Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a weekly newsletter that is no longer brought to you by Mailchimp. The platform had become too expensive, and it does seem that a lot of the action is on here – so we’ve followed fashion and joined Substack. It’s just the same newsletter, it’s still going to be free, and we’ll still be joining you at the start of the week. We might refine the fonts and design features, but in good time. The whole archive – all 100 and more newsletters – is available to read here.
If you’ve got a Substack of your own, please do recommend us to your followers, and we will return the favour in kind. We’ve got our classique buffet of tips, links, gossip and more, but we lead today with a dispatch from Oliver Briscoe, who went on a ride with the Metropolitan Police.
Cruising Down to Rio’s
His stab vest hung loosely, unzipped. He did not think I would need one. But Jack’s* boot-caps are polished and softly creased from years on the beat.
Do I get car-sick? I reply that I don’t, before I am reminded to stand back if there is a brawl, that I am not to get involved, and not to try and stop anyone. I don’t have a stab vest.
Sami* comes up to the car, the other constable for my ride. Laptop in hand, we have forms to fill in; who is my ICE contact and, optionally, how do I define my ethnicity.
For roughly a quarter of a million people in Camden, a fully-manned shift should have around 35 to 40 officers. There are 12 PCs out tonight. The minimum force guidelines would have 28 officers. 'What’s the guidance on that? Just get on with it?' Jack looks at me, as if considering the question for the first time, 'Yeah, just get on with it.’
I take the moment to edge at what’s gone wrong. 'Recruitment and retention issues,' Jack offers. After thinking, and alluding to the real question, he trails; 'Every organisation has its issues.'
As soon as we pull out of the yard there is a call and we’re off, lurching up the Kentish Town Road. I do feel a bit car-sick. This is the Friday shift and Alanis Morissette’s You Oughta Know is on the radio.
Careering through traffic, lights flashing, siren blaring, Jack is still talking to me ‘Of course there are horror stories,’ he picks up the point and names Carrick and Couzens – so at least that’s out the way.
Figuratively, Jack says about 70% of the calls they deal with have something to do with mental health. As if to prove it, our first call is a suspected schizophrenic beating at his own door with a pole.
Another car tails us down the side street as back up. We all jump out. Sami and one of the officers handcuff the man and look for the pole. The other two go into the building. A few people come out to watch from their balconies. He might be a threat to himself or harm others, so we section him. The whole situation is under control in 15 minutes. But it takes another 15 minutes to get the local mental health unit on the line.
Because I am here we do not hang around, but the process will tie down the other car, two officers, for at least an hour. They are ‘tucked-in’. Jack stresses how quickly the whole shift, six cars tonight, can get tucked-in. An arrest alone takes more than three hours, dealing with the faff of bringing them in.
Blondie’s Atomic beats out. We are now patrolling along Nash’s terraces on our way to get a cup of chai, a favourite pit-stop for the boys. But then a call comes in and we peal off.
An Afghan family had been housed up north. Not taken with Cumbria, they had come down to London and were refusing to go back. Camden Council had put them up in a hotel the first night. Cumbria Council were offering to pay their train fare back. The hotel had called us because they did not know what to do and who was going to pay.
In the lift up we ask the hotel manager; Pashto? Dari? He could not say. We knock, the paterfamilias lets us in; the beds are unmade but the shoes are neatly lined up at the door. They are Dari speakers, we work out, so we dial for a translator, standing around the phone on speaker.
Apparently there was a djinn and the man’s children lived in fear and his wife cried every night wretchedly.
Their two very small boys stare at us through the tension and wave. The constables smile gently and wave back.
Not willing to enforce eviction, Jack hands over to Sami and starts calling the councils. Cumbria had apparently been working with the local imam to ward off bad juju but tonight was a Camden problem. Camden quite sensibly refused to pay, saying it was a Cumbria problem.
After three hours, we manage to fix one more night’s stay for the Afghan family. The father then asks who would pay for food and drink. The constables stop him short. They then apologise to the hotel manager and give him a number to call in the morning.
Back on patrol Blitzkrieg Bop plays and the calls are heating up. We take a few more but those will be mostly the next shift’s problem. Cruising back to Kentish Town, I ask Jack and Sami some questions. Where is it going wrong for the Met?
Jack takes the lead. He tells me that people see the police as ‘moral robots,’ all the same. ‘When a nurse kills babies no-one says all nurses are murderers.’ And again: ‘We cannot excuse Carrick, we cannot excuse Couzens.’
Here Sami pipes up. You have no private life as an officer. Personal phones are seized and internal investigations become a trawl.
The process is slow too. One in eight disciplinary cases now take over a year to resolve and sometimes three or more.
But we have one last call: could we look in at Rio’s, the infamous spa. No matter how drunk and angry a man is, there is not much a man can do with his trousers around his ankles. We see him off eventually with a bit of a scuffle, after a lot of prideful, drunken threats. This was our first call that had come near an actual crime during this whole shift.
Back in the yard, we part with a nice firm handshake. I am off home for a hot shower and bed. They are going back to sort more paperwork.
You can follow Oliver on Twitter here.
The Golden Generation
This week, we’ve been asking our fellow Millennial journalists a question: who is the nicest Boomer hack you’ve ever worked with? Who’s the kindliest oldster on Fleet Street? Who do you think needs to have their chill vibes and general damn-good decency acknowledged?
If you’d like to make a nomination, please reply to this email. All votes cast are anonymous, and we’ll be crowning the winner in next week’s mail-out.
The Country Is Going To The Dogs
At the age of 86, the Greek playboy, Taki Theodocrapolous, is still skiing the Swiss Alps, smoking cigarettes and filing his weekly ‘High Life’ column for The Spectator. In his latest dispatch, he relays how the late American actor, Tom Sizemore, rang him up in the 1990s, as the young hunk was having an argument with Linda Evans, a woman Taki had been involved with. Now, late at night, Sizemore needed Taki’s counsel, and the shipping tycoon was happy to be of assistance.
If you think it would be interesting to know Tom Sizemore’s version of events, then you are in luck. Sizemore died earlier this year, but wrote a memoir in 2016. His time with Linda Evans is covered in some detail, specifically how their relationship overlapped with the courtship of an ‘insanely wealthy European gentleman’, who pestered Linda with phone calls non-stop. In Sizemore’s telling, the actor went to New York, where he beat this ‘annoying gentleman’ to a pulp. Any ideas who this pesky caller could be?
Beyond The Velvet Rope
It’ll probably happen later this week. You’re in central London of an evening, and you feel the promise of magic in the air. But everywhere you look, it’s rammed, the crowds spill out of the pubs, the restaurants are booked until midnight. You’re not one of these Soho House Charlies, you just want to spend some time with your friends. You just need a table, somehow.
So we’ve collated The Fence’s goldstar list of ‘somewhere to sit’ – our reliable fallback options when you feel the whole world is carousing in Soho. (Needless to say, we have left one pub off the list. You have to keep something for yourself.)
Move Over, Van And Eric
Two weeks back, nostalgic ravers reacquainted themselves with 90s pop-house favourites N-Trance, when their official page tweeted their disgust toward a certain BBC sports broadcaster the week before that.
‘Gary Lineker should resign if he has any dignity’ read a post on the Do Ya Think I’m Sexy (1998) hit-makers’ Twitter page. ‘Comparing illegal immigration to a national socialist party in Germany abbreviated to Nazi that committed mass genocide, shows his lack of education & exposes his virtue signalling. Shame on you @BBC for not dealing with this highly political individual who thinks he’s above BBC standards like… [chin stroke emoji]’.
Perhaps feeling the heat from fellow band members or their management, the account’s username changed last week to that of founding member Kevin O’Toole (while still keeping the @ntrance handle and accompanying blue checkmark). ‘Slight obvious change… this account is now me (it obviously was)’ he reported. ‘Stopped using this platform for advertising a while ago. All the band stuff is on Facebook and Instagram’. Indeed, a trip to said socials shows the sort of benign feed of crowd shots and festival line-ups you’d expect from a legacy dance crew, still plying their trade up and down the country, with little to no mention of his less than euphoric take on virtue signalling.
With other 90s favourites like Right Said Fred headlining anti-globalist events and DJ Danny Rampling dispensing sovereign citizen word salad to anyone who’ll listen, we wonder if there was something funny in all those gurners way back when. Or whether the dance-act-to-Spiked-contributor pathway has been examined as thoroughly as those journeys which begin at yoga teacher, sex-addled MTV presenter, or chair of Exeter Young Conservatives.
We may never know, since @ntrance deleted the account a few days ago, presumably to liberate themselves from the dual mantle of gigging and, um, discoursing with which they found themselves encumbered. The truth, perhaps, really shall Set You Free (1993 Radio Edit).
In Case You Missed It
Sally Rooney lands an excellent and excoriating rebuke of the Irish government’s handling of the current housing crisis.
In a deft and nuanced piece, Simon Hattenstone speaks to Ben Leyland, whose mother committed suicide after being exposed as a particularly vehement internet troll.
Miles Klee raises an urgent dispatch on the secret society of people who piss in the sink.
Peter Baker got the weekend’s biggest scoop with the astounding tale of the Reagan campaign’s successful plot to scupper the Iran hostage crisis and hobble Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
And Finally
A couple of weeks back, we ended Off The Fence 107, with Clive James’ magisterial Postcard from London, in which the Antipodean Aristotle took in the sights of early 90s London, and mostly mourned the state of its shabby offerings by comparison to the heyday he first met on his arrival to the metropolis in the mid-sixties. (It’s excellent, and worth watching on your nearest iPlayer for contributions from Victoria Wood, Peter Cook and a scene-stealing turn by Michael Caine). We noted the strangely palindromic quality of watching a programme on the vibrant, characterful London of thirty years ago, nevertheless bemoaning its lack of said qualities when compared to the London of thirty years earlier.
In any case, the whole wonderful object had us wondering aloud if all trips through London ever committed to film, must necessarily lament the city’s degradation when compared to an arbitrarily established hinterland. Friend of the magazine, Quinton Drawbridge, promptly sent us some decent proof for that very assertion, in the form of 1969’s The London Nobody Knows.
Narrated by James Mason, The London Nobody Knows performs a similar purpose as James’ show, but at its next logical remove; filmed in the exact London lionised by Postcard From London, it still finds cause to bemoan the decline of the city’s character, most especially in regard to the great music hall theatres of several decades earlier still. Presented by a rakishly dapper Mason – at 58, he still twinkles, though superannuating James’ grumpy old man turn from 1991, by five years – the film begins in the ruins of the Bedford Theatre in Camden Town. Mason – speaking, as ever, like a pewter bowl of plums that’s grown lips - then walks through throngs of street-sellers, public lavatories and crumbling railways, showing a markedly less swinging London than that captured in James’ film of memory. Speaking to the poor and indigent at a Salvation Army hostel, he strikes a humane and empathetic tone, alarmed at the prices charged for food and board, and allowing his interviewees dignity in reportage.
But, it must be said, his vision of the present age is not a wholly, or even largely, negative one. He seems charmed, not just by the vestiges of Old London which remain in barrels of eels and bombed out music halls, but by increasing prosperity, characterful locals, and the ‘seedy flats coming up in the world’.
‘All these bits and pieces meant something once upon a time,’ he says of some scrap metal by a rail side. ‘They are’ he concludes, ‘what you might call the crumbling images of the past, but we would be foolish to mourn them too readily’.
All of which leads us to humbly ask: if someone can send us a 1930s newsreel that performs the same trick again, we’d be greatly obliged.
That’s it for this week, we look forward to joining you next time out with our first award ceremony: The Boomies: our countdown of the nicest 55plus hacks in the game. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be a slushfest, we’ve also collated some hysterically funny stories of Boomer technology mishaps and general malfeasance.
If you’d like to write to us, then either reply to this email or send us one at editorial@the-fence.com
All the best,
TF