Dear Readers,
Good afternoon once again and welcome, welcome, welcome to Off The Fence, the free and breezy Tuesletter supplement to the UK’s Only Magazine. Finally, it seems that Issue 15 has broken through the Post Office backlog and has been hitting doormats up and down this green and pleasant land. And what a gorgeous issue it is! Clive Martin on fashion horrors, Jade Fitton on selling out, Danielle Thom on the history of the souvenir, and so many more gems – you could not find a better accompaniment to a springtime pint, and that’s a promise.
And if you’re still weighing up whether to subscribe – if you are, and I am so sorry to use this, on the fence about it – then let us bombard you with magazines to sweeten the deal. We’re running a flash sale, where until midnight tonight, new subscribers will get EIGHT magazines for the price of four: the latest issue, the next three, and the first four, £30 all in. From those early issues, you’ll get a sneak peek at some of the pieces that are too hot, too scabrous, too legally questionable to put online. And from the latest quartet, boy you are in for a treat. We’ve just signed off on Issue 16, and it is the very best edition we’ve ever worked on. Stay tuned for more updates over the next few weeks, but seriously, it’s going to be a stormer.
We’re keeping it pretty slinky this week. We’ve got some champagne to give away, some intellectual blowhards to rail on, and some twenty-first century weirdness from the New York documentary scene. But we’re starting this week in Cairo, where Lara Gibson reports from a tacky, boozy clubhouse shielding expats from the realities of life under the Sisi dictatorship.
Smokin’ ACEs
As I walked into the bar, I was struck by the familiar smell of sweat, stale beer and sugary air freshener. The musty odour distinct to affable pinkish home counties dwellers lured me closer and closer to the mahogany bar. Perched on a barstool, a balding man in his mid 50s swore at the Man City game playing on the television behind me and promptly apologised when he became aware of my presence. It was as if I was back home in England. In the cosy nest of chipped paint and fruit machines, the only hint of my location was the eagle-embossed State Security sign warning foreigners to behave appropriately and banning local Egyptians from the premises.
I had entered ACE Club, a private members association based in Maadi, a leafy suburb in the South of Cairo favoured by expats and wealthy Egyptians. As I stepped through the guarded door, I was transported from a dusty street to a Surreyish country club.
Outside the walled gardens, Egyptians are battling an enduring economic crisis. Gross inflation clocked in at 40% in March and President Sisi’s government is struggling to support its hungry citizens, given that it spends 54% of its budget on debt repayments. The Egyptian Pound (EGP) is now near-valueless on a practical level – its rate against the dollar has doubled in the last year. But at the ACE Club, you’d never tell.
Inside the villa, drunk divorcees drape themselves over younger boyfriends, international school teachers drench themselves in tequila, and in true ‘Brits Behaving Badly’ fashion, there have been incidents – multiple – of injuries sustained on the dance floor in the rush to belt out ‘Hey Jude’.
ACE Club is anecdotally, and perhaps ominously, referred to as the British club. For one, it’s the only one in town nowadays, after the 2015 closure of another ‘British club’ for what was described to me as “improper behaviour”. And beyond that, it’s a hard label to shake, what with the preponderance of Estuary accents at the bar and bacon on the menu – a hard thing to come by in a Muslim-majority nation like Egypt.
“You need to join,” he exclaimed, “it’s the best investment you can make.”
Yet there has always been somewhere for an Englishman to go and dream of home. The British have a colourful legacy of clubbingin Cairo. In 1845, an Englishman built the Hotel des Anglais in Downtown Cairo, which would later be renamed as Shepheard's Hotel, where everyone from Churchill to Agatha Christie sipped on Suffering Bastards at the Long Bar. As the English flexed their financial muscle in the Suez Canal, they took to remodelling parts of Cairo in their own image – the quaint little district of Garden City, with its swirling paths and creaky old townhouses, was an entirely British construct. And in a time when Tahrir Square was associated with recreation over revolution, Windsor Hotel served for years as a colonial British officers club. During the past few decades, elites have moved further out from the centre to places like Maadi, as dust and decay creeped into once-grand downtown buildings.
The sun was setting on the penultimate afternoon of a 5-day national holiday as I strolled from my apartment to ACE’s inconspicuous villa through Maadi’s sleepy, tree-lined streets. Unlike the bulk of Cairo, Maadi is largely unaffected by rampant pollution, frenzied seven-lane highways and the perpetual construction of bigger and better roads. A common issue newly-arrived expats face is how to cross a road in Downtown without being cut in half by a horse-drawn cart, or how to take an Uber from New Cairo to 6th October City, two elite enclaves on extreme sides of the city, without arriving showered in sweat.
After assuring the security guard that I was made in England, I was welcomed into the confidences of several patrons. My first companion was from a small town near Birmingham and had spent the past decades working for oil companies across the globe. “You need to join,” he exclaimed, “it’s the best investment you can make.” A full-year 2023 membership costs $160, and management encourages members to pay the annual fees in dollars, despite the club using EGP for everything else – a sensible, if privileged, move when currency stability is nowhere in sight.
A second patron told me the club helped him battle loneliness after he moved from Nairobi to Cairo after his divorce a few years prior. A third said it’s essential to join, as it’s one of the few guaranteed places in Cairo to drink during Ramadan which isn’t full of tourists. The topic of conversation never drifted to politics, a welcome relief for Egypt’s autocratic leader a decade into his rule, yet several members noticed the price of beers had increased in recent months – a portent of a revolution anywhere else in the world.
Egyptians without ACE-friendly passports complain of lifestyle degradation as wages have not kept pace with inflation, and prices for imported foreign goods have skyrocketed. But the vast majority of ACE members are unlikely to be touched by these troubles, as expats are typically paid in dollars or euros, effectively doubling their spending capabilities, and widening the already-considerable gap between themselves and the extant Egyptian classes.
The ACE Club itself is in some ways a hangover of a time gone by – a comforting constant for Brits in a country pondering its political stasis. Staff from anglophone sub-saharan nations serve white expats, and Egyptian nationals are kept from the door. The exclusion of Egyptians is not – as the pleading signs above the bar reinforce – a club decision, but a State Security one, and in Egypt, it’s State Security ruling the roost. But an Egyptian friend reassures me that it’s no great loss: bland British food and tacky Anglophilia are not everyone’s idea of a good night out.
You can follow Lara’s adventures in Cairo on Twitter and Substack.
Champagne Showers
We had some wonderful entries to our champagne giveaway. Chris Coates knew how to play on the emotions of the editorial team by getting his cat involved; Francis Martin took himself to Herne Hill just to stick us on a neat little train bench. Rahul Jog caught the Golden Gate bridge in the background of his shot, Nick Morgan took us to the cricket, and Olivia Baskerville’s copy took her totally by surprise. But the winner had to be Peter Christian, who got a sumptuous courtyard shot of Issue 15 under the trees with a negroni in Crete. A bottle of Aldi’s finest fizz will be coming his way as soon as he returns to these shores, and as the winner, he gets to decide whether we douse him in the stuff, Formula One-style, or just hand it over as normal.
Business or Pleather?
Last week, we ran a barnstormer of a feature from Kyle O’Neill on the hunt for the Somerset Gimp, and the long shadow that this PVC phantasm has cast over his county. It’s a brilliant effort from Kyle – skilful, funny, thoughtful; his first for us, and not the last – and better yet, it scooped a number of national newspapers from their own gimp hunt.
You can read it right here, and if you’ve got a story this good, send it our way at editorial@the-fence.com, and let’s do some business.
Art AND Ideas?! Wow!
We’re all plugged-in adults here, so we’re going to assume that your excitement is already at a fever pitch for this year’s HowTheLightGetsIn festival in Hay-on-Wye this month. You’ve booked your minibus, bought your 96 cans of Strongbow, and you can’t wait to lose your shit as Jesse Norman and Thangam Debonnaire debate the merits of liberal democracy to a crowd of dozens. Hang on… you’re not going? You’re busy doing literally anything else that weekend?
Well, in that case, you should have a read of James Waddell’s fantastic investigation into the festival’s organisers, the Institute of Art and Ideas, where you can learn a bit more about the underpaid, unfocused grunt work that goes into planning HowTheLightGetsIn every year.
It’s one of the best bits of journalism we’ve ever published, and was only possible through the support of our subscribers. If you’d like to see more scintillating exposés in our pages, sign up today. Thirty quid, eight mags, today only.
In Case You Missed It
The Fence’s editor-at-large, Rev Fergus Butler-Gallie writes a powerful letter to the Bishop of London which is, and is not, about a missing bible.
Samanth Subramanian embeds with those fighting the war on the most invasive interloper in British ecology, the Japanese Knotweed, for the Guardian.
Over at Bleeding Cool, Rich Johnson shines a light on one unheralded Brexit benefit over at: current X-Men continuity sees Beast exploiting Britain’s global isolation for mutant gain.
Friend of the Fence Roisin Lanigan pens this moving and thoughtful piece on quitting smoking, again.
And Chicago Magazine’s Dan Johnson delivers this week’s finest gangland gotcha with his superb piece on Ken “Tokyo Joe” Eto, the outsider who rose through the ranks of the Chicago mob.
And Finally
How To with John Wilson is, in the opinion of the deputy editor manning the desk this week, the very best thing you can find on iPlayer right now – let’s just get that off the bat straight away. Made as a series of short instructional documentaries, Wilson weaves thousands of hours of mundane footage of New York City into the most exhilarating show on TV; part-comedy, part-art flick, part-memoir, and just about the most unflinching depiction of the Big Apple ever put on screen.
But that’s no big scoop from us – it’s on HBO already, it has Susan Orlean on the writing staff, it’s doing fine without our promotion. What you should be watching this week, though, is one of John’s earlier films, posted on Vimeo in 2016: a twenty-minute film called How to Act on Reality TV, which was shot inside a fly-by-night school for New York’s aspiring television stars.
https://player.vimeo.com/video/160141441?autoplay=0
Few shows or films manage to capture the impulses driving lost and lonely people into the grinding gears of the reality TV machine quite like this does. Even in his early work, Wilson knows how to linger his lens on the deep, primordial weirdness of a place and its inhabitants without sneering or mocking. It’s touching, it’s hilarious, and it’s properly fascinating – watch it as soon as you can. And if you haven’t watched his main series, do that too.
Right then! That’s us all sorted for this week. If you’re still missing a magazine, or you love the magazine, or you’ve had some kind of visceral reaction to something you’ve found in the magazine, reply to this email and chat to one of the team – we will endeavour to solve your problems, and/or bashfully receive your praise. Don’t forget that midnight deal – £30, eight issues – and we’ll see you next Tuesday.
All the best,
TF