Dear Readers,
Hello hello, and welcome back to Off The Fence, coming to you live & direct from our unglamorous Soho headquarters on this bright Tuesday afternoon.
Issue 18 is currently ripping through the print mills at a million miles an hour, ready for stapling and sending and landing at your feet in the second week of December. After last week’s brief reveal in this here Tuesletter, we have a few more contributors to unveil, for what will be our strongest, sharpest issue yet.
And we have another little deal for you folks, if you need any further enticement to hop on board. The first five of you through the door will get TWO WHOLE YEARS of TF mischief for the price of one, taking you all the way to winter 2025 for only £24.99. For the next ten to follow, we have a mighty consolation prize: a free copy of issues 15, 16 and 17, along with your next four, to keep you high on the hog with The UK’s Only Magazine all through the Yuletide season.
You will not forget it, you will not regret it, you will be all the better for it: subscribe today, with the button below.
As ever, we encourage existing subscribers who have since swapped their abodes since we last graced your doormats to drop us a line with your new address at subscriptions@the-fence.com, and we will get your beautiful new copy to you without a moment’s delay.
Let’s get into the meat of the matter. Leading this week’s slate, we have Booker baggies – a dispatch from one of our staff writers, from the very centre of the Anglo-Irish literocracy.
Murder, She Tote
Sunday night’s Booker Prize was a typically star-studded affair, packing the great and good of literary life into Old Billingsgate for a celebration of reading, a moving speech from Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a live broadcast by Radio 4’s Front Row and, of course, the bestowing of the prize itself, which this year went to Dublin’s Paul Lynch, for his dystopian drama, Prophet Song.
While some corners of the commentariat have recently suggested the influence of the Booker, and literary fiction more generally, might be on the wane, it’s hard to conceive of a more effectual gong in all of the arts. The uptick in sales, obligatory translation deals and – we’d argue most importantly for anyone in the precarious act of writing for a living – the all-important guarantor on whatever project comes next, still seem to be much in evidence.
As such, we wish Lynch well for the coming year, especially in light of remarks made in 2022 Booker winner Shehane Karunatilaka’s standout opening speech, which promised the eventual winner that he or she will not have time to write a single word for the next twelve months. Which, to most writers we know, might also seem positively euphoric.
And the evening featured one delightful coda. Our attendee was pleasantly puzzled by the goody bag they received when taking their egress: a tote containing no more, and no less, than a copy of one of the books shortlisted and a KIND Sea Salt & Almond cereal bar.
A charmingly demented pairing that has us wondering if you’ve received a more incoherent offering from a fancy do. A 4-pack of Cheestrings from the Turner Prize? A mophead from the Paul Foot Award? Answers on a postcard.
In Search of Atalanta
Fresh off our demure little scooplet on the Booker Prize, we can exclusively reveal the star of our eighteenth issue – none other than the legendary John Banville, winner of the 2005 prize for his achingly beautiful novel, The Sea.
For the lead feature in our Coming of Age issue, Banville returns to his childhood, and the story of his first love: a girl from Wallasey, who he only names as C. It is, you can trust, a spectacular story, penned by one of the finest prose stylists of the last century – we are inordinately delighted to have him in our pages, and we know that you, too, will love it as dearly as we do.
Not merely content with landing only one of our favourite writers of all time, we can also tell you that Issue 18 opens with a dispatch from the inimitable Geoff Dyer, who tackles the ageing process with the wit and wryness that has made us all such keen fans of his.
Dyer opens up the issue with a sharp interrogation of growing old, growing up, and whether the self is such a moveable concept as we seem to think. The piece is the perfect introduction to the stories that follow, and we are overjoyed to be welcoming him into our roster for this issue.
Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?
It seems like the Speccie and the Telegraph, the two jewels in the Barclay empire – and the in-house journals of the Conservative Party – are to be purchased by a consortium largely backed by the United Arab Emirates. It’s worth reading what Charles Moore has to say about these developments.
A couple of years back, we assembled a roundtable of eminent British journalists to ask them how they think print, power and patronage works on Fleet Street – it holds up very well today, if we may be permitted to say so ourselves.
Standing on the Pipes
Here’s another archive treat: William VanDyck looks back at a career in a peculiar and pretty unpopular part of the law. We’re always looking for these types of pieces, so if you’ve worked in an industry that you feel is misunderstood or misrepresented, do drop us a line at editorial@the-fence.com.
Ambassador, You Are Spoiling Us
A reminder that we have a very exciting deal available to readers – you have a chance to win a year’s worth of free magazines here:
But we also have a beautiful archive of back issues for your perusal, all available here.
In Case You Missed It
Sophie Elmhirst tracks love and loss in the world of care home romance.
Hatchet job of the week goes to Bilge Ebiri for his excoriation of Disney’s ‘lifeless, uninspiring mess of bland brand management’, Wish.
Rosa Lyster used to love Planet Earth – now it gives her nightmares.
Hannah Gold goes to Newark in search of Philip Roth.
Science news of the week: after telling how he treated a crocodile bite with an age-old remedy, indigenous elder John Watson may have introduced science to a new painkiller 'stronger than morphine' in time for the Brisbane Olympics.
Through a glass, daruch-ly. A history of German-American immigration via its beers.
And Finally
Few things so straddle the line between cool and not cool as parkour, the gymnastics-meets-loitering craze that probably had its golden moment about fifteen years ago. This week, we discovered it still has ardent proponents in the UK, not least Joe Scandrett, whose impressive acrobatics we’ve been greatly enjoying. As in the below video, where he can be seen plying his trade in Watford.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIeWl4p-fbo
Parkour - and its close cousin, the ‘different in a way no outsider should be expected to understand’ discipline of free running – enjoyed its high water mark in the mid-2000s, under the guidance of its inventor, David Belle, the French choreographer who memorably incorporated its movements into Besson-adjacent action schlockbuster District 13.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uw0XnKiRf4
From there, its ‘falling with style’ approach crept into the Bourne and Bond cinematic universes, and thence to any regional city centre that had sufficient grip-points and overhangs to satisfy its teenage adherents. It seemed, for a while, that it would usher in a new era of, well, jumping about a bit, but at some point everyone just forgot about it. Or so it seemed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quIYg3Gry7w
It turns out that a surprisingly active scene persists to this day in London, and many an hour can be lost wondering how, why, or even if, it fell out of favour in the first place. We guess if any artform knows how to straddle a line – or a pipe, or a stanchion – it’s parkour, which has weathered the storm of people wondering how ‘skate culture without the skating’ can exist as a thing, and we humbly submit that such pockets of enthusiasm suggest it could be ready for a roaring comeback.
We hope so, if only because some of their more testicle-damaging moves may prevent them from passing their skills down the usual genetic line.
There we go, that was the Tuesletter that was. Remember, this bumper deal above is only available for the first fifteen new subscribers, so move without delay and get on board with The UK’s Only Magazine.
Should you have anything else for us, you know where to find us: editorial@the-fence.com, where we’ll read it and get right back to you with anything you may need. Rest easy, and see you next week – same time, same place.
All the best,
TF