Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, an affable newsletter if we don’t mind saying ourselves. There are now 20,000 of you reading this mail-out, which is 8,000 more than there were at the start of the year. It’s pretty good going!
We have just sent Issue 21 to design, and it really is looking like the best one yet, and we will be telling you all about it in due course.
We are going to put up the price of a digital subscription by a fiver very soon, so this is the last chance saloon to bag yourself a deal and score 20 percent off a sub by entering the promo code ‘5YOFENCE’ at the checkout. The deal applies to print, digital – or both. Get at it through the image below or that endearingly shiny red button.
Issue 20 has been tripping the light fantastic: in Victoria Park, in the city of Detroit and, from what we can make out, in someone’s bedroom.
The competition for the fizziest photo of the issue is still running. Tag us in a snap or send one in via editorial@the-fence.com and you could win a bottle of Bollinger champagne.
Let’s get cracking. This week we have got an interview with Dame Rebecca West, but first a word about Tommy Fury.
Lightning Can Strike Twice
It was headline news for tens of millions of Britons: Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury have broken off their engagement. For the rest of you, we can imagine this unlikely push notification would have barely registered, but we are in possession of a scoop on the uncoupling.
As has been widely reported, Fury’s upcoming autobiography, to be released on 10 October, features ‘gushing chapters’ about domestic bliss with Molly-Mae and their daughter, Bambi, in their £3 million Cheshire home.
The publishers, Sphere, an imprint at Hachette, are in ‘crisis talks’ and have already slashed the cover price by half. How much do they stand to lose?
Speaking to multiple sources in the publishing industry, we are told that Tommy Fury received an advance of around £500,000 for the book. Which is a lot.
Dante’s Infernos
Nobody wants to live in Clapham. Nobody wants to work in Canary Wharf. And yet, some do. Some even do both. And that, we think, is very interesting. So, we sent our intrepid editorial assistant, Lotte Brundle, on a some-expenses-paid trip to SW11 and E14, in pursuit of those unlucky souls doomed to do the Deadly Double each and every day. It’s yet another hilarious and wry-eyed escapade, hot on the heels of her previous dispatch to Islington on the hunt for Paul Mescal, and you can read it right here.
Bird Of Paradise
A member of staff was deeply shaken at the weekend. While eating at The Parakeet in Kentish Town, their waiter suggested one particular dessert as ‘recommended by Eating With Tod’ – the revolting gannet whose chomping maw you might’ve seen, or tried to avoid, on TikTok and Instagram recently. Which prompted us to think, once again: who makes the tastemakers?
One such tastemaker who we hold in far higher esteem is the restaurant critic, Andy Hayler. Hayler marks restaurants out of twenty, studiously assessing them on a course-by-course basis; full marks are given out on the rarest of occasions. His favourite restaurant in Britain, The Ritz, only gets eighteen, but his favourite restaurant on the planet, Les Prés d'Eugénie in southwest France, received twenty out of twenty on six different visits between 1998 and 2019.
Which brings us to some sad news. Michel Guérard, head chef of Les Prés d'Eugénie, passed away yesterday at the age of 91, after holding three Michelin stars at the restaurant for 46 years. We asked Hayler to write us an obituary of Michel Guérard, which we print below:
‘Michel Guérard’s influence on the culinary world is hard to overstate. He opened his own restaurant, La Pot au Feu, in 1965 in Paris, and gained two Michelin stars for it by 1971. It was around that time that he met his wife Christine and they moved together to Eugénie-les-Bains in 1974. He was the first chef to appear on the cover of Time magazine on February 9th 1976, showcasing his “Cuisine Minceur”, a lower-calorie style of nouvelle cuisine which he pioneered.
I first visited the property in 1998 and was dazzled by the quality yet simplicity of the cooking there. I ate there many more times over half a dozen visits, staying in the property for a few days each time and alternating meals at both the main restaurant and the more casual La Ferme aux Grives. This, in its own rustic way, was just as impressive as the main restaurant, with its roaring fire, chickens and suckling pigs on the spit, and its central wooden table groaning with local produce.
His cooking never put more elements on a plate than needed to be there, and the ingredient quality and technical skill were remarkable. Any dish involving puff pastry there was a must to order, showing off his sublime pastry skills.
Even in his later years Mr Guérard was very much involved in the property. I recall staying there once and was surprised to get a knock on my hotel door room in the mid-morning, to be greeted by Mr Guérard himself. He explained that he was always present at service, but that night he could not be, as he needed to travel to Paris to receive an award from the French President. He spent the morning going around each hotel room of the property to make a similar apology.
Michel Guérard was truly one of the great chefs, a genuine legend who will be greatly missed. May he rest in peace.’
We Love This Magazine, Too
Backstory is a new magazine published by the independent bookshop of the same name. It takes an irreverent look at books, authors and the publishing world, it's loaded with punchy and colourful features.
In the latest issue, Yael van der Wouden – one of the debut authors on this year’s Booker longlist – tackles the thorny issue of how to write good sex, and New Yorker journalist Ed Caesar writes about his improbable part-time gig as a DJ.
There’s insight, gossip, gags and a tonne of great book recommendations. It’s only on its second issue, but Backstory already has plenty of fans, including David Nicholls who says ‘I love this magazine!’
You can get 10% off a subscription with the code ‘FENCE’. The editor, Tom Rowley, writes an excellent weekly newsletter about what it’s like to run a bookshop, too.
Insert Some Sort Of School Pun
Last Thursday – a Thursday just like any other for us fully-grown adults – was once more the day of reckoning for our nation’s sixth-formers, as A-level results were released across the land. Topping the national charts yet again, with 150 students receiving straight A*s in their chosen subjects, was Brampton Manor Academy in Newham, a school once heralded by Boris Johnson as ‘proof of what I mean by unleashing potential’.
As Francis Martin writes, however, that unleashing of potential comes at a considerable cost to both staff and students, with a host of former employees coming out against the ‘culture of fear’ maintained within the school. This spectacular feature, our first large-scale investigation back in Issue 10, holds as much relevance now as it did then, with the school still facing a lack of scrutiny in the face of its undeniably impressive academic performance. You can read the feature here.
Chants Would Be A Fine Thing
With the return of the Premier League, it is time to ask the question: why do football fans love singing Sweet Caroline? Musicologist Chris Milton supplies you with the answer. On a more ludic front, Ella Benson Easton, an itinerant Scouser, has had a number of memorable encounters with fellow Reds abroad where the only language they have in common is a blissed-out love for Mohamed Salah. We are always keen for more sports-adjacent material, so if you’ve got a decent pitch, please do send it through to editorial@the-fence.com
The Cinnamon Buns Are Truly Fantastic
Last week, we asked readers if any of them remember the ‘Burger Off’ movement, in which the booky denizens of Hampstead ran a 12-year campaign to prevent the shades of NW3 to be thus polluted by an outpost of McDonald’s (they failed).
So there’s something rather telling that a chain that opened its first bakery in Hampstead itself – Gail’s – is encountering organised local resistance in Walthamstow, where the community pride themselves on their chain-free high street and independence of spirit. Gail’s has some, shall we say, ‘politically active’ backers and has mushroomed all around the south-east of the country.
But the main problem with the chain is that it is just very, very good. A class of its own on the pastry, sandwich and coffee front. Top-notch stuff. Game-changing. If you work from home and live nearer than 300 metres to a Gail’s it is very hard to spend less than £40 a week there, which is more than a year’s subscription to this very publication.
The Price Of Bread
…Considerably more, actually, since a digital subscription to The Fence can currently be secured at just £15.99, which is less than a pack of cigarettes in central London. We are going to raise the price in the next couple of days so move rapido with the code 5YOFENCE to score yourself a nourishing little deal. We do of course recommend the print package – or the print and digital – for the full TF effect.
In Case You Missed It
Kate McCusker asks how Ireland became a literary powerhouse.
Sam Fowles on the mainstream media’s role in enabling far right ideology.
The winners have been announced for the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Competition of terrible opening lines.
Conor Gogarty tells the curious tale of a Cardiff Street embroiled in a massive tax scam.
This week marks 35 years since the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem, Pump Up The Jam. (More info here.)
And Finally
If this newsletter is anything, it’s a delivery system for a certain type of video clip, pulled from the murky archives for you to enjoy at your leisure. And while the rate in which we dredge them might lead you to believe that we spend all our free time watching obscure YouTube channels and rummaging through the back-end of the iPlayer (we don’t – sometimes we go out), we’re delighted to bring you yet another gem this week.
Settle into this spectacular 1976 interview with Dame Rebecca West, one of the most gifted British writers of the 20th century, running the rule over her time at the heart of the London literary scene a century ago.
Infamously, West – at the tender age of 20 – wrote a column so acerbic about H.G. Wells that the author, 26 years her senior, became captivated by her; the pair began a tumultuous, decade-long relationship soon after, which West blithely recasts as ‘a friendship’ in conversation here with Ludovic Kennedy.
Marvel as West weighs up the relative talents of Wells and George Bernard Shaw, then wince as she starts discussing ‘women’s lib’ and why the modern wave of writers, the ‘76 vintage, could never survive in the scene she came up in.
Problematic flings, frivolous gossip, and a strong distrust of the next generation. Plus ça change!
That was the newsletter, this is the ending, and keen readers will know what comes next. If you have any queries about your magazine delivery or lack thereof, support@the-fence.com is the email to reach out to. If you’d like to share a story, or just say hello, send your missive to editorial@the-fence.com. And if you’re just finished reading with no further comment to make, then we’ll see you at the same time next week.
All the best,
TF