Dear Readers,
Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that leads with carrot and follows with stick.
Clear your calendars, set your alarms, and while you’re at it, wind up your watch: Issue 26 arrives with subscribers this time next week, hitting the newsagents’ shelves a day later. Thrilling, no? We’ll share a little more – only a teensy bit more – further on in this newsletter, but for now we can only underscore that it is our greatest collective achievement to date, and without a doubt the best 64 pages printed in Britain this year, possibly ever.
If you want your copy in the first big mailout, then you have a couple of hours to buy a subscription before the address list is sent to our distributors. Sign up now, and you will get this issue, and Issue 26 as well. Strike now to avoid crushing disappointment and searing jealousy next Tuesday, and also to receive the astonishing pleasure of receiving two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine.
In next week’s missive, we will also be revealing the winner of our quarterly competition, where the snapper of the moment receives a gleaming bottle for their artful photograph of our lovely magazine. And if you want to win, take notice: subscribers Oisin & Laila have just taken their copy into the brackish waters of the Dead Sea, where we are, as you may expect, buoyant. Beat that, you only have seven days to better them.
Win Big Prizes
You may have seen the launch of The Fence’s Fighting Fund recently on our socials, a wonderful prize draw that you can, and should, enter today. What we want to stress is that this isn’t just a request for donations, it’s a chance to win some truly fantastic things.
The jewel in the crown is easily the experience at Osip, rated by Time Out as the best restaurant in the whole of the UK. This prize gets you a signature tasting menu for two as well as its wine pairing, all cooked by Merlin Labron Johnson, who is without a doubt the best young chef in the country, and soon to receive, no doubt, another dripping golden star from the tyre-hustlers over at Michelin. On top of this, you also get a night’s stay in Osip’s auberge, making this a truly phenomenal offer. Outright, this would set you back over £1500, but with one £25 entry, you’re in with a shot of it being yours.
And there are so many prizes to be one of a similar calibre. We have a voucher for £250 at Mountain, one of the very best restaurants in the capital, as well as a voucher for a weekend stay at the luxurious Updown Farmhouse, also running in at £250. There are also some wonderful hard goods to be had, including a KNWLS Razr handbag (RRP: £945) as well as a case of 2018 Chateau Musar, a superb wine from this esteemed vineyard in Lebanon. Just think about all those people in your life who would love to cellar that case or swag that bag.
Finally, we’re not only putting great items and trips on the line, but our own flesh and blood. If you enjoy reading the work we do here at The Fence, what greater prize is there than to come into contact with the minds behind it? In all seriousness, these will be a lot of fun. Winners will get the opportunity of either a pub crawl where you and your friends are joined by our pints correspondent and pub God Jimmy McIntosh, a tour of the wonderful churches in the City of London with our editor-at-large and Vicar of Charlbury Fergus Butler-Gallie or indeed a walking tour of Soho followed by drinks with The Fence’s editor-in-chief Charlie Baker.
This is also very much not a lottery. We’ve done some quick robot maths, and the overlord reckons that if you enter right now with a big enough splash, your chances of winning a prize stand at just over a coin flip. Insanely good odds that aren’t set to drastically decrease, either. So get involved now, people. We can and will tell you about the altruistic virtues of entering this prize draw but, in many ways, they are by-the-by. This is a great chance to win some great stuff.
Caecilius Est in Horto
One of the lead features from the current issue is now up on the website, twisting like a rotisserie chicken and waiting to be devoured. Robin Lane Fox is the Financial Times’ gardening correspondent of some 50 years’ standing, and also the extraordinary lecturer in ancient history at Oxford University. A voluble opponent of garden gnomes, he is perhaps the last of an ancient breed: the eccentric don living on their wits and private means.
He spoke, at some length, to Ella Benson Easton while touring his horticultural creations. You really don’t want to miss out on this.
On the Gift Card
Spotted in a central London branch of Waterstones: cultural wars touchstone, Sydney Sweeney, pursuing the aisles. And what of her purchases? An illustrated copy of a Paddington book – and also a paperback of American Psycho.
The Temple Tour
Stowe School in Buckinghamshire may have its strengths on the sports field, but it’s not known for its intellectual alumni. However, it does now boast a Booker Prizer winner, in the shape of David Szalay – a biographical record the novelist has been keen to expunge from his Wikipedia, but he has met his comeuppance at the hands of the ‘Old Stoic’ Instagram account, as seen below.
The Many Saints of Smithfield
An era is concluding in the capital – not just for its restaurants, but much else besides. After 31 years doing all manner of things to porcine carcasses, Fergus Henderson & Trevor Gulliver, the brains and brawn behind St. JOHN, are stepping back from restaurant operations, as announced in the FT. The move, long-rumoured and hardly unexpected, concludes a story as resonant as anything served on their plates: the triumph of aesthetics and ‘philosophy’ in British gastronomy, pursued with a single-mindedness that has outlasted passing trends, economic crashes and personal hardships, launching thousands of acolytes and imitators in the process. Have we ever had an amazing meal there? No – but you can’t help but admire a place that could stand so still as the world continued to turn. Plus, a warm tray of madeleines after two bottles of plonk is an undeniably wonderful thing.
We’ve featured St. JOHN in our pages before, with this excellent recollection of life in the kitchen being one of our standout pieces in 2024. The author, Ian Trueger, returns in Issue 26 – this is the reveal we were hinting at in the introduction – with a thorough dissection of private equity and its Rabelaisian appetite for British restaurant brands. In the piece, one unnamed insider suggests that the redoubtable St. JOHN pig, which has swelled to three restaurants, four bakeries and a vineyard, may be in the process of a pre-sale fattening. So if you’ve never managed to cadge a table, you could soon find Bone Marrow & Parsley Salad on provincial high streets nationwide.
The Daydrinker’s Companion
You there! It’s two days into December – have you bought your presents yet? Have you made your own list? Do you like a pint, or know anyone who does? If you answered ‘no; I haven’t done that in 30 years; yes; and yes’, then we have something for you. Our book, The Pub, is the ideal gift for essentially anyone in your life – a charming compendium of lager lore, session stories and tipple tips, with everyone from John Banville to Tom Parker Bowles, Katy Hessel to Clive Martin, William Hanson to Charlotte Ivers, all throwing in for their round.
There is now a glowing write-up in the Literary Reviewto encourage you all to take the dive in and buy buy buy.
Don’t just take their word for it. We’ve been included in GQ’s latest gift guide, the window-fixtures at Foyle’s, sparkling send-ups in The Idler, and now the Margate Bookshop’s Christmas collection, for those of you who are Down From London. It’s £16.99 on the shelves of the great and good, or 20% less through Amazon – buy from whomever, we won’t judge.
Our Cup Runneth Over
It’s been less than a week since we launched The Fence’s Fighting Fund – and only three subsections of the newsletter since we mentioned it last – but already, we’re cresting 25% of our target, something which delights us immensely. More than this, we’ve been overjoyed at the support we’ve received on Twitter & Bluesky; particularly from this pair of TF alums. Lotte Brundle and Tommy Gilhooly, who both joined our coven mere moments after filing their dissertations, have given the campaign the ol’ heave-ho across their socials, to use the parlance of their generation, with some very touching words alongside.
We are, quite literally, doing this so we can have more young, talented writers passing through the doors of 2 Archer Street, on their way toward successful careers producing excellent work for decades to come. For £25, you can help a bright writer on their way, and be in with a chance to win an absurdly decadent prize. For £250, you can times that impact by ten, and increase your odds of winning 25-fold. Never before has an act of altruism been so personally beneficial – sate your selfless and your selfish sides (for we all have both), and chip in today.
In Case You Missed It
The news coverage is moving on from the Beeb but we still have our eye on this fantastic use of licence-payer money.
A criminally underrated discussion podcast about Africa for your audio perusal – The Bad Natives Podcast.
Some truly glorious photos from Nikita Khruschev’s failed corn crusade.
Bob Katter sings an ode to one of the strangest sources of Australian pride, the Battle of Beersheba in 1917.
A phenomenal internet hoax site and the time VICE fell for it.
A fascinating interview with Don McCullin including photos of an unrecognisable Finsbury Park.
Patrick Marber remembers Tom Stoppard.
And the Daily Telegraph obituarises David Ker, the ‘most famous non-famous person in London’.
And Finally
We’re going out on a limb here. Usually, we like to play it safe at the end of a newsletter. A funny mishap in public; an interesting documentary; a warm, cozy nature watch. Well, this week we have some deliberately written comedy. Which, barring the occasional SNL sketch, is one that makes us a little nervy. Because how much really good new comedy is going on these days? Google’s desperate attempts to label shows like The Bear, Kaos and Beef as part of the genre suggest the current state of play.
Our offering this week is the strange Instagram brainchild of Hudson Hughes and Aidan Pittman, who have been weaving a hilarious and surreal narrative about two battling neighbours in suburbia. It’s really sharply written and exists in that wonderful uncanny valley between the absurd and mundane, best perfected perhaps by Chris Morris in his phenomenal somnolent radio show, Blue Jam. This stuff is good and certainly has a whiff of Morris about it.
So, we hope you enjoy Jonathan confronting Nigel about his fox-feeding, or this installment where Jonathan returns home from a tough day working for Curry’s (all the computers’ spacebars were broken) only to find that Nigel has broken into his house to make jam. If you want the full lore, you can begin from the first installment, and await future developments with baited breath.
We’ve pulled the steam whistle – everyone gather your lunchboxes and saunter on home, your work here (reading an enjoyable newsletter) is done. Today is your very last day to get any changes of address sorted before the mailout list is, well, mailed out, so send your new locale to support@the-fence.com. If you want to give us advice, praise or an earful that we may or may not deserve, editorial@the-fence.com is the one for you. The smallest known flowering plant, Wolffia globosa, is so tiny that a dozen of them can fit on the head of a match. Until next week.
All the best,
TF