Dear Readers,
Hello once again – how are you? We never ask. Off The Fence, a newsletter from The Fence, back with your good selves on this frigid February afternoon. And we are back, as ever, with heat.
The Great Bolly Raffle rolls on across the continents, our fiercest-fought competition ever. Some of you really want some free champagne. Issue 22 was spotted peering into Wong Kei, revelling in rubbish and dominating the competition in the LSE sociology department. International snap of the week goes to one anonymous reader waving the flag over Bandra in Mumbai, in one of those shots where you can practically hear the deafening car horns below. By our count, this last issue has now crossed every sea and touched every landmass that isn’t coated in permafrost, which is pretty good going from our horrid little hovel in Soho. The competition is still wide-open, if our subscribers on either pole are reading – and we know that you are.
We’ve also got a sale on, and a generous one at that. If you sign up today for the print & digital sub, we will sweeten the pot something proper with a bonus tote, stuffed with Issues 18, 19, 21 and 22. Eight mags and a bag, plus a year’s untrammeled access to the digital archive. You will not find a better deal in print, of that we can solemnly swear. Click on the image below or the link to bag it. Bag it!
To business. Yuuuge week this week, with clips and snips on big houses, dead legends and the heart of the Chinese state. But first, let’s talk about an old friend of this newsletter.
Where Have you Gone, Calvin Robinson?
The arrival of the Trump presidency has been a veritable bonanza for the weird, wired and fash-adjacent world of the terminally online right. Cabinet positions, advisory jobs and commentariat positions have been doled out like prizes in a meat raffle as the world discovers these people aren’t going away any time soon. Well, almost all of them aren’t. If he weren’t one of the least appealing people to have come out of the United Kingdom for some time, you would almost feel sorry for the Reverend Calvin Robinson. Or to give him his correct title, Calvin Robinson. His pathetic attempts to get noticed during his one shot on stage with the Donald were gut-turningly embarrassing, involving him trying to dance to YMCA while in clericals. This hadn’t stopped him speaking out as a self appointed figure of the right, all the while giving off a sort of ‘Lord Haw Haw if he’d played too much Settlers of Catan’ vibe.
The mask for Robinson’s self publicity has very often been his religion. Booted from the Church of England after his training for the priesthood with a piece of glorious Anglican understatement that ‘it proved difficult to find him a curacy’, Robinson has since gone round a variety of sects peddling his wares, each time falling out with them for his behaviour online and moving on. His latest nominal berth was the ‘Anglican Catholic Church’. This was a splinter sect of the ‘Continuing Anglicanism’ movement, where socially conservative Anglicans split, split and split again during the 1970s and 80s, all the while trying to maintain their apostolic succession (i.e. links to legitimately consecrated bishops in mainline churches). Rather gloriously, the ACC’s was maintained in part by a Bishop called Harold Nutter. Sadly, however, even this group of loons found Robinson’s latest antics – a deliberately provocative invocation of a Nazi salute – a goosestep too far.
The latest statement from the church – which effectively boots him out with no ceremony – can be found here. It contains some glorious lines – including allusions to just how quickly he seems to get through denominations and a blast against his claims of a ‘woke conspiracy’. Most of all, however, it provides a telling insight into what sort of person – and priest – Calvin Robinson really is.
Vroom Vroom
Some of our writers go on to write longreads, some publish books, and we’re all very happy for them, but Bertie Brandes – a regular contributor since Issue 6 – is the screenwriter for the debut Charli XCX cinematic project, which is titled The Moment, and that really is very cool indeed. Bertie wrote a brilliant piece for us called ‘Confessions of a London Femcel’, which we commend to you entirely. We’re all absolutely delighted for her.
The Gypsy Fairy Queen
May she rise in glory! Like many, we were very sad to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull, truly one of the greatest to ever do it, one of the most Romantic (with a capital R) lives of the 20th century; a woman who packed in an extraordinary amount in 78 years. Her talents as a singer and an actress are well-known, but we really must commend to you her memoir, Faithless, a wonderfully honest book that is too little known.
Julian Lloyd, a longstanding subscriber to this magazine, was a lifelong friend of Marianne’s and took this beautiful photo of two great chanteuses at a birthday party in County Kildare. He has very kindly allowed us to share it here, and we do recommend that you look at his Instagram account for more astonishing examples of his work.
Rightmove Fantasia
Apparently, Fleet Street’s finest are offering £10,000 for anyone who can proffer the identity of the buyer of The Holme, a villa in Regent’s Park. It has just sold for £139 million, but that came after a £111 million price cut.
Is it a rough time for the super prime property market? Not according to Trevor Abrahmsohn, the legendary property agent who’s operated at the apex of the market for almost 50 years. ‘It’s absolutely uncontroversial that London is the greatest city in the world,’ he tells us over the phone. ‘Monte Carlo is like living in a lift’.
For those members of the global 0.1 percent who have ‘grown up weaned on English culture’, there is nothing like buying a piece of English heritage to make your own. London is a hub between the East and the West, and the centre of the world, GMT-wise. In Abrahmsohn’s telling, turbo-wealthy families living in New York or Los Angeles are likelier to splinter as the children grow up and try to make their mark elsewhere, so for that reason, ‘the mothers love London, the dads like London and of course the kids love London.’
But are there many other properties that could command such a lofty price as The Holme? In short, yes. There is Witanhurst in Highgate, the subject of a classic Ed Caesar investigation; St John’s Lodge in Regent’s Park, Dudley House in Park Lane, but at the very top of the market, there is Bridgewater House, a hulking palazzo squatting over Green Park. Bought for £19 million in 1981 by shipping tycoon, Yiannis Latsis, it would, we are told, likely cost £500 million to buy today.
You can walk past it – and its rather poky garden – very easily, and the alleyways around it throng with art dealers and idle London Library members making phone calls. If we won the EuroMillions, you would find the new TF HQ at The Elms, a long red-brick house deep in Hampstead Heath itself, a house so secretive that there are no photos of it online. Well, the Euromillions wouldn’t be enough. But a magazine can only dream…
Off the Web, On the Walls
A final five ‘Soho Map of Vogues’ have been dug up from the archive, and now there are only six left, and after that, they will be sold out forevermore, like the ‘Soho Map of Cokes’. Drawn by the legendary Paul Cox of Vanity Fair fame, they are signed by the artist and in A2 form, and are only £40 plus shipping, which really is an excellent deal if you google how much a Paul Cox work goes for at the Chris Beetles Gallery. Buy yours by clicking on the map below or on the link.
Don’t Say F*ck Or Bugger
The early 2000s were a boom time for gas-leak reality television, with learner drivers catapulted to national celebrity and Scouse hoteliers rendered household names. But nothing came close to the discourse cocaine that rewrote the rules for all that came after, Big Brother.
Gary Grimes was an early obsessive, and he writes tenderly about his time spent navigating a BB forum for us in our latest issue. That piece, 'Day 1,509 in the Big Brother House'is now online and ready to read. From trying to cop an interview with a departing housemate aged just 11, to the joy and stress of attempting to maintain the endless competing fictions of his assumed identity within the board’s milieu. Bliss was it in 2004 to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.
Après-Swiss
We try not to rise to every story about a beloved London pub facing closure, sale or whatever fate might befall it in the name of insurance reclamation. But with the sudden demise of Ye Olde Swiss Cottage – comfortably one of the capital’s strangest corners – we’ve moved to eulogise.
See, a few years back, the meat snack company Serious Pig offered our editorial team a giant box of pub charcuterie on the proviso that we inhaled it in one sitting in a pub of our choosing. The pub we chose was Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, and though we were the only people there (a fact perhaps related to their shuttering) we drank and ate like kings unfearful of a salami-and-lager lunch. With the old chalet closing, London now only has, to our knowledge, two pubs that gave their name to the place around it: the Brockley Jack, which gave its name to Brockley, and the Fitzroy Tavern, which predates, and claims to lend its appellation, to Fitzrovia.
Lighters in the air for Ye Olde Swiss Cottage, and a reminder to all: we love free stuff, meat or no meat, and will consume anything you ask us to, provided you let us choose the location. Commercial opportunities to editorial@the-fence.com, please and thank you.
Pauline Quirks
It’s always a point of pride in the office when a name from our early days re-emerges in the headlines. So we were as delighted as anyone, close family included, to see Senator Josh Hawley snag some column inches this week, proposing a bill that would make downloading DeepSeek – presently the world’s most downloaded app – punishable with 20 years in prison.
Before he was leading this charge, and prior to this, heading the senate efforts to overturn the 2020 election, Hawley was living it up as a firebrand politics tutor at the prestigious St Paul’s School in Barnes, munching popcorn as US troops marched into Iraq. Learn more about the protean senator in Henry Dyer’s excellent feature, written in collaboration with the Guardian in Issue 7, and available to read online here.
Abbey Read
It is no secret that we at The Fence are unequivocally pro-magazine. We love magazines generally but what we love most is finding magazines where we least expect to do so. Consequently we think it is exceptionally cool that none other than Westminster Abbey has its own magazine. Even cooler is that it’s free to read online here with full access via the Abbey mailing list.
We genuinely don’t know of anywhere else where you’ll find an interview with Alan Bennett jostling for page space alongside bodies, bones, and the Brontë sisters. You might even spot some Fence-friendly names in the contributors list. As befits one of London’s most iconic buildings, it looks great too. So, more historic sites with their own mag, please!
In Case You Missed It
Grab a damp cloth, Dazed’s Emma Garland says we’re all horny again.
Dr Mark Pack on how the Times and Channel 4 misread the ‘Gen Z hate democracy’ polling.
John Saward on Gene Hackman and pie.
Ed Zitron explains the seismic impact of the China-US AI war, in terms even the greatest Luddite can parse.
What you need to know about the fungal zombie spiders discovered in a Northern Irish gunpowder store.
A meaty revisit of a modern classic: James Robins on Michael Clayton, a film you should watch again in 2025.
And Finally
Last week, as a faithful reader, you arrived here expecting some more black-and-white bollocks from the BFI Archive, and we gave you an episode of Dispatches about meth dealing in Norfolk. Surely we’ll get back on track this week, right? WRONG.
This week we’ve been bothering the YouTube page of the China Global Television Network (CGTN), the English-language arm of the Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. And with the dawn of the Year of the Snake last Wednesday, the state broadcaster went all out in securing a staggering array of Cameo-style video messages from the world’s most powerful people, all for maybe a couple hundred views at a time. Where else can you watch the dictator of Azerbaijan, the CEO of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the head of the World Economic Forum giving cheery well-wishes like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IojmmBx7Oy8
The star-power does fall down a bit after these five clips, no offence to the premiers of Kiribati and the Solomon Islands, or to EDM DJ Alan Walker, the Norwegian behind 2015 electro house hit ‘Faded’ (yep that one, the exact song you’re thinking of right now – 3.7 billion views).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60ItHLz5WEA
But CGTN have nabbed far better names in the past, and perhaps their interview pool is more revealing of shifting geopolitical tectonics than first anticipated. Back in 2018, the state broadcaster could still rely on video messages from Macron, Merkel, Putin and even dear old Theresa May, captured here wearing a neckchain not dissimilar to Toby the sleeping meth dealer in last week’s newsletter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RQyoJAyZ4I
We must wait until 2026 to see which despots, functionaries and Davos-scented heads-in-jars make the cut for the Year of the Horse. Judging by the view count of this year’s video – 481, or rough one view per three million Chinese citizens – we feel confident in saying that you’ll hear it from us first.
Oof – there we go. Newsletter done. Nice. Anyway, if you liked this, let us know below, and if you need anything from us (or want to give anything to us), editorial@the-fence.com is always your point of contact. Until next week. Plenty more then. Plenty more.
All the best,
TF