Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, an email from the editorial team at The Fence magazine. We’ve got a particularly juicy edition for you today, but we should tell you that we’ve got an exciting sale going on, and we won’t be doing something like this for a while.
If you subscribe to the print magazine today, you’ll get Issue 14, Issue 15, Issue 16, Issue 17 and Issue 18 alongside Issue 19 and all the future issues. So that’s five issues and four for free.
All you need to do is sign up at this link here, and owing to limited stock we imagine this deal will expire pretty soon. So do move quickly.
A reminder that our competition to capture Issue 19 ‘out in the wild’ is still very much operational. We’ve had some crackers in so far, one from an unnamed reader in Riyadh, and here’s the magazine on a train to Norwich. And it seems a theme is emerging, thanks to this snap from Christina Hoggard. Keep them coming, and you might be in with a chance of winning a bottle of Bollinger.
Let’s get it going. We’ve got some bits on Manchester City and Chloe Sevigny, but we lead with a really very funny dispatch from George Attwell Gerhards.
Microphone Check
‘Has anybody ever told you, you’re the next Ant and Dec?’ a sweaty deputy headteacher grasps for another vol-au-vent from a passing tray. It’s the third time we’ve been asked this in the last five minutes.
Nick and I are 17 years old and about to sit our A levels. Despite this, our headteacher, recognising in us the right balance of ego and obsequiousness, has taken us out of school for three days and has us holed up in the behemothic Hilton Metropole in Paddington. We are to be masters of ceremonies for the annual conference of the teaching trade body of which he is president.
It has started strangely enough. We are escorted to London on the train by Mr Murphy, a metalwork teacher that neither of us know personally. Taking his teaching brief a little too seriously, he is dressed almost entirely in silver – suitcase to match – displaying a monochromatic commitment to metal that incurs our adolescent derision as much as his suggestion that we could strike out from the hotel, under his supervision, to Madame Tussauds. In the event, there is no time for striking out, because the schedule is stacked.
We are assigned a handler, a jocular Yorkshireman called Sam who is stubbly, paunchy and with a habit of punctuating his speech with ‘diddly-diddly’. If the impression is hauntingly Savile-like, these are more innocent times. (Wherever he is now, I hope Sam is okay. It can’t be easy resembling a notorious paedophile. Especially if you work in education.)
Sam has the printed itinerary, as well as advice about what tone to take. We are sixth formers, however, and as such we know better. I am first in to bat, and on the opening morning I climb the lectern to address conference, introducing myself and Nick and pointing out the nearest fire exits. For speaking in a nice clear voice and using complete sentences, I am greeted with a large round of warm applause from the room of educational leaders.
‘You’ll clap anything you lot.’ Nick quips. This goes down very well. We quickly establish an odd-couple routine, myself as straight man; Nick the naughty – literal – schoolboy who affects contempt for his audience's laughter. They lap it up even more. The first break out session arrives and we cannot get through the crowds waiting to speak to us. Within the confines of the hotel we acquire a celebrity that is equal parts delicious and pathetic. Over the buffet lunch an excited delegate pulls us to one side.
‘You two could give Dick and Dom a run for their money.’
Of the actual conference events I remember little. Michael Gove is frustratingly pleasant. The Labour man is stiff and unlikeable – this is the period of High Milliband. One of the Benns is there. The CBI gives a talk that remains among the most boring hours of my life. The head of Ofsted disapproves of Nick jokily welcoming him into ‘the lion’s den’. Our grasp of current affairs is formed by The Thick of It and the least boring bits of Have I Got News for You? We don’t have a clue what we are talking about.
The evenings are more laidback. Mr Murphy sacks off the conference for a go-karting stag-do and is replaced by our English and Drama teachers who we refer to by their first names.
We are given free reign of the hotel and can think of absolutely nothing worthwhile to do.
I waste a dinner sitting next to the editor of the Times Educational Supplement, who studied history at the university I am hoping to go to. I fail to find the courage to ask for some work experience. The after-dinner speaker is the comedian Hardeep Singh Kohli who, at the time of writing, is facing a half-dozen charges in a Glasgow court including sexually assaulting a woman. Nick and I still recount with precision what our weary headteacher says to us in a moment of quiet at the bar: ‘There are only so many things you can say to a gay Glaswegian Sikh’ – demonstrating a profound lack of attention to detail.
The circus culminates with the macabre ritual of an inverted school disco. The DJ is uninterested, and the dance floor over-ambitiously large, with great empty spaces throughout the venue revealing how many delegates have already turned in for some late night marking. Yet there remained scores of half-cut teachers bumping bums and body-popping, shouting themselves hoarse to Come On Eileen and partying like it's 1997.
And we, the two students, watch on, sipping Diet Cokes. Sartorial rules are flagrantly disobeyed: top buttons undone; shirts untucked. Beer breath and bad cologne fills the room. These are the creatures in whose hands a generation of children were placed. We leave the bar and get an early night. We have revision to catch up on.
If You Can Make It There
We’re delighted to share with you another five-star feature from Issue 19, this time from the Irish novelist, Megan Nolan, who has swapped south-east London for Brooklyn, and has written a particularly charming and moving piece about the pull and push of the two great cities.
The Klopp Army
Speaking of great cities, this magazine’s predilection/ sectarian fervour for The Reds is well-known, so when Ella Benson Easton offered us a piece about her surreal experiences as a Scouser abroad, it was a pretty instantaneous commission from us, and made all the more fitting as a Dutchman replaces the world’s most likeable German as the manager of the club. In the managerial ‘slot’, even. Get it?
Thomas Heatherwick’s Magical Ideas Factory
As was signalled last week, we have revived The Carbuncle Cup to celebrate the worst new buildings in Britain, and we have got a vile tranche of nominations so far, and you can see some of the leading offenders here on our Instagram stories. You can still nominate buildings, either on social media or via the email address carbuncle@the-fence.com.
Dirty Sexy Money
Usually we see our regular contributors getting their flowers in the arid pages of the broadsheet culture supplements. So it was pretty cool to see Bertie Brandes get a ‘special thanks’ in the credits for Charli XCX’s new video, which you can see below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJW-VvmRKsE
Also, on a side note, it really is very cool to see Chloë Sevigny still rocking it, being very cool. Has anyone been on a ‘cool girl’ run for more than 30 years? Let us know.
In Case You Missed It
Casey Baraka glides through a superlative long-read on the loneliness of the internationally educated elite of Kenya.
Archaeologists have unearthed a Roman ‘service station’.
The tragic downfall of the internet’s art gallery.
Lauren Michele Jackson asks: are breasts ‘over’?
A marmalade-dropper of a story from Sharon Lerner
And Finally
It’s been pretty galling watching Manchester City take their fourth title. But if enough of the 115 charges stick – and by God we hope they do – then that oil-soaked silverware might be taken from Guardiola’s gang. In which case, allow us to propose this video as a more fitting era to the Mansour era.
Riyad Mahrez left City last year for Saudi Arabia, but has taken a flower of Manchester with him in the shape of his redoubtable bride, Taylor. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to watch two people with zero chemistry commit themselves to each other – on film – then you will be delighted with this short, which carries at least three genuine laugh-out-loud moments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZW5-sn-OKs
That’s it for this week, and do remember to score five free mags by signing up for a subscription here. We’ll be with you next Tuesday. Until then.
All the best,
TF