Dear Readers,
Good morning. It’s Tuesday once again and we are back with another edition of Off The Fence, the rollocking weekly newsletter from the team behind The UK’s Only Magazine. Right up top, we have a competition to conclude, and the battle for the free bottle of Aldi champagne has been won. We’ve had some fantastic entries over the last few weeks, with some particularly sterling efforts arriving in our laps over the last seven days. One subscriber, Luke, took us out for a spin on an ice rink; Jo Glancy informed us that we’d negotiated a way past the Irish Sea Border as she tucked us into some blooming Belfast flowers. Lesley O’Connor propped us up on a memorial in Bath, and Hugo Gye, the i’s Politics Guy, flew us all the way out to Albania in an effort to get his hands on the fizz. But our winner this time around is Joseph Smith, who brought his copy of Issue 16 to keep him entertained through his third round of chemotherapy – it delighted us to no end that our sixty-four pages of silliness could be of some therapeutic value.
If you are still waiting for your copy, drop us a line at subscriptions@the-fence.com and we will go to war with the postman to retrieve what is rightfully yours (or send you a new one – whichever is easiest). If you’ve moved house between the last issue and the next, then go to our website, log in and update your address to avoid disappointment in the first week of October. If you’re an existing subscriber and you didn’t know you had an account set up with our website, then good news, you do – pop your email in here and fix yourself a new password.
And if you’re not yet a subscriber, well… I think you know what we’ll suggest next. A TF subscription remains the very best money you can spend in the British media space. The best writers, the best illustrations, the best stories, the best jokes, the best everything – and so cheap! Subscribe today, as we’ve got a special deal running till midnight (GMT): everyone who signs up in those hours will get Issue 14, Issue 15 and Issue 16 straight away on top of the annual subscription. That’s £45 of magazines for just £25, and those two back issues are really very good indeed.
To business, and to pleasure. Here we go.
Carrie On Gramming
There have been a couple of articles about Carrie Johnson’s decision to put her Instagram public that suggest that the subject is something of a lifestyle trifle. But flicking through her account, and something else emerges – a narrative of depth, one to worry to those novelists beavering away on the next State of the Nation novel. For a historian of the period, or a journalist looking to clamber on the soapbox, there’s some 2,008 posts, and tens of thousands of comments to dissect. And there is that rather useful Instagram function where you can track who a user has followed in a chronological setting.
We haven’t had time to look through the account in any detail, but we’re sure that some eager hacks will find the time to hop on the grid.
A Grand Coming of Age
For Issue 18, we are hoping to have our best issue yet. Well, every issue is the best one yet, but this is going to be – we hope – a quantum leap forward for print magazines: this Christmas, we want every household in the land to be cackling away to TF #18, and we want YOU to write for it.
We’re open across the board, in facts, features, fiction and all the rest of it. Have a read of the pitch guide here, which has recently been rewritten, and send through your brightest and best ideas to editorial@the-fence.com.
In terms of what we’re looking for, sometimes people send us pitches saying ‘I don’t think anyone else would publish this, so I approached you.’ Which is nice to hear, but we want to publish pieces that other editors wished they had commissioned. Big, bold, ambitious bits of journalism – we look forward to hearing from you.
Zen Master Flash
Last week, we were delighted to publish one of the strangest yarns that has ever come our way: Maximilian Hess’s scarcely believable story on the Buddhist banker, Jesse Dean Bogdanoff, former Jester of Tonga. Through some mad confluence of radical New Age thought, financial malfeasance and good old happenstance, Bogdanoff ended up being appointed to the court of Tupou IV as a way to manage the country’s untapped sovereign wealth fund. What happened next – Y2K, and Bogdanoff’s fear of same – would have astonishing repercussions for the Oceanic paradise, but that’s all we’ll give away for now. Give it a read here – Bogdanoff declined a Netflix series for his story, but their loss is our gain, and soon yours.
A Correction
In Clive Martin's article, Laugh Like You Used To, published in Issue 16 and online last week, it was written that Mr Jim Davidson maintained 'a friendship with Gary Glitter long after his paedophilia convictions'. This is incorrect.
As Mr Davidson writes here that he 'had visited veterans in HMP Verne, a prison for sex offenders, back in 2021 as part of his role with Care After Combat – a charity he set up to support veterans who find themselves in the criminal justice system after military service. Gary Glitter – real name Paul Gadd – was housed in the prison at the time and attempted to gate-crash Jim’s meeting with the veterans, but was refused entry by the comedian. During the brief encounter, Glitter told Mr Davidson that he was remorseful and ready to start a new life. The story was correctly reported at the time by the Dorset Echo but picked up by other publications and distorted to falsely imply Mr Davidson had made a special visit to see the disgraced performer and personally believed him to be rehabilitated.'
We are happy to correct the record.
Axolotl
Over on the website, we’ve got Susannah Dickey’s short story from Issue 16 available to read, and it’s an absolute corker that you can enjoy here. For the next issue, we’d like to commission something especially for the magazine. If you’re a fiction writer with a bit of experience under your belt, we’d love to hear from you – we’re going to pay a bit more than usual. You can reach us at the usual address: editorial@the-fence.com
Fill Your Boots
If you’ve been trying to enjoy those pieces, but have been frustrated by the hard and unforgiving paywall – allow those frustrations to cease by purchasing a digital subscription for just £14.99 for the year and allow yourself to savour the TF archive at your leisure. Or, if you’re longing for the feeling of paper in your palm, take out a subscription to the print magazine – remember that if you subscribe before midnight, then you’ll get Issue 14, Issue 15, Issue 16 straight away. This deal expires, however, at midnight.
In Case You Missed It
Jeremy Gordon interviews Steve Albini, nineties musician and reformed asshole/ arsehole.
In a particularly moving piece, Amelia Tait speaks to Ivy Snizter, the second body double in a forgettable Jack Black vehicle.
Sophia Smith-Galer travels to Armenia, where a frozen war threatens reproductive rights.
Will the Crooked House rise again? Guy Kelly went to the site of the West Midlands inferno.
This story is in-Seine(!) – Madeleine Schwartz explores how Paris is preparing for the return of a flood of Biblical proportions.
Forget about the threat of the Singularity, AI’s real problem is that it’s so boring.
And Finally
What’s old is new again! Truculent Knorr Stock Pot spokesman and sometime chef Marco Pierre White has broken through to TikTok, as this footage of Marco fumbling around a supermarket, haranguing customers and huffing the produce, is doing the rounds with Gen Z and beyond. We’re no strangers to MPW content, and now is as good a time as any to repost his beguiling address at the Oxford Union in 2016 where, despite looking like he’d been woken up on a park bench twenty minutes before showtime, he shares some sensational anecdotes about his time in the culinary trenches.
While the era that Marco epitomised is now scorned for its wanton cruelty and macho bollock-measuring, one critic we spoke to recently still heralds Harvey’s – the legendary Wandsworth dining room that launched him to stardom – as better than any British three Michelin star restaurant that has followed it. And hey, if you had the chance to scream at the young Gordon Ramsay, wouldn’t you take it?
MPW’s mafioso energy can be a little hot to handle, so if you’re looking for something different, then why not end with this perfect little vignette, of the furious chef encountering a lovely donkey.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkk0pXH5Ylg
That’s it for this week - do remember that we have that lovely little opportunity to score yourselves some primo print, but only until midnight (GMT). We look forward to joining you next week.
All the best,
TF