of rave, loaded with lachrymose middle-aged men in the comments, writing about how they’ve never tasted such happiness since the summer of 1989, or issuing their children with sternish reminders about which ageing DJs to see at festivals, on account of whether they ‘know their house onions’ or not. But this 20-minute short, filming the Tonka crew assemble a party at The Zap in Brighton, has an immediacy – and a genuine charm – that we’ve yet to encounter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyGW88l6q-8
Filmed by Tonka themselves, on a borrowed camera, it follows the team pick up the rigs in a Brixton lock-up before heading down to the south coast for an all-night party that continues on the beach. What stands out is not the wide-eyed 4am confessions, but the bold ambition and quiet, ironical humour of the crew, who are dressed much the same as people in their twenties dress in 2023. But truth be told, can people in their twenties hurtle around the country putting on parties late into the morning on Brighton beach today? It’s a rather bitter reminder of the ways in which freedoms and opportunities have been gradually curtailed over the years. But it also features a quick cameo from the legendary DJ Harvey, now resident in Los Angeles, and if you have any interest in ‘the scene’, then it’s one for the ages.
A truncated version today, because we’ll be back on Friday with another outing, and then it’s back to a weekly Tuesletter going forwards. As ever, if you’d like to speak to a member of the team, you can get in touch at editorial@the-fence.com, and if you’d like to enquire about an order please email subscriptions@the-fence.com
That’s it! Speak in 72 hours or so.
All the best,
TF