Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again and welcome back to Off The Fence, the relentless Tuesletter that brings you the goods each and every week between issues of our gorgeous quarterly magazine.
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On we go, into the meat of the matter. This week, we have a Purple Aki remontada, a tribute to the dearly-departed Dumbledore, and a magisterial music doc from the Emerald Isle. But first, we have a real treat for you: a special dispatch from the redoubtable Paddy Galbraith at the XL Bully march in Birmingham, and the very frontiers of hell-hound ownership.
Bad Dogs and Englishmen
I was meant to be at a Tennessee Williams play across town but I’d spent the afternoon drinking beer with Britain’s biggest distributor of Italian shotguns and there was no way I was going to make it. Instead, I caught the bus home and for the first time in my life, I watched the Farrelly Brothers’ 1998 film, There’s Something About Mary. Quite drunk, I decided for no particular reason to let my young spaniel come upstairs and watch it with me. She sat there, completely transfixed, her little head bobbing and weaving, seemingly trying to work out if she’d seen Cameron Diaz kicking around Camberwell anywhere before.
It was, I realised the following morning while driving to Birmingham for a gathering of XL Bullies, the most indulgent evening of Jessie’s eight month existence. Her life is an ascetic one. She trains twice a day: heel work, recall, and basic retrieves. I suspect a lot of people in the park think I’m a freak. ‘Gave up on that ages ago’, a toady-looking owner of a cockapoo said to me recently, when he saw me teaching Jessie not to pull on the lead. ‘I mean, it’s basically impossible, right?’
For months now, the nation has been feverishly hung up on the spectre of the XL Bully and its supposed taste for blood. In late August, things became so spirited that the Daily Star ran a piece on what to do if one attacks you. Apparently, if gouging out its eyes doesn’t work, you should finger its arsehole. On the face of it, the numbers speak for themselves; six out of ten fatal dog attacks in Britain last year were linked to Bullies and the tabloids have recently been doing a tidy trade in videos of them mauling people across the country. It was only ever going to be a matter of time: on the 15th September, Rishi Sunak addressed the nation. Bullies, he announced, will face the same end as single-use vapes and laughing gas, banned by a government that cares.
The traffic through Birmingham was hardly moving and even if the motorway was clear, I would only make the last half hour of the meet. The event had been planned for weeks but the details kept changing. Initially, Jake Harris, the 21-year-old organiser had put out a post on Instagram requesting that as many owners as possible bring every Bully and every child they could find, in order to show the world just how gentle Bullies actually are. Twitter found the whole thing hilarious. ‘No way it could go wrong’, posted one young BBC journalist, prompting a slew of replies focusing on the recklessness of the event, or the social wattage of most Bully owners. ‘Last march of the chavs’, suggested one particularly popular reply. In response to the concern, and after talking to the police, Jake initially decided that the event should be dog-free and then had a further rethink and asked people only to bring puppies. It would be the march of the baby Bullies.
As I hit the motorway, I called my friend Ellena Swift. Ellena was Gundog Trainer of the Year 2022, and was this-year selected for the England gundog team. When she isn’t competing, she often works with troublesome dogs. Her forearms are a map of scars. ‘The thing is’, Ellena said to me, ‘from my point of view, most people shouldn’t actually have a dog of any breed’. Almost every week, Ellena sees cocker spaniels that are aggressive, which she attributes to them being owned by people who don’t understand that they need a lot of stimulation and she was recently attacked and injured by a golden retriever.
The whole thing, according to Ellena, is a red herring. If Rishi bans the Bully, she’s sure that those who want aggressive and intimidating dogs will simply move onto another breed. ‘It’ll be Malinoises next, or it’ll be Dutch Herders, or Caucasian Shepherds.’ The most stupid part is that, as Ellena points out, XL Bullies aren’t actually even a recognised breed. They are simply, ‘a type’. Ellena thinks that most of them are Staffy and Boxer crosses.
The location for the meet wasn’t revealed until the day before it was due to take place. The police had been at Jake’s door all week and he wanted to try and keep control of the whole thing. By the time I got there, there were only fifteen or twenty people, families mostly, and no more than ten dogs. The mood was apprehensive – ITV and Sky had already been and gone. Jake was here with Riz, a Bully that he got as a companion when he was struggling with his mental health. He hoped the news crews would be fair. A young Alsatian owner who had come along out of solidarity, chipped in to tell me that ‘these TV guys just sensationalise the whole thing.’ Three weeks prior to the Birmingham meet, a much bigger protest had taken place in London. Jake wanted to go but he didn’t have the money to get there.
A lady with two Bullies, not yet a year old, was telling me the whole thing is part of a Government cover up. ‘It’s a diversion you see. Like when they did Covid to put up the 5G masts.’ I didn’t totally follow but before I could press her, she trailed off to admire a new arrival. Jim, gold teeth and an umbrella under his arm, was striding across the grass with 16-month-old Bleu. The whole thing, Jim explained, was an accident. He had actually always been scared of dogs but his friend had a litter and he ended up falling for one of the pups. The idea, to Jim, that some people want his dog banned is unbearable. ‘Bleu’, he told me, is his ‘right hand man’. Just that morning on their way to the meet, two Jack Russells had attacked Bleu. It apparently wasn’t the first time but Jim thinks it highlights a more general issue with people having wayward dogs. ‘When he gets attacked,’ he told me, solemnly, ‘I feel it here’. Jim clenched his fist and bumped it against his chest, looking down lovingly at his boy.
As I started to leave, a crowd of little boys appeared, and Jake handed round treats for them to give to Riz. I asked one of them as he reached his small hand down to the huge dog if he thinks the breed should be banned. He looked up at me and shook his head. ‘It’s not about the dog, bro. It’s about the owner.’ Then he ran off towards the ice cream van.
I wonder if my conspiracy-theorist friend was onto something. Is this just an ill thought-out pledge by a government in its dying days? A ban undoubtedly sounds delicious to those who think the Bully is a byword for a sort of feckless skunk-smoking, out-of-work waster. But nobody ever ended up on the straight and narrow because you took their dog away and at the same time, we aren’t even acknowledging the real issue. Britain is a nation of irresponsible dog owners and irresponsible dog breeders – where’s the proposed solution to that?
Last week, Jessie (bite force of around 250) pursued my Nigerian neighbour, who does not like dogs, up the stairs of his house. ‘I’m okay’, he shouted, from behind the closed door after slamming it in her face. ‘I believe she was coming for my bread roll’. The training continues.
Paddy is a journalist, an author, and good value on Twitter. You can – and should – follow him here.
Being Purple Aki
A few weeks back, we put together a little bit of a primer on Akinwale Arobieke, the serial groper and regional punchline known to anyone with an L postcode as ‘Purple Aki’. Since that newsletter came out, one reader has reached out to let us know that a one-act play on the man, titled Being Purple Aki, has just been performed at The White Hotel in Salford.
Annoyingly, we did not get anyone down there in time to cover it for us, but we did find this fantastic review from Luke Charnley, which we wholeheartedly direct you to read ahead of the play’s next outing. What’s clear from the play and its audience is that the Purple Aki phenomenon looks likely to linger on for a good while yet in the North-West imagination.
The Great Gambon
The famed actor, Sir Michael Gambon, who was both English and Irish but not Anglo-Irish, has died at the age of 82. And the tributes have been flooding in. This morning, Daniel Craig, Michael Mann, Simon Callow, Nicholas Hytner, Tom Hollander and Penelope Wilton have given lengthy valedictions to the Guardian. It’s all very moving for some. Others of you might feel it’s all a bit ‘luvvie’. Lots of anecdotes about ‘Larry’ calling his fellow actors cunts and so on and so forth. It’s a fascinating insight into the essential strangeness of the acting craft, a profession that seems to inculcate freakery like no other. And we’ve got a knockout feature on the very subject. In Issue 17, Clive Martin asks: why are actors so weird? It’s a brilliantly funny piece, loaded with juicy anecdotes, and it will be going online soon.
Don’t Forget your Pen
For a good while now, we’ve been keen fans of Simon Akam & Rachel Lloyd’s podcast, ‘Always Take Notes’, where the duo interview some of the most brilliant minds in writing today, and ask them about their journeys, processes, and insights on the weird, Byzantine world of getting people to read your work.
Delightfully – and fittingly, considering the podcast’s veneration of the written word – Simon and Rachel are now on the cusp of releasing the Always Take Notes book, collecting sage advice from names like Irvine Welsh, Kate Mosse, Anne Enright, Patrick Radden Keefe: basically every writer we’ve grown up idolising, and some that might even be gracing our pages soon. If you’re a young buck or an old vet or anything in between, this book will serve as an invaluable repository of wisdom that you can return to over and again. Be sure to pre-order your copy, it’s great.
In Case You Missed It
Our dutiful ed, Charlie Baker takes a stroll through the Heath in his continuing London series for AirMail.
Jeb Lund approaches an event horizon of zingers in this delectable pummelling of the Ron DeSantis presidential campaign.
Megan Gray lays out the eyebrow-raising chicanery Google is pulling with its search engine.
TF’s Nice Boomer Hack of the Year, Mick Brown has a touchingly vulnerable chat with Michael Caine, on the eve of release for the film he says will be his last.
Friend of TF Clive Martin wonders, where to now for a rudderless Laurence Fox?
The Athletic’s Jack Lang profiles Tiago Rech, the Santa Cruz del Sol fan who became a meme and then club president.
And Finally
We do so hate to be sincere but sometimes a piece of contemporary filmmaking stands out enough for us to interrupt our usual diet of decades-old footage of smoking toffs, torn from the BBC Archive. Just such an occasion presents itself this week with A City Under Quiet Lights, the new short music doc by Irish documentarian and folk music archivist, Myles O’Reilly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKmWEXEP-uo
Recorded during the Quiet Lights festival in Cork City, it showcases exquisite music by a host of young talents, but is most notable for the throwaway brilliance of its direction. O’Reilly previously established himself as the maker of the best music television not on television with his series This Ain’t No Disco and A City Under Quiet Lights continues his steadfast commitment to musical and visual excellence.
It has us wondering why such an offering has not been attempted for unsung British voices. Perhaps it has, and we’re unaware – answers on a postcard if that be the case.
Though Myles is no relation to our estimable Features Editor, Séamas, we have him to thank for placing it on our office playlist, and we suggest you do the same. We predict it will enrich your day, and promise we’ll revert back to grainy footage of people smoking in Maida Vale armchairs next time out.
Bosh! Consider this Tuesletter complete. As ever – you know the drill – drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com with any questions, queries, tips, tricks, stories, yarns or tall-tales. We’re all ears. Well, not literally. Catch you next week!
All the best,
TF