Off The Fence: Shakespeare's Sister

And some rotten Coren content

Apr 23, 2024

Dear Readers,

Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that is occasionally if not frequently as clever as it thinks it is. Issue 19 should now have arrived on the doorsteps of subscribers – please do send us some snaps of where it ends up. Have a gander at this simmering image of our pints correspondent for starters.

So far we’ve seen 19 in the gossipy backstacks of The London Library and struggling through a sea of gilets to get a pint of Guinness in a 20-minute queue at The Devonshire. We’ve also reached westward, with a sighting in Killarney, and southward – proving that the mag is the perfect companion for a blustery 99 with a Flake on Margate pier. Rhys Thomas doesn’t want to take the magazine out of its packaging. Here’s Issue 19 with some parsnip wine, and some cauliflower seeds and providing a doormat surprise.

The best photo of the magazine will receive a bottle of Bollinger, a lovely Champagne. The last winner of the prize, Nick Pearce, lives in Georgia, and doesn’t drink, so his aunt has collected it (and she doesn’t drink either). It does also work as a decorative item so we do encourage the teetotalers to join the soaks in winging through snaps.

Keep them coming, and if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do so for your own good and so you can join in this safari. A year’s print subscription starts at just £19.99, which is notably less than a London Library subscription, and only slightly more than a pint at The Devonshire.

There has been an extraordinarily generous thread about the magazine from Patrick Galbraith, in which he hails the latest issue. Please do read and share it.

Now, onto the juice. This week we’ve got dispatches from Warren Street’s premier sex club and the Telegraph’s premier feature writer named Ed Cumming. There’s also Giles Coren dipping his toe into TikTok fame and fortune and 146 Hinge questions courtesy of Dolly Alderton. Let's get into it.

The Rest Is Prophylactics

If you somehow missed it, in our latest edition we sent Bron Maher to investigate how the nude pundits at Vault 139 are going to vote in the upcoming election. The Warren Street sex club did not disappoint and, alongside offering free packets of lube and condoms to its guests, it also provided a rich array of political opinions. For the naked truth, you can have a read here. It was an absolute delight for us to see this piece featured in Popbitch and Playbook, the sweetest spot in British journalism.

Everything I Know About Hinge

In other news, we have learned that our 146 Questions with… Dolly Alderton piece has been ingeniously repurposed. The Sunday Times’ resident agony aunt has unintentionally been helping our reader's with their dating lives, in a most unexpected way. One TF superfan has been using the questions we posed to the author to add new life to his Hinge profile, with the new prompts yielding great results, or so we hear.

The Real Housewives of Tangiers

We delude ourselves that you come here for the deep dives and dispatches. For the most popular thing we’ve ever published here is our archive of Brian Sewell links, which we ran a couple of years back. If you’re not familiar with the deceased art historian – a man who is venerated in our office – allow us to provide a brief refresher:

For some time, we’ve been looking for someone equal to Brian, and we might have found it with Bill Willis, a lavishly talented American interior designer known by his friends as ‘the queen of the queens of cocaine’. Sadly, there’s very little footage of Willis himself, but his friends made this documentary of his life, which is fascinating in of itself and contains a couple of truly unbelievable moments. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to watch the film.

Streetwear Stylee

This Giles Coren x Topjaw video really should come with a health warning. The 54-year-old’s outfit is hazardous enough: an APC logo t-shirt and a pair of clunky Air Force Ones, kitted out like some try-hard 24-year-old. But, as ever, it’s his general patter and mien that grates. We sent the clip to our friend, Secret Chef, who wrote this memorable review of Coren some years ago, and they wrote back to say: ‘This really captures how unfunny he is in person.’

In Case You Missed It

Hundreds of thousands of miles of slender cables carry the internet across the bottom of the ocean. Josh Dzieza meets the people who put them there, in a fascinating piece for Verge.

Peniel Rajkumar with the pan of the week – an unholy skewering of Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism.

TF’s pint ombudsman Jimmy McIntosh asks whether it’s closing time for London’s pubs, for PoliticsHome.

Come for the headline 'Seagull Boy', nine, wins European screeching competition, stay for the sensational video of same.

And Finally

Timeline buffeted by tedious handwringing over Englishness as it relates to George of Lydda, England’s notional and nominal saint? Well, luckily, today’s a great one to throw yourself into the joys of an English icon who actually set foot in England.

Obscure poet and playwright William Shakespeare was born 460 years ago this day and, never ones to gatekeep, we’d recommend his work quite heartily if you can search it out. The Bard packed quite a bit into his 52 years; at least 39 plays, 150+ sonnets, and the first recorded usage of more than 1700 words and hundreds of phrases. (Although some of those, like ‘Frenchwoman’ and ‘bedroom’ we reckon stretch it slightly).

The work itself has been near endlessly adapted of course, and luckily there’s a boffo batch of bardery available for free on the BBC archive, which hosts over 1,000 videos of adaptations, documentaries, and learning resources from primary to university level.

YouTube, too, has reams of old Beeb content preserved in easily shareable fashion, like this sterling production of King Lear from 1982, featuring a superannuated Laurence Olivier and a whippersnapperish John Hurt.

Or Willard White’s 1990 turn as Othello, aided by Ian McKellen as Iago.

But we’ll leave you with this all-star cast doing Hamlet’s ‘To be, or not to be’ speech, aided by a not-at-all-wooden-and-mortifying guest appearance by the RSC’s nominal patron himself.

That’s it for this week, if you’d like to speak to us about an order, please email support@the-fence.com. We’ve got a double helping next week, which is something to look forward to.

All the best,