Off The Fence: One-Star Hotels in Yakutsk

And the latest winner of our champagne competition.

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Off The Fence, a newsletter with magazine characteristics. The world awaits the launch of Issue 24 – give it a couple more weeks – but in the meantime, we’ve had the final two entries to our quarterly Bollinger tombola.

One long time subscriber took us out, gently so as to avoid splashing, into Newbury Lido last week, making use of the sunshine which tortured the city over the last week (may it never go above 30 degrees again). Another climbed higher still, waving their copy on the rocks of Buckhorn Mountain across the beautiful Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. If this were the competition for Issue 22, which had a big mountain on it, then we would have our winner.

A close runner-up

There is no such mountain on this latest edition, and so our bottle of champers is going elsewhere: to Alistair Scott, who took us to the stages of both the Royal Albert Hall and Royal Festival Hall on consecutive days. How can you top that? Maybe Wembley, or the Maracanã. And considering the amount of South American athletes we have subscribed to this publication, it’s a surprise we’re yet to receive those entries. Anyway, congrats to Alistair, and thank you to everyone who submitted.

A worthy winner

We are working as busily as we ever have done, as we expand into the multi-platform behemoth that we always dreamed of becoming when we first manned the printing presses six years ago. The latest edition of Capital Letter, our fortnightly roundup of How to Live in London Right Now, did sensationally well, with the next edition primed to rock your weekend plans when it lands this coming Thursday. Our first podcast series, Money’s No Object, is now reaching thousands of listeners (more on that below), and this time next week, we can finally break our biggest-ever announcement. And that’s not even factoring in the launch of Issue 24, which is the greatest, smartest, silliest and smuttiest edition we’ve ever released.

All of which is to say: support us. Buy a subscription, buy a tote, buy a single issue – although only five of our back-issues aren’t sold out these days. If you like what we do, and you want to see more of it, there is no better way to keep us going than putting your money down, and getting four gorgeous magazines in exchange for it. Tap the graphic below, or the button lower still, and get a sub for as low as £24.99 a year.

Appeals made and champers won, it’s time to get stuck into the meat of matters. On the docket this week, we have whisky-swilling Soviet spies, ambitious art terrorists and harrowing Japanese television. But first, an assemblage of thoughts from newly minted debut author Oli Basciano, on the far-flung fleabag hotels he has known and loved while compiling his first book.

Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn

I gave up on Airbnb long ago. It’s bad for cities and too unreliable. Give me a receptionist, however surly, in whatever fleapit, any day or night. Over the five years I spent researching my book Outcast, a history of leprosy past and present, I have become a connoisseur of the mothballed corners of Booking.com. I even came to appreciate the website’s crappy design, its ludicrous claims that deserted hotels were ‘selling out fast’ and the image galleries in which stickybeaks would report a scuff mark by the lightswitch with a blurry phone snap.

It was through this unlikely portal that I located a hotel in Yakutsk, Siberia, the coldest city on earth – the roads built on permafrost where the residents leave their cars ticking over permanently so they don't freeze up. I was there for the story of a Victorian nurse, fraught with guilt over her sexuality, who exiled herself among leprosy patients. My room had a view of the Lenin statue in the square, from which I was told a kid hung himself when the Soviet Union collapsed.

Then there was the pensione close to a leprosarium in rural Romania, the last in Europe, where I stayed with my driver. On being recognised by the owners, he revealed himself to be a beloved former sitcom star, down on his luck after investing all his money into a Bucharest pizza restaurant. We watched Romanian league football on TV that night, while our host took surreptitious photos to share with his friends.

Such places are the dank substrata of accommodation that journalists find themselves in. Some, by the nature of the story, have been mythologised. Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, ostensibly a memoir of the the Angolan Civil War, is as much a paean to Dona Cartagina, the house keeper of the Hotel Tivoli who stayed on even as Kapuściński became her last guest and Luanda a ghost town. During the Vietnam War, the opium-partial proprietor of Saigon’s Royal Hotel, a former French Legionnaire named Jean Ottavj, apparently became a key trader in information: cognac and Viet Cong intel proffered over the bar. During the US invasion of Iraq, Robert Fisk, the legendary war hack, with trademark disdain for his peers, railed against the ‘hotel journalism’ of those who feared leaving the relative safety of their rooms.

Sometimes the hotel is more than just an anecdote. In Mozambique, I travelled through Cabo Delgado, the country’s northernmost province, seeking out communities whose link to key medication has been cut off by the ongoing Islamist insurgency. My security advisor and I stayed at places I thought best left unrecorded, despite the pleas from hosts that future guests would ‘love’ my feedback. Though a little cleaner, Raphael’s in Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado, was far more depressing. A marbled resort built with optimism that the city’s beaches and reefs might attract monied holidaymakers, it now attracts the account departments of the various Western oil and mining companies sensing opportunity amid the violence. I was one of the few guests not in fatigues; English, Afrikaans and Russian-speaking security personnel picked over the moribund breakfast buffet just as their employers picked over the land’s natural resources.

A hankering for homeliness soon prevails, and sometimes you get lucky. As Akira Ota showed me the guest accommodation of the Kikuchi Keifuen Sanatorium in Kumamoto, Japan (not on Booking.com), he explained the former patients had paid for it themselves with their government compensation. Ota and his neighbours were taken away from their families young, dragged from their homes with no chance of discharge. They slept in dingy communal dorms to which masked and rubber gloved medical workers would march through in their boots, the height of rudeness in Japanese etiquette. Given this history, the little rack of communal slippers at the entrance felt the most poignant of gestures. After the horror of forced segregation, a bitterly-won calm has settled on the site: a home the patients never wanted, but they made nonetheless.

Go and buy Oliver Basciano’s very good first book at Waterstones.

Stacked to the Rafters

We were delighted to make our very first venture into the world of readings, at a wonderful event hosted by our good friends at Stack Magazines last week. First to trot out onto the pitch in Fence orange was Ella Fox-Martens, reading her superlative essay on crossing the world during Covid to first meet, and then immediately move in with, her boyfriend. Next came Jack Beaumont, with an exclusive feature from the upcoming issue which you’ll be hearing lots more about in the weeks to come.

Thank you to every subscriber who came down, there were a good few of you and it was great to see so many fans of what we do. It was also great to see the audience that exists for independent publishing, as well as to catch up with some of the head honchos of our favourite fellow mags: Offal, Vittles and The Toe Rag. All in all, a fantastic evening – and not our last.

Smoke Me a Kipper

In 1995, a British artist called Harry Kipper was kidnapped on the Italo-Slovene border; the claimants to the kidnapping, none other than former Watford and AC Milan striker Luther Blissett. Except he wasn’t. In fact, Harry Kipper didn’t even exist in the first place, and Blissett had no idea, never mind involvement. The whole story was, in fact, traceable to a small band of ‘art terrorists’: the London Psychogeographical Association.

Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, newly minted TF contributor and author of the acclaimed debut novel Shibboleth, reveals some of their stranger plans – like announcing that the UK’s 1995 Venice Biennale submission would be a live chimp – as well as some of the ideas that drove its founders: a rejection of auteurism, a love of mischief and a lightly worn occultism. Read the whole mad history of one of Britain’s strangest cultural footnotes right here.

Stars of CCTV

Mark Rowswell did it by playing a ‘sassy peasant’ on Chinese state television. Chris de Burgh simply invited himself to play a massive unauthorised (and thus cancelled) gig in Tehran. Rutherford B Hayes chose the obvious pathway of giving Paraguay 60% of its current landmass by settling a land dispute.

Read these tales – and for the bold, a potential How-To – of how these and others became massive celebrities on the other side of the world.

A Hopeless Place

A whole week has passed, and yet our toes have not fully uncurled after reading the horrors of Lotte Brundle’s excellent dispatch on London’s most basic night out: Hannah’s in Battersea. Even those present seemed to run the gamut of the five stages of grief in their justifications for attending:

Denial – ‘It’s not London. It’s Clapham’

Anger – ‘What is basic? You’re basic if you’re asking. Do we look basic?’

Bargaining – ‘I hope they play Sweet Caroline.’

Depression – ‘I can’t be fucked to go anywhere else.’

Radical Acceptance – ‘Have you met me? Look at my fucking shoes.’

Read here to avoid visiting.

Oban Hymns

‘The story of his defection is straight out of a John le Carré novel’. Oleg Gordievsky was the highest ranking KGB officer to ever defect to the west. He escaped Russia in a plan that involved a Safeway and a Harrods bag, a mars bar and a dirty nappy. This plan not only led Oleg to Britain but, eventually, to The Merry Harriers, an isolated 16th century pub near the village of Hambledon. Here he became a regular and met Colin Stoneley, its publican.

When Colin’s uncle Vic – who had been a Desert rat and part of the secretive ‘Phantom’ regiment of GCHQ – died in 2009, Oleg beckoned Colin over in the homely surrounds of the Harriers. ‘I am sorry to hear about your uncle,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew him. He was a very brave man’ – intonements that caused Stoneley to question all he ever knew about the quiet relative he had known. He writes for us tenderly and skilfully about these revelations, and you can read them here.

Slumdog EuroMillionaire

Ava-Santina – formerly of LBC and now of PoliticsJOE – is the latest in a growing line of wonderful guests on our new podcast that asks the simple question: what you would do if you won the big one? For Ava-Santina, the EuroMillions are not enough to contain her ambitious plans, which places the horror that is One Commercial Street at the centre of her aim – a building whose developers put in a ‘poor door’ for the affordable housing residents they were forced to accommodate. She talks to our host Joe Bishop about becoming the coolest landlord possible, all the very real sex happening all the time in Westminster and the industrial cooking power of the nonna – ‘there’s no end to how much food the nonna wants to cook’.

Listen here, or catch it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Look on Our Totes, Ye Mighty, And Despair

On our website our beautiful collection of totes are still available to purchase (along with a series of exceptionally reasonably priced subscription options to The Fence, but hey who’s counting). One such tote has, in fact, recently begun its journey all the way to Australia, and they were flying off our table at the wonderful Stack event last week. It’s no surprise, they are the UK’s Only Tote after all.

They are available along with the last of our beautiful maps drawn by Paul Cox of Vanity Fair and Folio First Editions fame. It’s your guide to the pride of Merseyside.

The only map in the world with both Ian Botham and Johnny Vegas on (RRP £40)

Elephant Talk

Sharp eyes will notice that this newsletter, and our magazine, is brimming with excellent insider long reads. But it’s not enough; it's never enough. We want our cup to overfloweth onto the floor and out to the street, staining the shoes of passers-by.

If you have a good behind-the-scenes perspective to share, we want to hear it. You do not have to be a seasoned penner of features or a government insider to get a look in – the phenomenal Hotel Britannica from Issue 23 was from a first-time writer, and we have at least one debutant in each edition. If you have peered behind closed doors, email editorial@the-fence.com and let’s tell your story together.

In Case You Missed It

Photographer Seamus Murphy has returned to Nablus after 20 years to survey and contrast the city he knew, and the city he finds today.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan traps the French President’s finger.

An assortment of Trumps have bought one of the last undeveloped Mediterranean islands and it's full of unexploded ordnance.

The research project to map the human genome was not without fascinating controversy. Its head archivist says the 13 year programmes work may now be inaccessible.

Snoop Dogg still cannot stop using AI.

The Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) have set up a livestream over a bald eagle nest.

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And Finally

We’re so used to plumbing the depths of the iPlayer archive and calling the discoveries our own that we get startled when other publications start showcasing bits of non-fiction from the national broadcaster. That said, it is heartening for all fans of good factual programming to see BBC Storyville’s latest documentary release, The Contestant, attract mainstream attention from the Daily Mail and the London (née Evening) Standard.

It really is a mindblowing documentary, covering one of the most disturbing social phenomena to arise in the entire 20th century – and that is no exaggeration. The Contestant focuses on the story of Tomoaki Hamatsu, a struggling comedian with an obloidine, Barnacle Jim-esque face, who is conned into living, naked and filmed, in a studio apartment for fifteen months, subsisting only on what he can win in magazine raffles, for an audience of 17 million TV viewers watching his descent into inhumanity. The result is harrowing in every way; if it wasn’t for the fact that Hamatsu’s participation was voluntary – at least on paper – this would be a story of kidnap and trafficking, yet it’s more a story about audience complicity in televisual cruelty.

While the strangeness of Japanese television has beguiled us second-hand for forty years, from Clive James commentating clips of Za Gaman, to Banzai! and Takeshi’s Castle, there’s less attention paid to the gentler, softer end of their output. So let us close with a truly inscrutable short series from state broadcaster NHK: this is Texico, an educational series intended to teach you the fundamentals of computer programming through a series of impossible riddles. None of the episodes are even slightly about computers, or programming, but they make for hypnotising ten-minute viewing, if only for inducing the feeling that a toddler must have when they learn about shapes for the first time.

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Ba-da-bing, there we go, newsletter delivered on time and at length yet again, and what a corker we hope it was. If you agree, hit that heart below and leave us a like, or even a nice comment. Subscribe to Capital Letter now, and get your sweep of recommendations delivered on Thursday. Sign up to Money’s No Object on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, new episode landing tomorrow morning. And one more thing: Kent’s shingle headland of Dungeness receives so little rainfall that geomorphologists class it as the UK’s only true desert. Catch you next week.

All the best,

TF