Off The Fence: Live from the Cotswolds

And we watch an octogenarian down a pint

Dear Readers,

Good evening, and welcome to Off The Fence. This might be deemed an ‘eccentric time’ to send a newsletter, but last Saturday’s mail-out on the worst pubs in London was our most popular one yet. There’s some important news: Issue 22 is launching next week, and will be with subscribers on Friday or Saturday, post-Brexit border checks permitting.

What this means is that this is your last chance to update your address on your account on our website. Do log in and check everything is correct. This also means that if you subscribe today, then you’ll get Issue 21 and Issue 22 within a week. Two pieces of post in a week from a quarterly magazine. Five print magazines for the price of four. Does life get sweeter than that? No, it does not.

There’s an assortment of treats to look forward today, but we’re going to start with a dispatch from Isobel Lewis, who grew up in the coolest town in the country.

Stroud and Proud

Nobody grows up thinking the place they’re from is cool – let alone that it’ll one day become a celebrity hotspot. Telling people you're from Stroud, a Cotswolds market town with a population of roughly 13,500, conjures visions of a Laurie Lee fantasy of an upbringing, where weekends were spent stomping through the stunning landscape of the Slad Valley only to stop for a hearty lunch at a dark-wooded gastropub. Or perhaps they imagined the town weirder side: the happenings, the wassailing (an old tradition where a piece of toast is soaked in cider, hung in a tree and sometimes shot at) and all the assorted hippie shit.

Obviously, I hated everything about growing up in the town. As a moody teenager hungry for excitement, I felt like the hedonistic world of Skins (set in Bristol, a mere 20-minute drive to Cam and Dursley station followed by a 33-minute train away) was just out of reach. Effy and co were off getting up to all sorts of antics and I was stuck here: in Cotswolds purgatory. So unfair! The town centre was a rundown mess where pound shops closed down only to be replaced by 99p shops, and terrible public transport meant I was totally reliant on my parents for lifts, anyway. Stroud wasn’t Bristol or Cheltenham. It wasn’t even Swindon.

Fast forward more than a decade, and the town’s reputation has been overturned. Microbreweries, bars and music venues have popped up across the Five Valleys surrounding Stroud, and in 2021, the Sunday Times named Stroud the best place to live. For a long time, the biggest local name had been Keith Allen and his rolling list of failed business ventures. But now, a celebrity set had slowly started migrating this way. Dua Lipa might have archived her Instagram feed in recent years, but the people of Stroud feverishly remember the year she spent the days after Christmas in the quiet village of Box. How could we ever forget?

The celebrity coverage helped, but my own perception of Stroud had slowly changed ever since I left for university nearly a decade ago. I revelled in something teenage me had once found incredibly embarrassing: that Stroud was performatively weird. A trip into town wasn’t uncommon without spotting the local guy who walked around town with a ferret on his shoulders or a unicyclist on a busy main road, with these eccentricities documented on the popular Facebook page Not Unusual For Stroud.

Growing up here meant living adjacent to strangeness. When I was a teenager, some rich guy from Australia moved into the largest house in our village, bringing with him – not a joke – a large collection of wallabies. Most were snapped up by foxes, but a few of them broke out of their enclosure, and would be sporadically seen hopping along roads in the area (as recently as 2015, one was spotted in nearby Dursley.)

But in the environmental activist circles I was more frequently moving through, ‘being from Stroud’ meant something different. When Extinction Rebellion shut down London in 2019 and a Daily Mail article described how the group’s founders “plotted chaos in London from a vegetarian café in leafy market town”, I felt proud of the place. Every Christmas, my dad would give me a new piece of merch from artist Clay Sinclair’s tongue-in-cheek ‘People’s Republic of Stroud’ collection.

For the influx of people coming to Stroud, our rebellious history added to the charm. It had that picturesque Cotswolds fantasy, but was far less twee than many of the neighbouring towns; Stroud had bite. The place had its problems, too, but they were glossed over. 5,000 children in Stroud district live in poverty, Stroud’s new Labour MP Simon Opher reiterated to local press just 18 months before he voted against scrapping the two-child benefit cap.

The celebrity set didn’t seem to care too much about that. For them, Stroud was a dreamy bolthole, a place for them to stay and play at English country idealism without compromising too much politically before heading back to London to work. The calibre of star who settled here reflected that. The polished Beckhams went to Chipping Norton, and Stroud got the more rugged Jamie Dornan.

Jamie Dornan: very beautiful, yes, but somewhat predictably, and disappointingly, short IRL

Naturally, the celebrity arrivals made for great village gossip. Earlier this year, my mum was on an early morning dog walk on Selsley Common, when she struck up conversation with a ‘scruffy looking man’ (her words), only to realise days later that it had been Liam Gallagher. Really, the parka should have been a giveaway, but LG himself was Stroud’s latest resident, having moved into an 11-bed rented mansion reportedly setting him back £16,950 a month. When news broke last month that he and Noel were getting the band back together, independent news site Stroud Times ran the droll headline: ‘Stroud man on cusp of Oasis reunion.’

When Jamie Dornan was interviewed by GQ in 2021, he took the journalist profiling him to Tomari-Gi, a ramen outlet that had recently opened in the town centre. ‘The news that Stroud was to get a Japanese restaurant... well, it caused quite a buzz, let me tell you,’ he admitted, the eyebrow-raise audible in his words. But as delicious as the food was (I still think about their black miso ramen to this day), Tomari-Gi didn’t stick around for long either. Were the people of Stroud really not ready for tempura, or were there simply too many new places to try at a time when locals didn’t have money to throw around? It’s hard to tell.

There’s a deleted scene from the first series of Cotswolds sitcom This Country, set in the nearby village of Northleach, where Kerry and Kurtan Mucklowe (Daisy May and Charlie Cooper) mention a childhood companion who recently moved to Stroud to work at Halfords. The move made him ‘aloof’, they complain. ‘Darren was never the same when he went to Stroud,’ Kerry grumbles, brow furrowed. ‘All got to his head.’

It’s a silly line from a scene that didn’t even make the final cut on the BBC Three mockumentary, but one that hints at Stroud’s problems. The town has always had a sense that, despite its bourgeois appearances, it’s a lot cooler than other places in the Cotswolds. The celebrity influx has only validated those thoughts. The town wants to think it’s Josh O’Connor: the stylish, Loewe-clad man of the moment. It might be Keith Allen – the boring old drone – after all. No offence, Keith.

You can follow Isobel on Twitter here.

On Howth Cliffs

Tim Adams has interviewed John Banville in the Observer, and within the piece – which you should read here – the Irish magus talks of his love of women, of his love for his wife, and of his very first love:

‘The only woman that I’ve ever known who I don’t see any more is a girl that I fell in love with when I was 11. Her family used to come from Liverpool, to the seaside where my family took our holidays. She and I fell in love at 11. We’d see each other for four weeks every year and write to each other in between. I made the mistake of going and staying with her the Christmas I turned 17. She broke up with me on Christmas Eve. I’d just bought my first copy of Ulysses and it still has these little blisters of tears on the opening page.’

As some of you will remember, Banville first wrote about this relationship in our pages, last Christmas for our ‘Coming of Age’ for Issue 18. You can read the piece here, it’s one of the most things we’ve published that we’re most proud of.

Cake and Coffee

Earlier this year, Francesca Bratton met perhaps the most controversial clergyman on the island of Ireland. Buckley was a bundle of contradictory positions and guises. In his 72 years, he led dozens of lives: a socialist; seminarian; chamber pot chucker; Catholic priest; civil rights activist; whistle-blower; ex-priest; independent bishop; News of the World columnist; tabloid phone-tapping victim; performer of sham marriages; defender of immigrants (through said sham marriages); squatter; blogger; community archivist; media darling; bête noire; gay rights activist; HIV activist; memoirist; husband and the scourge, in his own words, ‘of everyone’.

Read the full article here.

MTV Cribs

Like Buckley, Blondey McCoy (not his real name) has packed quite a lot into his 27 years. Public schoolboy; skater; menswear impresario; Soho boulevardier; stepfather; father; male model; sober icon; PG Wodehouse fan. He’s also the person who reintroduced the proper pubs/ proper caffs aesthetic into ‘fashion’ when he used to take Supreme’s James Jebbia to Soho’s Bar Bruno and The Blue Posts. A lesser publication would string that into an article – we just give it away for free in the newsletter. Anyway, here’s a tour of Blondey’s Covent Garden penthouse and Lexington Street office. It certainly makes for compelling viewing:

In Case You Missed It

Nicole Branagan glances back at the Super Cassette Vision, an early 80s video game console that was simply too beautiful to live.

How does a growing social media platform moderate a million new users per day? Platformer’s Casey Newton investigates BlueSky’s newest dilemma.

John Calhoun made a mouse maze that changed the world. Lee Alan Dugatkin asks why he’s been forgotten?

Adam Baumas tells the heartwarming tale of the dedicated users who saved Sexypedia from obliteration.

An AI-powered robot in China led a strike with his mechanical colleagues

And Finally

For as much as we pour scorn – justified scorn – upon those who consider themselves ‘addicted’ to British politics, we’re not immune to a dabble every now and then, but we go for something stronger: Australian politics, which is Westminster intrigue in freebase form.

Where do you even begin? Their taste for backroom assassinations make the 1922 Committee look like UN peacekeepers; their MPs are ruder, cruder and loopier than we could ever hope to elect. Take Troy Barwell, for one, former Member of the Western Australian Parliament, who in 2008 was reprimanded – but not suspended – for seat-sniffing in the chamber. It took a ‘mental breakdown’ for him to resign in 2014, brought upon by imminent news of his eleven driving offences – charges made worse by the fact that he was the region’s Transport Minister.

It’s hard to pinpoint who Australia’s strangest Prime Minister has been: onion-munching Wario Blair, Tony Abbott; Edwardian cosplay merchant, Robert Menzies, or the one that literally disappeared while swimming, Harold Holt. But today, we’re going to shine our spotlight on Bob Hawke, who famously set an 11 second yard-of-ale chugging record while studying at Oxford in the fifties.

Hawke’s political legacy is plenty contested, but his pinting credentials remained undimmed all the way through his days, topping off with this fantastic clip from the last year of his life, 2019, where the 89-year-old Hawke ‘skulls a pint for the nation’.

A nation like no other, truly.

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That’s it for this week, we’ll be back again on Tuesday. Remember: subscribe now and you’ll get Issue 21 and Issue 22 within a week. Five magazines for the price of four. Moments like this don’t come around often. Blink and you’ll miss it. Etc. Speak soon.

All the best,

TF