Dear Readers,
Welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that discovered Atlantis four years ago but chose not to tell anyone. Even as the weather turns cold and wet again, things over here do not slow down, Issue 28 begins its inch-by-inch march to your doormats and already there are whispers and murmurings of a new beast on the horizon known only by its shadow and the name ‘29’.
Dear old 27 is still making its global tour at the moment and this week was spotted riding the Amtrak and surveying a truly picturesque, genuinely babbling brook. And will you gaze upon this immense haul of magazines that one reader has treated themselves to?
We have printed off another ten tokens with the code LRB25. This will give you 25 per cent off all subscriptions, print, digital, gift, whatever. So you can get four magazines of the highest quality that will entertain and delight you for the year, all for the price of a pack of Malboro Lights from a central London convenience store. So do sign up quickly.
Some very exciting news to relay. William Boyd – truly one of our nation’s greatest writers – will be in the fiction slot for the upcoming issue. With regards to this publication, he has this to say: ‘A coolly beguiling and bracing magazine. Clear-eyed, droll and shrewd. Just what we need in these complicated times we live in.’
If that doesn’t encourage you to sign up then we don’t know what will.
This week we’ve got a funk legend in full Celtic armour, but first it is time to report back on this week’s callout. That’s right, we have the cheapest bottles of wine available in the country.
Calling All Plonkers
It has been a truly fascinating week seeing all of your nominations for the cheapest bottle of plonk around our great nation. We set the bar at what we thought a reasonable, but likely clearable £20 from the Chelsea Arts Club, but we were deeply impressed with some of the efforts from you dear readers that limboed beautifully under that marker.
We did, helpfully, get some suggestions to check out this underground proprietor known as Wetherspoons but this felt a little obvious and little like cheating if we’re honest. We also got several recommendations to buy wine in supermarkets which is distinctly not the point, and some who resented the ‘London-centric’ nature of our search for the cheapest house wine in ‘the capital and the country’. As anyone who has existed in and outside the capital will remember, however, there tends to be quite a sharp price difference when you get well inside the M25.
With all that said, here is the list of wonderfully cheap plonk and with it some great ideas for your next evening meal out. We begin in Uxbridge, with a nicely placed £17.95 bottle from a French bistro called Martin’s Place, this one notable for its deliciously antiquated interiors and a per glass price of just £4.95.
By bottle, however, it is beaten in price and possibly quality by Mark Blacklock’s recommendation of Coarse, an eatery in Durham, that offers not just a wine, but a wine pairing for a mere £17.50. We can certainly beat that for price, but per ratio, this may be the critics’ choice.
The last to round out the list before the sub £15 club is Fukuoka, a Japanese number with a bottle for £16.99, Queen of Sheba in Kentish Town for dead on £15 and matching that – and setting up a theme to come – is Pinto’s Portugal in SW8.
And indeed if you want really cheap wine, the cheapest in London at least, look for the laminated menus and look to Portugal. We crown our joint winners of cheap London plonk as Pinto’s Portugal and Three Lions Portuguese both coming in at £14 though we must note that the Three Lions offers £14 for a ‘jarro’ whose undisclosed mililitreage may make it a false pretender or a rightful queen in pure drop-per-penny terms.
But the capital is fundamentally unable to compete outside of itself on this front. We feel it highly likely that many sub-14 house wines decorate many corners of this isle that haven’t been turned up in a mere week’s search. But we do have definitive proof of one which is TF’s official cheapest house wine in the country, at least for now. We’re in Nottingham, it’s the Bonington and it is just £12.50. Unreal.
Enjoy the Silence
Now we have a message from our dear friends at The Quietus
Compared to The Fence, The Quietus is a veteran of independent publishing, with our mission to keep Black Sky Thinking about music and culture now enduring since 2008. ‘Enduring’ is the word for it too – it increasingly feels as if all of us are comrades fighting some deranged rear-guard action against AI slop, tech platforms, and all sorts of pivots to formats that are simply never as good as the reading of words. We’re convinced that the fragmentation of culture, and the power of the algorithms, make the role of the critic more important than ever. We’re very aware that most people don’t have the time to go searching for music, new and old, like we do – our job is to do the work for you. So this includes a recent essay on Stanley Okorie, the Nigerian singer whose sweet voice soundtracked the Nollywood film industry; our antidote to the algorithm newsletter Organic Intelligence, guiding our readers to, for example, the US west coast underground of the early 00s, or Radical Traditional, our column on the best of the innovative, politicised contemporary folk scene. For more senior readers, we’ve also pointed out why Tom from The Good Life was actually a massive prick. Like The Fence, we’re 90% funded by our subscribers, and are currently running a sale with 35% off our top subscriber tier, in which members get monthly bonus essays, podcasts, newsletters and playlists to run alongside our editorial. You can find out more and sign up here.
Hold the Onions
To celebrate the recent launch of Eric Schlosser’s landmark title Fast Food Nation as a Penguin Classic, we invited him for a burger at Dover Street Counter in Mayfair, which critics regard as serving the best burger in little old London town. And Schlosser – a man of immense charm – found it to be absolutely delicious. His book is truly one of the greatest non-fiction titles in recent history, and we talked at great length about the project that has taken him decades to report, the ‘prison-industrial complex’ (a term Schlosser coined). His latest dispatch from the facility known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is very much worth your time.
To the Victor, the Spoils
Some of you may remember our Christmas fundraiser where the top prize was a meal for two and a night’s stay at Osip, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Bruton. Last night saw chef Merlin Labron-Johnson on the podium at the National Restaurant Awards after coming second. And it was great to see our friends at Luca on the list too.
Getting Fizzy With It
There are a few slights that you can aim at our pints correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh. You might ask why a man who purports to despise Arsenal FC makes his home off the Holloway Road, for one. But you cannot question his devotion to the futurity of the pub. A rather grating article has done exactly this, suggesting that Jimmy’s love of the boozer is rooted in nostalgia for a ‘fading way of life’.
Jimmy’s coverage has led to a turnaround in fortunes for some of the boozers he’s featured on his channels, like the King’s Head in Finsbury Park or Quinn’s in Camden. Moreover, wet-led or at least drinks-focused pubs – the type that Jimmy champions – are opening all around the capital, like Moylett’s in Clapton or the Hand & Marigold in Bermondsey or the relaunched Mother Red Cap in Archway. We could go on.
Writing about pubs is not a new thing (ask Geoffrey Chaucer, among others) but our own coverage of the humble boozer, led by Jimmy, has seen national publications realise that the British public wants to read about their most beloved institution. This weekend sees our next pub jaunt, in which we travel to the constituency of a widely despised politician to see if they’ll join us for a few jars…
NTS Scot-Funk Warrior
We greatly enjoyed NTS’ latest musical round-up of one of funk’s strangest characters, Jesse Rae, AKA The Scots Funk Warrior. Rae was a St Boswells boy who caught the funk bug and moved to the States in the ‘70s. After some time working as a gigging musician he literally bumped into Parliament Funkadelic and Bernie Worrell – two funk legends – in a hotel lift. Worrell and Rae hit it off in particular and became close friends, and so the Scottish king of funk had his big connection in the industry. He soon began releasing his own singles and, along with them, self-directed music videos of the highest quality. We give you one featuring Worrell here and if you really like it, NTS’ whole show on the man can be listened to here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GLraKSzmdE
Good Innings
The daughter of Lord Mountbatten, Lady Pamela Hicks, died this week at the age of 97. She was interesting for several reasons, and only one of them is that she apparently earnestly wrote a memoir titled India Remembered: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power. It covers the period she spent in the country when her father was made the last viceroy of India in 1946, dispatched to engineer and shape the independence movement that was emerging in the region. We haven’t read it – unclear if she gets into the nitty gritty of that transfer of power and what it entailed. Still, she was the last of her kind, and her undeniable sheen made us think of Andrew Hunter Murray’s imaginative faculties summoning the glamour of the real and fictional barons of London in Issue 18. ‘Barons: we imagine them as rural land magnates, shagging the wives of their miserable villein tenantry or bullying King John into signing Magna Carta. Newsflash, House of Lords-heads. There are modern, urban barons too.’
In Case You Missed It
Sean Dyche wishes his daughter a happy birthday.
Brazil baptised their plane to the World Cup.
There’s only one comic book hero this world needs, and it’s Fr. Fresh.
In the most political NBA finals yet, Mamdani extended a DJ’s set because the Knicks won and Donald Trump was ill received at Madison Square Garden.
What people did before Instagram saves.
TF legend Séamas O’Reilly’s infamous encounter with Mary McAleese has been made into an animated short film.
How can you not be entranced by Saverio, the feline mayor of a Tuscan village?
The Norwegian football team’s intensely homoerotic photoshoot has us puzzled.
Jeremy Corbyn celebrating his birthday at an Eritrean restaurant on Holloway Road.
And Finally
The former de facto First Lady of New York Sandra Lee made her name as a TV chef and personality through the principle that recipes need only be ‘semi-homemade’. Or, to put it another way: Lee got famous by devising colour-coordinated dishes that could be arranged from pre-made parts. However, even for the high priestess of a cut and paste job, there are limits to what you can do with only store-bought foodstuffs, and so much of Lee’s oeuvre consisted – perhaps also because of her ten-year marriage to Andrew Cuomo – of vodka-based cocktails.
There are some wonderful examples of her clutching bottles beneath an ironed and blonde face on YouTube, but her forays into multi-coloured martinis are best of the lot. She mixes her blutini while wearing a cobalt matching set, complete with headband, staring at the camera with a smiling and total confidence that ‘cocktail time is the best time of day.’ Her kitchen is something that could only be described as a symptom of something terribly wrong, and it is where Lee announces that the drink ‘will be perfect for my tablescape. Just wait till you see the patio!’ It is, like said kitchen and her glasses and her napkins and her eyeshadow – blue.
But don’t let this put you off. The blutini could be good. Try it for yourself: one part vodka, two parts vanilla vodka and a splash of orange liqueur. ‘They dye it blue,’ remarks Lee, looking at the bottle of liqueur a little sadly. ‘I do not know why.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfVs0CbDs-M
That’s that – do send all technical emails to support@the-fence.com and all over bits to editorial@the-fence.com. Snap up one of those cut-price subscriptions while you can and we look forward to joining you next Tuesday. The Caesar salad was invented in Mexico.
All the best,
TF