Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter that is coveting the prospect of a fortnight’s break.
Back to school, back to work and back at it once again, here we are at the beginning of September, and the start of the end of the year. As good a time as any to give out a bottle of fizz, as we did this week with Alistair Scott, winner of our Champagne tombola. Behold, a winner.
Speaking of winners, Aly Gillani has won the prize of a pub crawl with our pints correspondent, Jimmy McIntosh. Congratulations, Aly — and prepare for the night of your life.
The giveaways just do not stop. Our champers competition rumbles on, this time with Issue 24 in tow – we’ve been spotted in drizzly Provence (below), beside the fountains of Las Vegas, outside the temples of Central Vietnam and by the rubbish dumps at We Out Here (wrong issue but good effort). Never, ever, ever forget that you can bag yourself some bubbly by sending us your weirdest, most wonderful snap of the latest issue. Quite literally anything can win, from any part of the world, so don’t worry if you’re not visiting Ulaanbaatar this season.
Okay, let’s go: as stated above, we will be taking a break next week to recharge batteries, iron our domestic cats and rewind some old tapes. But this week, we have a newsletter debut for Janet Street-Porter, The Man from (Alabama who calls himself) Vuncle and a steam-powered vicar. Before we get there, though, a warm return to long-time friend of The Fence, Werner Herzog.
Wern After Reading
The desiccated husk of social media got an unexpected jolt this week, when a rare new passenger climbed aboard one of the web’s most prominent sinking ships. Werner Herzog, who famously does not have a smartphone, has nevertheless joined Instagram, and filled it with moody photos, contemplative notes and charmingly lo-res images from his films, which he’s clearly scraped from Google Images.
It would all be quite standard stuff, had he made this leap in 2013 like every other famous person. Choosing to do so now can only enhance his reputation for unpredictable, and inscrutable, genius. Some things were more predictable by half, such as this beautifully terse response to his first-ever commenter, a clout-farming goon perhaps a little too proud to be standing in virgin territory.
Alone among the scandal rags and froth sheets in British publishing, TF has been lucky enough to speak with Werner on a number of occasions in the last few years, not least in this enlightening interview about the cultural highlights he discovered during COVID lockdowns.
Inarguably our favourite contribution, however, was this answer he gave to the single most creditable piece of journalism we’ve ever published, Why Are You Asking Me This?, in which we asked very important questions of very important people.
As with Instagram, Werner very much understood our assignment.
Pitch? Perfect!
Ever flicked through our magazine and wondered how you might grace our 64 lithographic pages? Do you fancy yourself a spinner of good yarns with at least some grounding in reality? Are we on some kind of mailing list for struggling freelancers, which you signed up to at a particularly dire moment for your personal finances? If you answered in the affirmative to any of those questions, then we have some very good news for you.
Like errant fisherman trawling for tuna in the Azores, we are casting our net out widely and irresponsibly, with the hope of dredging your next big feature. Send us your pitches, whoever you are and whatever it may be. You do not need to be a professional, you don’t even need to be an amateur – you just need to have some meat on the bone, narratively, and we can work together on everything else. We pay well, and promptly after publication. Have a read of our detailed pitch guide here. And as we make clear above, you’re likely to find yourself on other editors’ radars if you write for us – everything else seems to. Direct your ideas to editorial@the-fence.com. We can’t wait to read what you have for us.
Bowser’s Castle
We’re not sure how we feel about the term ‘final boss’ forcing its way into everyday parlance. But it got us thinking: who are the final bosses of London? The mythical figures whose legend makes the city beat, and who are rarely seen trudging through the streets. In Jodie Harsh’s upcoming memoir of 00s London nightlife, entitled You Had to Be There, she writes of the excitement of meeting Fran Cutler, the terrifying party planner who ‘acts as a conduit between the art, fashion and music scenes’. Even though she may have lost her role as the ‘Katekeeper’, she’s still a London final boss – if you’re in the room with her, you’ve made it.
As for the capital’s other final bosses? Here’s our incomplete list: secretive courtier, William Nye; food PR, Gemma Bell; octogenarian seshlord, Nicky Haslam; pub enthusiast and political extremist, ‘Chelsea Dan'; publishing queen, Caroline Michel; financier, Chris Rokos – and of course, the one we all fear, [REDACTED].
Let us know your nominations in the comments below, or via editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll feature them in the next newsletter.
Boys Love Buildings
Is Janet Street-Porter the female Gyles Brandreth? This is the question that has sparked debate in our packed editorial suite this morning. Either way, we are grateful that Janet has selected a video from the BBC archive in which she herself features, showing the audience around that was designed for her by Piers Gough, who is part-cartoon, part-architect.
It’s a highly diverting nine minutes of television, and one that sparks a series of questions: isn’t it fascinating that post-modernist architecture is lazily regarded as shorthand for ‘90s aesthetics’, yet many of its greatest buildings were built in the 1980s? Isn’t it amazing that, only a few decades ago, journalists were so well-paid that they could commission and erect townhouses in central London? And why on earth was Janet Street-Porter wearing such diminutive shorts in the comfort of her own home? Watch it here, and then treat yourself to Posy Simmonds taking a tapdancing tour of Wood Street police station from the same series. Proper television!
Me and Julio Bashmore Down by the Schoolyard
The Instagram account ‘2010s Rave Archives’ does strike us as a rather thin piece of architecture on first glance. Despite its name, it does capture a very specific time and mood in dance music, one that spanned from 2009 to 2013 and produced some of the worst music ever recorded.
While the analogous ‘stomp-clap-hey’ era in guitar music has been widely – and correctly – derided, this was a fascinating little era, when chart music was dull and dance music was studiously apolitical. But a frenzied sense of hedonism pervaded, as some of you will no doubt recall.
The Future’s Orange
As we mentioned last week, the good burghers over at the Daily Telegraph developed a highly original sense of art direction for their magazine to celebrate the boozer. Only seven days later, has the Telegraph’sinnovative look already been replicated?
Lock Down Your Area
It’s not just the print mag that you can find creeping up the nape of the UK like so much poison ivy. Our pub book, entitled THE PUB for ease of memory, has also wheedled its way onto the bookshelves of the British Isles: your Waterstoneses, your Daunt Bookses, yes, but also your beloved local hotspots that are, like us, small and independent.
Find us in Battle, but not war, at Rother Books; find us in pretty, leafy Beckenham and their eponymous bookshop; find us amid the dreaming spires at Capel Books in Oxford. Head to the Whitby Bookshop if you’re near Whitby, the Kew Bookshop if you’re near Kew, and if you’re in Hove… their one’s called City Books.
Gaze upon our window display at Backstory, official matchday partners of The Fence, but do not despair: we’re still in stock, even after hundreds of you charged to Balham to clear out their copies over the last fortnight. We just want to say thank you to the legend that is Tom Rowley for being so accommodating for us there – if you’re looking to set up a new business, and want to see how it’s done, go and have a look at Backstory.
And if you’re not the kind of person who likes to go outside, for book purchasing or any other purpose, then you can buy THE PUB here.
Vuncle Fester
Have you heard of Vuncle205, the ketwigged Alabaman who has fallen head over heels in love with the distinctive working-class culture of rural Lancashire? We had, earlier in the summer; so too had everyone under the age of 23, weeks before we did. And we wanted to do a little write-up on Vuncle in our usual pithy style, perhaps showcasing his awestruck venture into a Toby Carvery for the first time. But then, one of our star contributors, Clive Martin, wrote the piece of the year for Vice, so we scrapped our plans and thought it better to commend Clive’s excellent work instead.
Ontologising ‘British Chaos’, a new subculture of content which reached its apotheosis this summer, Clive ties together the disparate threads uniting Big John, Bonnie Blue, Thomas Skinner and Charli xcx with trademark acuity. We doubt that any of our readers are unfamiliar with his work, but Clive’s dispatches have been a jewel of the magazine for years now: from horrible marketing conferences, twee lifestyle festivals, fraught fashion houses, anti-woke comedy nights, gangland wakes, grubby Mayfair, grubbier Camden and grubbiest Cornwall. You can expect plenty more in the issues tee-kay (which stands for ‘to come’, if you’ve ever dealt with American editors).
Miaow Please
John Broadley has made many beautiful illustrations for these pages, and he’s also restocked his shop page with a range of gorgeous prints. Prices start from £19 only, which really is quite staggering value for work of this quality. Have a gander through his website and buy yourself something special.
In Case You Missed It
Jia Tolentino dissects Elizabeth ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ Gilbert’s new memoir, for the New Yorker. (Read a mildly eyebrow-raising excerpt at The Cut).
Chuck Schumer’s imaginary friends have been back in the news again – this 2007 profile of him (and them) is still a cracker.
Phil Hoad examines the horrors of Netflix’s algorithmic movie wasteland.
Eric McHenry scries the annals of American folklore to ask, once and for all, who killed the mercy man?
The Instagram Tinned Fish Reviews has been delighting us with in-depth reviews of supermarket mackerel and braving Surströmming – the fermented Swedish delicacy.
Our editorial assistant, Ralph Jeffreys, has been delving into the history of the Board of Deputies following their letter controversy in the FT.
And Finally
Reverend Edward ‘Teddy’ Boston was rector and vicar for Cadeby and Shenton. He was also a train fanatic, harbouring a vast collection of both model and real locomotives.
So passionate was the rev, he built his own section of railway on the grounds of his rectory – a 110-yard U-shaped piece of track. Here he could show off his collection of locomotives, including his traction engine ‘Fiery Elias’, which could bring out Boston’s more explosive side. He was apparently ‘much given to Anglo-Saxon language in times of stress, such as a close-run race with his traction engine.’ He even frequently drove an Aveling & Porter R10 steamroller named ‘Thistledown’ into town, instead of walking.
The combination of God and steam really is a perfect match, leading to wonderful naming choices such as a narrow gauge locomotive Teddy bought whose engine took so long to start that he named it ‘The Terror’ in reference to Psalm 91: ‘The Terror that walketh in darkness’.
His wedding was a similarly steam-powered affair. He married Mrs Audrey Lees, who was the secretary of the Market Bosworth traction steam rally in 1974 in a ceremony filled with mishaps. They had planned to do a couple of circuits of Teddy’s personal track until their carriage derailed. Then, on their way to their reception, the engine of the steamroller pulling them (most likely Thistledown) packed in. Nonetheless, a report in the Coventry Evening Telegraph was able to report that ‘a couple of minor hitches failed to dampen the spectacular wedding.’
Fortunately, there exists a wonderful two-part documentary on the man, entitled The Steam Powered Vicar, and available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube. It’s where our clip comes from today, showing the Vicar’s fanaticism in full swing. He also made appearances as ‘The Fat Clergyman’ in The Railway Series and in Thomas the Tank Engine thanks to his close friend being Rev. W. V. Awdry, fellow clergyman and author of both series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSCbO_k4D3E
Once again we wearily unmount – from our horse, in this scenario; get your mind out of the gutter – to close this week’s newsletter. If you’re awaiting an order, or just bored, email editorial@the-fence.com and we’ll read your screed no matter what you send. No newsletter next week, as alluded to above; we need at least a fortnight to think of novel ways to open the email and to work on the winter issue. The name ‘Wendy’ was virtually unknown and unused before the release of Peter Pan. Catch you two Tuesdays hence.
All the best,
TF