What the newsletter was
Before forums, before Facebook groups, before anyone had a phone worth having, information about Angeles City travelled by email. Somebody who lived there wrote down what was happening, and everybody else read it on a dial-up connection in a spare room eight thousand miles away and planned a trip around it. That was the newsletter. It was called Harry the Horse because that was the name I signed things with, and it opened every month with “welcome to my stable”.
It was not journalism. It was one bloke’s account of a small, strange, cheerful town, with the prices written down and the Mail Bag at the bottom.
The four ages of the stable
1999–2002 · The email years
It started as an email to a handful of blokes back home. No website, no pictures, just a monthly wall of text about which bar had opened on Fields Avenue, what the beer cost, and who’d been robbed by a taxi driver at NAIA. The sign-off — “welcome to my stable” — stuck, and so did the name.
2002–2006 · The website years
harrythehorse.com went up with a hit counter, a guestbook and a front page you could see the table borders on. This was the peak: monthly issues, the Mail Bag running to a dozen letters, bar reviews, and the odd furious email from a bar owner who disagreed with a review. The forums hadn’t taken over yet and this was how you found out what was happening in Angeles.
2006–2011 · The long fade
Forums and then Facebook did what forums and Facebook do. Issues went from monthly to occasional to annual. The last proper one went out around 2011. The domain kept pointing somewhere for years afterwards, and the links kept coming — which is the only reason you can still find your way here.
2026– · Back in the stable
Rebuilt as a full guide rather than a newsletter, because that’s what people actually need now: bar by bar, hotel by hotel, priced and dated. The Mail Bag came back with it. Same voice, better spelling, and photographs that aren’t 640 pixels wide.
What survived
The Mail Bag, which is running again and takes the same kind of letters it always did. The habit of putting a date next to every price. And the archive itself, in the Internet Archive, where the old front pages sit with their hit counters still frozen at whatever number they reached in 2007.
If you want the proper history of the street rather than of the newsletter, that’s a different page: the history of Fields Avenue, from the air base through Pinatubo to what stands there now.
