Dear Readers,
Yes, we know it’s February, we’re having a little joke, as is our occasional purview at ‘Off The Fence’. The headline news is that we’ve got a sale going on. If you subscribe to the print magazine today, you’ll get Issue 15, Issue 16, Issue 17 and Issue 18 all for free alongside everything we’re going to publish in 2024.
Eight Magazines for the Price of Four
A reminder that our competition is still ongoing – we loved this snap from the Swiss Alps, and we would like to see more, please do keep winging them through.
Right, let’s get to it, we’re leading with a celebration – and a small enquiry – into the latest piece from one of our absolute favourite writers.
Down by the River
Patrick Radden Keefe has the story of the year so far. Zac Brettler was a 19-year-old who had just finished studying at Mill Hill, a private school in north London, when his body was found on the river foreshore near the MI6 building.
His parents, a liberal couple from Maida Vale, were shocked to discover that he had been pretending to be an oligarch’s son, and associating with two men in their middle ages: Akbar Shamji and Dave Sharma.
The parents’ quest to find out what happened to their son is worth reading in full – Patrick’s piece is a masterclass. But in short, the Metropolitan Police seemed totally uninterested in scoring justice for Zac, and somewhat amazingly, there was no press coverage of the tragic events, despite it being a pretty massive news story.
So is there a cover-up? Have the press been silenced? On the latter point, we will only say that the natural place for this story to have been broken would be the Evening Standard (prop: E. Lebedev).
As to the second point, regarding issues of police corruption, the key figure is that of Dave Sharma, who was known as ‘Indian Dave’ among figures in the London underworld. As the New Yorker piece details, Sharma was connected to the murder of Dave ‘Muscles’ King in 2005, the first time a fully automatic AK-47 had been used in this country.
Speaking to various sources, fascinating unreported details about ‘Indian Dave’ have emerged. The word is he was a shakedown specialist and debt collector who targeted rich individuals, including the son of a controversial billionaire with a prominent public profile and had links to leading figures in the drug game. So why could he operate seemingly so freely in Britain despite being suspected of organising a gangland hit?
The Past Is A Foreign Country: They Do Things Differently There
We never need an excuse to drop that little bit of L. P. Hartley into the mix, and in the case of Ian Martin’s article, it’s the most apposite of quotes, as Ian remembers what being 18 in the summer of 1971, with the coming of the Representation of the People’s Act and Rod Stewart’s first number one. You can savour this superior exercise in nostalgia right here.
All the Stars Are Here
The 2024 UK Michelin Guide is out, as of yesterday, and the runners & riders are in: three big fat stars for The Ledbury; two stars for the banker’s favourite curry house, Gymkhana, and a few solitary stars for our Soho neighbours at Mountain & Aulis respectively, among other places. We were surprised by some omissions. Ikoyi looked nailed on for three stars, since they’ve been charging like one for the last year – £300 a head without drinks!
If you’re looking for a hot, fresh review of a newly-minted Michelin restaurant, then thank your lucky stars that we have one ready & waiting. Ahead of the game as always, Finsbury Park’s leading influencer enthusiast, Ed Cumming, cadged a free lunch at one of this year’s one-star additions, Pavyllon, and brought a sleb mate along with him for some fish and riesling. It’s a brilliantly funny piece, and now that he’s filed his second Free Lunch column some two years after we first asked him to, we’re delighted to say that Ed will be completing his hat trick in the upcoming issue.
Like Matt Damon, Drawn From Memory
Questioning someone’s sexuality is obviously gauche and vulgar, so we would never do that. Here is a video of a woman and her ostensibly straight husband, describing their outfits for a night out. The absurdly American-named Campbell Hunt Puckett has become an unlikely TikTok celebrity with millions of likes on her ‘fit check’ videos when they began to include her husband, the even more absurdly named Jett Puckett, who affectionately refers to her only as ‘Pookie’. The comments on the videos of Pookie and Jett on their way to date nights at Atlanta’s ubiquitous steakhouses range from accusations that Hunt Puckett is a ‘yallosexual’, to comparing him to a child’s drawing of Matt Damon. Pookie herself was forced to release an apology last week when photos emerged of her and Jett Damon dressed as Donald and Melania Trump at an Antebellum plantation-themed party at the University of Mississippi. Now you can leave mean comments, too!
In Case You Missed It
Sam Kashner tells the story behind Truman Capote’s self-cancellation.
Celibacy is chic now, says woman in the New York Times.
Oh, you want to be an artist? You have to do TikTok instead. Sorry.
Gregg Wallace in the Telegraph: ‘I hate spending time with my autistic son’
Saltburn is a satire, you fucking dweebs (the editor is a dweeb).
And Finally
Red cups in the air please, and have your dirty old truck give a 21-rev salute for the late, great Toby Keith, who passed away yesterday aged 62. Toby Keith’s brand of country music will be familiar to anyone who loves to draw ungenerous stereotypes of southern America. Breaking out of Nashville in the early 90s with ‘Should’ve Been a Cowboy’, Keith made a career from beer-swilling, toe-tapping, plinky-dink tunes that championed faith, flag and family. He was, as it goes, no ideologue, praising George Bush, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and Donald Trump in the first two decades of the 21st century. But he was, all the same, a patriot in that beguilingly naff, almost campy way that only country stars can be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruNrdmjcNTc
Where Toby Keith shone brightest, however, was not through his indignant jingo tub-thumpers, but his odes to boozing, which were simple and pure and dumb. I Love This Bar is a true Ronseal track, expressing in sparse rhymes the truism that his favourite bar has all sorts of characters in it, and he loves going there. Its appeal was so resonant that Keith opened two chain restaurants called ‘Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill’ in his home state of Oklahoma. Beer for My Horses, a duet with unkillable pot-smoking outlaw Willie Nelson, is ostensibly about seeking good old frontier justice, but is also fundamentally about drinking with your buddies and sharing that alcohol with your horse. Keith later turned the song into a feature-length film of the same name, currently rated at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The purest distillate of Toby Keith, though, can be found in the video for 2011’s Red Solo Cup, and this is the video you should watch: it is a song, and a film, about filling a red plastic cup, drinking from it, and partying. Back then, on either coast, your Pitchfork-bothering media elites were too busy greasing their bike gears to Bon Iver, while Toby Keith and his country buddies were taking over frat houses with beer pong, keg-stands and the worst facial hair you’ve ever seen. And that, dear reader, is why we are where we are in 2024, something the failing New York Times would never dare to admit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKZqGJONH68
That’s not it for this week. We’re going to be back with another edition on Friday, would you believe it. Remember that we have this sale going on, if you’re the sort of person who likes free magazines.
All the best,
TF