Dear Readers,
Hello once again, welcome once again, to (once again) Off The Fence, the ever-reliable, indefinable, and endlessly re-hashable Tuesletter par excellence, brought to you by the team behind the UK’s Only Magazine. We are broadcasting live from our Soho headquarters amid a hysterical downpour, and so with great pain we must inform you that the British summer has already been and gone, some four days into the month of July. Let’s have another go of it next year.
Issue 16 remains so close, so close, to arriving on our shores; we are only separated by the Baltic Sea, and post-Brexit shipping difficulties. If you’ve changed address in the last few years, then double-check your details: log into our website – www.the-fence.com for the uninitiated – and update the address to make sure your copy arrives present & correct. If you haven’t logged in yet, simply enter the email address associated with your order and click ‘forgotten password.’
We move. Rolling off the production line this week, wheels polished and spokes appropriately shiny, we’ve got some gorgeous maps of Merseyside, a tribute to Tortoise, and a few-hundred words on little-known west London blues enthusiast, Mick Jagger. First! Rivers! And a psychogeographical featurette by the whip-smart Oli Grant.
Looking For A Tickle
The source of the River Wandle is a disputed site. It begins where chalk meets clay. To the human eye, this is either just north of the Carshalton Methodist Church or alongside the Ebom Cash and Carry, a breezy 15-minute walk from East Croydon station.
Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to the expressions I receive striding across Beddington Park with my rod and net in hand. Soon there are brambles and hedges between me and the pram-pushers’ cocked brows. Keeping the river to my right, a weir sends the water crashing into a concrete nook before it rightens and settles into a fast-flowing highway. Briefly, the noise is deafening. When she’s ‘up’, the Wandle runs at speeds of up to 45 miles an hour. Crouched on one knee by the flow, a man cranes his rod over the fast-flowing turn. He’s clad in neutral-camouflage Simms gear, his face obscured by a pair of wrap-around Polaroid sunglasses and a larvae repellent hat. Strapped across his back is the handle of an extendable net. He looks like a character from Assassin’s Creed, but his attire speaks to how seriously some anglers regard the Wandle.
Any luck? He shakes his head. I ask what fly he’s on. There is no response.
Like all hobbyists, anglers are generous and secretive in equal measure. You’re allowed to join in, just not on their patch. No doubt there are plenty of pools on the Wandle that anglers will keep to themselves but spend a lunch break trawling the Facebook groups and the Reddit forums and you will soon get a good read of the river. I cross the bridge (I’m not saying which one) and enter the river five hundred yards downstream. I examine my fly box. The mayfly is still yet to arrive. I take out something small and black with a dash of orange and begin tying it to my tippet. The birdsong is heavy overhead. The cow parsley is sticky in the air. Upstream, three teenagers have ditched their Lime bikes and are cracking open tinnies. They ash their joint over the bridge and its sweet tang drifts down to meet me. I release some line and with a few false casts, start searching the water where the weeds sway in vivid green ringlets.
After 20 minutes and only one lost fly, I move on and begin working the small seams about the island. I’m aware of someone behind me.
‘You beat me to my spot!’
I laugh and tell him I’ll be quickly through. He says he left the city early to try and get here in time. He talks while I cast. He’s been fishing the Wandle for nearly a decade. A sales assistant on the shop floor of Farlows introduced him to it.
I get out where the water depth threatens my nipples, and cast from the banks of a new housing development. Where I am, £400,000 gets you a four-bed semi-detached house with a trout river running through your front garden.
I am not proud of my record here. In four years, I have only ever caught one trout on this river and even then I’m not sure it counts. The fish was already dead before I scooped it up in my net. Spend an evening wading these waters or cast a look from the family-friendly cycle trail which accompanies the river from source to mouth, and you’re just as likely to spot something suspiciously still floating atop the surface as you are to see a dart of shadow scurrying beneath it. The teenagers on the bridge start piping up, pointing below. I lift my gaze from my fly. A dead goose, spatchcocked to the surface, is being carried on the current. Feeling like Marcus in About a Boy, I raise my rod and let it past.
The Wandle belongs to the majority of rivers in the UK – it’s on life support. Thanks to a major conservation effort in 2019, this chalk stream is miraculously home to carp, chub, barbel and trout, not to mention the herons, kingfishers and grey wagtails which clap about the sky. But sustaining momentum is hard. It’s everywhere to see.
Stuart Potter was born on the Wandle and still lives here today. The river runs through his garden. He tells me when he was growing up there used to several community river clean ups every summer. Now there is maybe one every few years. Recent environmental data shows that the largest contributing factors for the Wandle’s ill-health was due to urban transport and infrastructure while in second place was pollution from ‘wastewater’, closely followed by pollution from the public – the Elf bars and Christmas trees and hospital crutches don’t get here by themselves. There is no data on how much sewage water companies have been allowed to pump in the Wandle; but watching a dog defy its owner’s instruction to drink from the river tells you all you need to know.
Light is fading. I reel in my line and exit the river through a break in the reeds. The 127 bus blares past. Only moments ago, I could be forgiven thinking the city was several counties away. But it’s always been here, that’s what makes this water so special. I pack away my tackle in the community garden which borders the river’s edge. The grass is decorated with gnomes and flowerpots and snogging teenagers. A bald Polish man is hunched at the mouth of the bridge. A packet of bait is open at his feet. I watch his float indicator scan the murky square of shadow. I ask him if he’s caught anything.
He drinks from his can of Tyskie. Unblinking, he replies, ‘14’.
I can’t work out if he’s having me on.
You can follow Oli on Twitter here.
Mappa Mersi
Hot off the presses as of this morning, we are delighted to finally announce that The Pride of Merseyside – our map of Liverpool, its environs and its bins – is now available for sale through our shop page. We’re selling them at £40 a print on a limited run, which is somehow an even bigger giveaway than our atrociously cheap subscription price (£24.99, in case you’re wondering), and all copies come hand-signed by the legendary draughtsman who put it all together, Paul Cox. If you’re a native of the city, an exiled Scouser – with a capital S, we insist – or just a very big fan of Johnny Vegas, then it really is the print your home needs. Run, don’t walk, to the-fence.com/shop and get your map while stocks last.
Dreaming Of Metternich
Ben Judah’s new book, This Is Europe: The Way We Live Now has received glowing notices from publications more esteemed than our own, and it really is a singular journalistic achievement; all the more timely given Britain’s increasing disinterest in Continental affairs.
Over a period of five years, Ben interviewed Romanian truck drivers, Syrian refugees-turned-porn stars, Belarussian mothers and Tunisian imams tending to their flock in France. It’s written in beautiful prose, and accompanied with some vivid, tender images that are embedded through the text. We were particularly interested by the photos in the book, and asked Ben to tell us about how he managed to accrue such a unique library.
‘I asked them to take photos of their daily life, and send them to me’, he tells us. ‘And I was amazed by what I was sent. About half the images are photos I’ve taken, but what I wanted was to give a sense that you’ve dipped into someone’s photo library on their phone, or that they’ve sent you a WhatsApp.’
Judah also told us some of the challenges of the reporting – in perhaps the book’s most striking chapter, he follows a group of African immigrants over the Alps, in Hannibal’s path, as they freeze themselves to exhaustion in search of a new life. ‘At one point, I was carrying a five-year-old girl on my shoulders, as her father was too tired to continue.’ There were other challenges, like the Syrian porn star: ‘It was very difficult to make Ibrahim stop talking about porn. He’s very porn-focused, and making him discuss his past was challenging – in a different way.’
We commend this book to you wholeheartedly. You can buy a copy here.
The Slip Of The Hare
In previous outings, we highlighted the excellent work done by the FT’s investigation team in bringing down Crispin Odey, the hedge fund tycoon. In reality, the piece was a collaboration between the team at Tortoise and the FT. This podcast, entitled The Octopus’ Garden, gives fascinating insight into how this partnership came to be, and suggests a number of promising paths for impactful journalism. It’s hats off to the Tortoise team from us.
TL; DR
Long reads – we all read them, we all love them, they don’t spend weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks dying a death in our unloved, unopened mobile tabs (they really don’t! We love them!) We’ve been talking a lot about them recently; not least as our editor, Charlie Baker, has just had a feature out in Press Gazette about the state of British longform, and why it isn’t as celebrated as its counterpart industry in the States.
One point, which recurred continuously in speaking to long read aficionados over here, was that British publications often shy away from giving the time, money and emotional bandwidth to nurturing a truly juicy bit of narrative journalism. Well, if you will allow us to toot our own horn a bit, we are exceedingly proud that we have been able to do just that, issue after issue, often with first-time feature writers. To name but two, we’ve had Francis Martin’s investigation into Boris Johnson’s favourite state school. James Waddell’s deep dive into the bizarre working practices of the
Our latest issue, which – as we’ve stressed, multiple times – is the best one we’ve ever done, has not one not two but three debutantes in Features, all of whom have knocked it out of the park, and will no doubt be fixtures of ours and elsewhere going forward. Subscribe now, for the insultingly cheap figure of £24.99, and read tomorrow’s stars today.
In Case You Missed It
TF deputy editor Kieran Morris details the new generation of Liverpudlian MMA fighters bringing new life to UK martial arts.
We know you already have but if you haven’t read the most bonkers article of 2023, and have any lingering affection for humanity as an ideal, then cure yourself of both afflictions by sampling that piece by Liz Jones on dining with her ex.
A great long read from friend of the mag (and contributor to our imminent and excellent 16th issue) Sophie Elmhirst, on the man who’s on a mission to make condoms sexy.
What do poets make of Drake’s new tome of playful verse? Not a lot, reports Sama’an Ashrawi for Complex.
In a truly great feat of recursive myth-debunking-debunking, Snack Shack's Doug Mack makes a compelling argument that Van Halen's resistance to brown M&Ms was for exactly the reason you might have first imagined.
Zadie Smith writes the most entertaining auto-blurb you’ll ever read, on writing in Dickens’ shadow.
And Finally
In this time of fawning celebrity profiles and glitzy memoir-scented documentary films charting the struggles and triumphs of the rich and famous, it’s nice to remember a time when the field of celebrity docs wasn’t quite so saturated, either by quantity or quality. Such is the case with 2001's Mick Jagger auto-documentary, Being Mick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrixtAkg5B0
Despite being filmed for ABC by Oscar winner Kevin McDonald (One Day In September, Touching The Void, Last King of Scotland), Being Mick is not a beautiful work of cinema. While today’s glut of documentaries portray lesser talents in a safer format, they do admittedly have a focus-pulling gloss and are universally shit and edited with Sundance-ready élan. Not so with Being Mick which, basically, looks like it was shot on a camcorder because it appears to have literally been shot on a camcorder. Indeed its least legible scenes are shot in such low resolution, and at such canted angles, they look like they've been filmed as part of a sting by the Fake Sheikh.
None of which matters a trice, since Mick is such a compelling subject, and avid attractor of celebrity drama, that one is compelled to watch purely for the joy of being in his irrepressible orbit. Partying with Elton John, Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet and AA Gill. Trying out his wartime newsreel voice. And generally acting as if he's forgotten the camera is on. We demand an eight part Netflix series and we want it yesterday, providing the budget is kept just as wondrously, horribly low.
Et voila, there we go, done and dusted for the first week of July. As ever: send us an email to editorial@the-fence.com with any questions, tips or passionate confessionals you may have, and we will all read them, and one of us will be designated to respond. Any enquiries about orders are to be sent to subscriptions@the-fence.com.
Until next week, that’s it from us.
All the best,
TF