Dispatch Magazine

For much of the evening, the Caliph sat quietly at the high table, his head bowed, breaking pose only when it was time to deliver his speech. Even then he was subdued. “Is there any benefit to holding this event?” he asked the 600 seated guests of his Surrey Kingdom. Hundreds of thousands more were watching on TVs in Lahore, Lagos and beyond. When he launched the first Peace Symposium in 2004, Hazrat Mirza Masroor had been the Fifth Caliph of the Ahmadiyya for little more than a year.

The first thing you see when you exit the station at Burton is the little glimmering tip of a cooling chimney from one of the breweries. Is it a working brewery, or just some leftover infrastructure from the time when Burton was Britain’s beating beer heart? It is hard, really, to ever know. Walk around Burton and everything is named after beer: Cooper this, Brewer that. There are brass studs in the pavements that demarcate where each brewery was allowed to trade up to back in the day.

Before you reach Amanda and Ben King's RV, you have to pass a wooden fisherman in a bright yellow raincoat. He stands at the entrance to Fisherman's Cove Campground in Hunt's Cove, Nova Scotia, welcoming visitors with the sort of kitschy maritime charm that feels lifted straight from a postcard. Beyond him, a gravel road runs towards the shoreline. On quiet days, you can just about hear the Atlantic before you see it. The Kings have lived here, on Nova Scotia’s south shore, since August 2024.

Hello, and welcome to the Weekend Dispatch. Inside this week: Pink ladies, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and a sauerkraut diet. Let’s get to it. We started the week up in Sheffield, where Miles Ellingham profiled John Hemmingham, captain of the England Band — the group of trumpeters and drummers who follow the nation's football team everywhere they go. It's a beautifully observed piece about patriotism, loyalty and one man's attempt to wrestle with his Englishness. You can read it here.

In the summer of 2019, Boris Johnson arrived in Brixham bearing ice creams and promises. By then, Britain's fishermen had become the unlikely folk heroes of Brexit, their boats and harbours freighted with all the emotionally charged language of taking back control. Johnson toured the fish market, posed for photographs with local figures, and emerged from the Rockfish restaurant clutching hake and chips, grinning like a chimpanzee.

Sheffield is buckling with English heat, English noise, English paranoia. An elderly man gazes through a telescopic lens towards a church spire, observing a peregrine falcon as it feeds its young while, down in the yard, four topless day-drinkers roll around play fighting. Little sticky notes on the inside of a ground floor window have been decorated with neat cursive slogans: “diversity is not our strength”, “no one is coming to save you”.

They said it quietly. They said it admiringly. They said it poolside at weathered hotels and at breakfasts at cafes over churros. They said it in Facebook groups. They said it for small talk. They said it at pubs named after Britain’s dead heroes and in the libraries of the mansions off Main Street. They all said it. Journalists and politicians. Lawyers and businessmen. Ordinary Gibraltarians. They said it before I even asked, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Arjun used to spend his nights partying. He had short hair, a clean-shaven face, and little interest in religion. “I was big into weed, smoking it every day. And then come Friday, it was all about chasing the weekend’s motive.” It is difficult to picture him that way now. A compact navy-blue turban is wound tightly around his head; a dense beard falls to his chest. He is slightly shy. “I was lost,” he says. “I had no direction, no goals. I didn’t see anything bigger than myself, nothing beyond tomorrow.

In 2023, the Brussels-Capital Region commissioned a new slogan for Belgium’s capital. The process was quintessentially Brusselian: an 18-month consultation exercise, followed by a bespoke “brand toolkit”, culminating in a glossy launch party. The whole thing cost €600,000. The slogan they settled on was “perfectly imperfect” — a phrase that managed, in its own perfectly imperfect way, to glide over the increasingly harsh realities of life beyond the city’s diplomatic quarter.

It’s 8pm on a Monday in Scarborough, and Yusuf Sefa is exhaling, a lot. He’s only had the chippy open for three hours, but it exhausts him in every way: his body is tired, his mind is tired. This wasn’t the life he imagined when he moved to Britain five years ago, an audacious 25-year-old from the Turkish-Syrian borderlands, looking for a new career in a new country. During that post-Covid summer of 2021, he had his first taste of fish and chips in London, and it stayed with him.