In a busy maternity ward, first-time father Dan meets Jada, a dad welcoming his fifth – no, sixth? – child into the world. Dan and Jada come from very different places: both called Glasgow. Dan is a successful TV writer with a townhouse in the West End and a shiny Tesla ready to drive his wife and baby home. Jada is a hustling, small-time criminal who is already planning how to separate Dan from some of the luxuries Jada has never been able to enjoy in his tiny flat in a Brutalist sixties council block.
Both men find that the birth of their sons has fired their ambitions. Dan plans to walk away from his saccharine TV success and finally knuckle down to writing that novel he always felt he had in him. While, for Jada, it’s the opportunity for one last get-rich-quick scheme – ripping off a local airport. When a tragedy occurs, their worlds are brought closer than either could ever have imagined – close enough that it could mean destruction for both of them … (Canongate Books)
Born in 1966, John Niven is a Scottish author and screenwriter. His books include Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs, The F**k-It List and The Second Coming.
John meets Jack at Scott's in Mayfair
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I've never been to Scott's Seafood Restaurant in Mayfair, but I'm very pleased that my next guest has chosen it since I've had it on my radar for many years. And it's a beautiful evening to be here, actually sat outside on the terrace. My next guest is the screenwriter and novelist John Niven, with whom I'll be talking about his 11th novel, the Fathers. John, it's great to have you here.
John Niven [00:00:41]:
It's good to be here, Jack. Thank you. Always nice to be at Scores.
Jack Aldane [00:00:44]:
And you're a regular here?
John Niven [00:00:45]:
I wouldn't go that far. Not the cheapest place to be chained down every night, but probably more than I should, to be fair.
Jack Aldane [00:00:52]:
Well, to be fair, I was inside earlier and I was saying to somebody, oh, I think the author's quite familiar with this place. And they said something, they mumbled something like, yeah, he was here, which made it sound like he had been here just the night before.
John Niven [00:01:03]:
I know, last time, you. Couple of weeks ago. I like. Lovely. Sean's on tonight. Who works. Who works the door there?
Jack Aldane [00:01:10]:
Yeah, Sean, the doorman.
John Niven [00:01:11]:
Sean's great also.
Jack Aldane [00:01:12]:
Is he also a Scot? I thought so, yeah.
John Niven [00:01:15]:
Yeah, I've been here forever.
Jack Aldane [00:01:16]:
It's an institution, isn't it, Scott?
John Niven [00:01:18]:
Yeah, well, it's, it's, you know, it does a few things very well, you.
Jack Aldane [00:01:21]:
Know, in particular, seafood, which I admitted to you slightly cautiously over email, I'm not a huge fan of. And you responded with an email in all cabs, you don't eat seafood.
John Niven [00:01:32]:
I just always find it staggering when people over the age of 13 claim they don't eat certain things.
Jack Aldane [00:01:37]:
Yeah, I'm really not fussy, as you know. I wouldn't have launched a podcast in which I go to restaurants if I was fussy with food. But as I think I described to you something about the insectile appearance of a lot of seafood, crabs, lobsters, et cetera. For me, that doesn't make me think, yeah, I want to take a bite out of you. I'm obviously in a minority, though. Let's talk about your latest book, John, your 11th novel, the Fathers, which I just finished reading over the weekend, thoroughly enjoyed it. It really fucked up my Monday, actually, that novel, reading the chapter, which, without giving away any spoilers, is the saddest turning point in the plot for the main character, one of the main characters, Dan Chambers and his wife Grace. And I couldn't really stop thinking about it for the entire day.
Jack Aldane [00:02:20]:
So that was Monday Squared. Just took all the blues and made them much, much worse. So thanks for that.
John Niven [00:02:26]:
Sorry for that. Sorry about that, Jack.
Jack Aldane [00:02:28]:
But it is both a sa. Incredibly funny, as many of your novels are incredibly funny, with flecks of anger everywhere. I've learned a lot of Glaswegian slang in the course of reading this book. Is this book, would you say in part a love letter to Glasgow?
John Niven [00:02:44]:
In part, definitely, yeah. Well, the Welsh of an expression called the Hirath, which means as you get older, certainly as you get into your 50s, a sort of nostalgia, a longing for the place you come from. And so some years back I bought a house in Ayrshire, so we're up there a lot in the coast. I play a lot of golf, but I do miss Glasgow specifically too. I had been trying to convince my wife to move back to Glasgow in the last. Oh really, three or four years. I'd sort of convinced her to go and look at a few houses and we'd been looking in the West End, so I'd been spending a bit of time in the West End. I'd forgotten that if you take a five minute walk from Highland where there's all these beautiful big Victorian townhouses, within 5 minutes you can in partake, which is much more rough and ready, you know.
John Niven [00:03:32]:
So that idea, you know, and stuck in my head of kind of a novel where two guys from these very different Glasgows was kind of forced to. To rub along for some reason.
Jack Aldane [00:03:43]:
Those guys, Dan Chambers, who we've already mentioned, and Jada Hamilton.
John Niven [00:03:46]:
Yeah. So that. And then that was kind of all I had for a while. And then the other instant, which I'll allude to because I don't want to know spoilers because it's quite a big one in the novel. But my daughter, who's now 7, when she was about 218 months maybe, nearly choked to death on a peach, flat peach stone, which is completely my fault. I was eating a flat peach, she wanted a bite and I sort of let her take a bite and I was reading the Sunday papers and wasn't really paying attention. Before I knew it, she'd snarfled half of it, including the stone, which promptly stuck in her windpipe. And there was like maybe 50, I guess it was no more than 15 seconds before she managed to swallow it.
John Niven [00:04:28]:
But there was 15 seconds where she was panicking and she clearly couldn't breathe. And I remember just this jet of panic and terror, you know, it was 15 seconds, but it felt like a month, you know, of just horror. And thankfully, as I say, she swallowed okay. But with such a seething moment of pure terror that once the adrenaline had burned off and I'd go over it, you know, I knew that one day that moment was going to work itself into my fiction somehow. Wow. And normally takes a few years until the experience distills down enough for you to write about with some detachment. So sure enough, yeah, a few years later, there we were. We kind of.
John Niven [00:05:17]:
I knew that the. The idea that how could I get these two guys together on the books who would normally never meet in the course of their daily lives? And it became the idea that, oh, well, why? The great leveler in this country is the nhs, you know. And so, yeah, Dan, Dan Chambers, the novel is very successful and certainly has the money to go privately, but he's a bit of an old school Scottish socialist type. Who wouldn't do that? So they have him and his wife, you know, the compromise is they have the kid in the National Health, but they managed to pay for a private room at the hospital. And it's in front of the maternity ward that he meets Jada, who's. He's celebrating the birth of his fifth or sixth child. He's not quite sure. There's five or six moms involved certainly.
John Niven [00:06:00]:
And they get talking and so these two guys who kind of normally would never be and each other's lives wind up being in each other's lives.
Jack Aldane [00:06:09]:
You mentioned there the two characters whose paths cross from two sides of the track in Glasgow. This is quite an amazing novel, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean, let's, let's just talk very briefly about that. I don't want to mix my color palette too much here in terms of shows that I produce, but.
John Niven [00:06:22]:
No, no, I, you know, the. Again, Amos did it back in the day in Notting Hill, not far from where we're sitting now, where he would take two guys, one from a sort of. One from the sort of townhouse chic end of Nottingham, one from the sort of crumbling council block which I lived in Notting hill in the 1995, I moved to Notting Hill. I think it was a year after the information came out and I remember being amazed that there was still really rough pubs around there and sort of, you know, Round about All Saints Road, Lanka, there were areas you wouldn't want to. Streets you wouldn't want to go down after dark. Of course, that's all gone now. It's all massively changed. So that was another reason to set the book in Glasgow, because I thought you still do have those kind of, you know, different communities existing quite close together.
John Niven [00:07:11]:
I'm Glasgow, but yeah, the influence of Amos, where you take in London Fields and you'd have Guy and, you know, Nicholas, all these characters rubbing along in that area or in information. You have, you know, similar set up.
Jack Aldane [00:07:26]:
Well, putting London Fields to one side. Then the Glaswegian element of this. Where do you find the comic elements from things which to most Glaswegians are just part of the scenery, I guess.
John Niven [00:07:35]:
You know, I haven't lived there for a long time, so you cannot come back with a fresh comic eye. And I. Well, also, I love making things up like that. Kind of close enough to the reality, you know, but it's more the kind of shops that Jada supplies with them, knockoff booze, you know. So Jada, you know, the first couple of people to. To read the book, thankfully they got. The first feedback I got was all my. From my agent George says, oh, my God, Jada's a comic creation for the ages, you know.
Jack Aldane [00:08:13]:
Absolutely.
John Niven [00:08:14]:
Because those guys, they're always. I mean, poor Dan. Dan's pretty much a straight man for a lot of the novel. To Jada, Jada's just a lot more fun, you know. And to give an insight into kind of how books are written. Sometimes when you start. When you start falling for a character, I started looking for reasons to, you know, as I was getting into the third draft of the book, for reasons, just to give Jade a little more fun to do. For instance, the scene in the pub where Jada beats the outer Edinburgh sort of rugby pawns type.
John Niven [00:08:46]:
That came quite late in the book. It just was a. It was just like wanting to give Jada a bit more fun games, you know.
Jack Aldane [00:08:54]:
And that's the thing you find yourself. I found myself becoming very warm towards Jada and more interested in everything he did versus everything that Dan did, I suppose, because Dan is more familiar.
John Niven [00:09:04]:
You know, I run across Dan's every day of a life.
Jack Aldane [00:09:06]:
Right. Exactly, exactly. You know, media.
John Niven [00:09:08]:
Media success.
Jack Aldane [00:09:11]:
He's a writer for a very successful crime series called McAllister.
John Niven [00:09:15]:
Here's an interesting thing that kind of happens through the novel or these guys are. There's a parabola where they cross paths, where they cross trajectories. In a way, because Dan. There's always a suspicion for Dan that he can have sold his talent out. What little talent he had, he came up with a very successful but sort of bland crime show, you know, which has now been running for a long, long time and has become his, sort of became his life's work. And he knows that it's perhaps not the highest quality offering. There's one for the housewives sort of thing and the grannies, and he's wanting to kill it off and maybe do work. He feels more equal to his real talent, so.
John Niven [00:09:58]:
Quite sure what that is? Yeah. He's kind of thinking he might write a novel. But the problem for Dan is he hasn't really get anything to write about because he sold the show pretty much straight out of university. And then by the time he was 30, was quite wealthy, successful and has remained so. So what do you write about? You know, art comes from struggle and grief. And then here comes Jada and here comes these events in his life where he does end up. I mean, the price is horrific, but he does end up. You suspect that if the book went on, Dan was actually going to set about writing a pretty powerful, if not harrowing, novel or movie, you know, with J.
John Niven [00:10:35]:
Also, it was important that I didn't want Jada just to be a caricature, a cartoon. Also, beware the. The writer who comes heavy with the backstory. So it was a case of just giving Jade a few moments to breathe throughout the novel, where you kind of got a wee insight into how Jada was parented and how Jada was brought up and, you know, the fact that he's a functioning parent of any kind at all, sort of medical, given where he's come from, you know.
Jack Aldane [00:11:01]:
Did you know Jada Hamilton? Have you met Jada Hamilton?
John Niven [00:11:04]:
A Jada? Yeah, yeah. I mean. I mean, not to put to a finer pointer, had I kind of not discovered reading and books, my school was full of jaders and fate had taken a slightly different wobble. I could have been a Jada. You know, my brother was a Jada up to a point. And, yeah, a lot of. A lot of that. I would say there's maybe only small handful of me and my friends from school who weren't Jadas.
John Niven [00:11:31]:
You know, there was a lot. There was more Jadas, a lot more jaders than Dan's.
Jack Aldane [00:11:35]:
At my school, as we've already kind of alluded to, Dan is a successful careerist, very, very wealthy, however, has struggled to have kids, has gone through, I think, seven Rounds of IVF before they eventually have their son Tom. And they meet in the hospital, he and Jada, where very quickly he susses out who Jada is and vice versa really. But Jada smokes, drinks, has umpteen number of kids by so many women he can barely keep count. And in terms of fatherhood, the main theme of this novel doesn't really place much value or have much of a sense of what it means to be a father. Meanwhile, Dan's running around in a constant state of low lying anxiety and panic about getting everything wrong. What did you want to convey about fatherhood in the fathers through these characters?
John Niven [00:12:19]:
I guess I was me. One of the points he's making about class is that often strikes me that the only the people who have the least fun in this country in the middle classes because it's all about kind of responsibility and you know, people who have a lot of f*****g fun are the very upper classes and the very low classes.
Jack Aldane [00:12:38]:
Very low classes.
John Niven [00:12:38]:
They don't have to care in both ways. You live in consequence free environments. Jada doesn't care if it's a bunch of kids outside wedlock, who cares? You know, somebody else is going to pick that slack up. Similarly, if you're very rich, you don't have to care about that.
Jack Aldane [00:12:52]:
You're a music connoisseur. And you must have read Marquis Smith's autobiography, Renegade, of course, in that he says exactly that the working class and the upper class, they're all right. The ones you want to be suspicious of are the middle classes because they have a suspicious need for control.
John Niven [00:13:07]:
And of course I find myself firmly stuck in that bracket myself. What I want to see if I wasn't so much that I came armed with, I want to say all these things about fatherhood. Although I did want to write about. There's quite a lot from Dan's POV about those sort of holy sort of sacred moments when you have your father to a very small child, the instinct to. The very deep instinct to protect and to nurture, you know, which of course Dan fails in spectacularly or he feels. He feels in spectacularly. So I wanted to dive into that because there's a lot of. Whether it's Rachel Kuska, there's a lot of books from the women's perspective about those sort of.
John Niven [00:13:50]:
But I didn't see a huge amount about dad. Dad's writing about the kind of joy of early fatherhood. So I wanted to put on, you know, and Dan's in a position where he has to work away from home a lot and he's missing the kid and he gets home and look, you know. And that was also an essential thing for the contrast, these two characters that Dan and Gracie's child so wanted and so desired and that they spend such a long time and so much money trying to have him. Whereas with Jada, it was like falling off a log, you know, you only have to look at. I think he phrases it more memorably himself than awful. His own sexual prowess. I can't remember how he does it, but it's fairly distasteful image.
John Niven [00:14:33]:
I'm sure it's funny because I've been so. Yeah, the book tour starts on Saturday, the 12th of July, and everything my hometown. And already, of course, I'm sort of preparing readings for that. And already that sort of sense that I'll. God, it's really got to be all Jada all night. And one of my terrible weaknesses. I like to make him laugh. As you know, Jack, you've experienced my sickening Playing to the crowds, playing to the cheap seats.
Jack Aldane [00:15:00]:
I was laughing all the way throughout. And as I think I told you, I was laughing from the very first few pages, which, to be fair to Dan, were all about him and his internal thoughts when he and Grace are trying fiercely to have this child. Gradually, Dan had come to hate anyone who managed the most natural thing in the world with complete ease, seemingly without planning, preparation or any thought whatsoever. The smugness with which your friends would announce, hey, we're pregnant, made him want to turn and walk away or just tell them to go f**k themselves. Dan remembers standing with Jack and Bob at a party, both of them knocking back the whiskeys while they bragged about the ease. Literally within hours of making the decision to start a family with which their partners had been knocked up, Dannard stood there clutching his tumbler of orange juice with a rictus grin on his face, all the while dreaming about taking them both out the back and standing on their f*****g heads. I mean, this is the tone that you can expect from an even novel anyway. But I think now looking back actually gives us a sense in which Dan has a calm exterior and a very civil manner about him.
Jack Aldane [00:16:00]:
But there's already darkness lurking within the character that comes out later when things really go south for him. Perhaps you can give us a reading for. From the novel.
John Niven [00:16:08]:
So the. The scene I was going to read is brief. It's early in the book, page 40 ish, when we're still in the hospital and Nicola, Jada's much younger partner, has been given a leaflet by the doctor about the idea of after you've had a baby and you have to sort of resume your sex life. And we've already probably intuited at this point that Jada isn't the most sensitive partner in this regard. Nicola opened the leaflet and began to read slowly, her lips softly moving under the section headed Going Home with Baby. There was a subsection titled Baby's Health. And then beneath that, smoking. Nicola read on for a bit.
John Niven [00:16:52]:
Jada scrolled in his phone. Jada says here we shouldn't smoke ruin the wane. Ay, well, I'm not going to smoke right in his cooper, am I? No, but it says we should be smoking the house. Aye, in another room. But no, it says here secondhand smoke is harmful for you and your baby. Nicola read on haltingly. Chemicals linger in the air and can still be in the room five hours later. Opening windows or smoking in another room or out of a window won't help Augie's peace with that shite.
John Niven [00:17:24]:
Nicola, when your baby is born and you bring them home, ask anyone who cares for them to smoke outside or stop completely. Don't talk pish outside. It's f*****g January, for f**k's sake. The baby woke with a start, crying. Shh. F**k sake, Gina, you've woke the way up. You should read this. She picked up the baby and cradled him with her left arm, soothing him.
John Niven [00:17:46]:
A weighty f**k. I've had a f*****g pitch delicious day. Look, Nicola, I've had a few ways, right? I've smoked all my days. They're all fine, eh? Nicola paused to consider this. The proposition that Jira's kids were all fine was certainly open to the debate, but she chose not to pursue this. She turned the page with her thumb and read on as Jada stood up and stretched. Anyway, all this shite's not going to put food on the table, is it? I need to get back to work. Jada, minding you make sure you put the weins caught up before you come and get us tomorrow.
John Niven [00:18:14]:
Aye aye, Nicholas. I had moved on to a section of the leaflet titled Returning to Intimacy. Sex may be difficult or painful after giving birth. If you don't feel like sex, you can find other ways of being intimate. Try lots of warm physical contact that doesn't have to lead to sex. This was obviously not a sentence or indeed a concept to much trouble Jada with. She modulated it. Jada says here we have to be careful for a wee while and bedlike.
John Niven [00:18:44]:
Jada picked up on her Euphemism and tact. He respected it. Mentally, he thanked her for it. He tenderly cupped her face. Don't worry, doll. No, my first rodeo just means your dung funnel's gonna take a pounding for a wee while. He turned back to Caden. Jaden.
John Niven [00:18:58]:
See you later, wee man. He ruffled the baby's hair and left. Ricola watched him go, shouldering his way across the ward with that swagger he had his nightmarish promise of vigorous anal sex ringing in her ears.
Jack Aldane [00:19:11]:
Nicola is a story of last minute triumph, let's just put it that way. And you only realize, I only realized by the end how much I ought to have been rooting for her the whole time. We were talking about class just then. It's very easy to make fun of the middle classes. Do you find it tricky to be funny about the working classes without seeming to ridicule them?
John Niven [00:19:33]:
I kind of. That's not. I mean, I still, as stupid as it may sound, sitting in Scots and Mayfair, I still feel working class. I am. I came from my father's natural. My mother was a cleaner. I grew up in a two bedroom council house in a Scottish council estate that never kind of leaves you. So it's not like.
John Niven [00:19:54]:
I certainly still feel in my bones more working class than middle class.
Jack Aldane [00:19:59]:
Is that why you'd like to move back to Glasgow?
John Niven [00:20:02]:
No, no, no, no, that's nothing to do that. That's just. I love the city and I cannot, I'm quite fancy in a nice big townhouse in the West End. No mortgage. I guess as you get to my age, one starts to think in terms of slimming down my responsibilities, increasing them. But also I've lived quite a profligate life, you know, I've had four children by three different women and I love them all dearly. And I'm very fortunate in that I'm on great terms with all of my X's and. But, you know, there's a fairly chunky price tag that comes with that, sort of.
John Niven [00:20:43]:
And I quite like, you know, I quite like to live well, too. So it's, you know, we have to work fairly hard. So I guess the Glasgow thing was part of a sort of a slight economy drive in my part. I was thinking, well, I could sell up being down south for 25 years. We could sail up and, you know. But, yeah, the weather is a thing.
Jack Aldane [00:21:00]:
Yeah.
John Niven [00:21:00]:
Jack, what can I tell you?
Jack Aldane [00:21:01]:
Well, fatherhood's price tag is certainly another theme of this book. Do you know what you'd like to order from Scott? Is it Ludicrously basic of me to want to know what the Great Scott's fish and chips is like.
John Niven [00:21:11]:
Not at all. If that's what you want to do, go down that road, mate. Could we have half a dozen of the Lindisfarne rocks to start and. And the zucchini flowers I'm going to share. And then you want the deep fried haddock.
Jack Aldane [00:21:26]:
That's right. Thank you.
John Niven [00:21:28]:
And I'll have the 16 ounce Dover sole. Fantastic. Thank you.
Jack Aldane [00:21:33]:
You were talking to me, John, about the increasing sense you have that literacy, particularly among male readers, where it's been shown to decline, leaves you feeling uncertain about the future of your trade. Do you worry that it's not going to reach its audience in the future? Do you worry that it's maybe not even reaching its audience now in the way you intended?
John Niven [00:21:53]:
I do worry that sometimes as a male novelist working where I am, the time and place I am, that you're writing for an increasingly diminishing audience that might not even be there in a decade because as we know, women by. I couldn't give you the start, but it's hugely out by men when it comes to fiction. Men tend to read non fiction. They read history, the biography. Women read novels. And as a male novelist, it's kind of terrifying where that might leave you in a little while.
Jack Aldane [00:22:22]:
Do you have any theories as to why this is?
John Niven [00:22:23]:
I think we lost a lot of younger men to the Internet and to gaming and to, you know, the problem when Kill youl Friends came out, I met a lot of parents on reading tours and at dinner parties who said, oh, thank you, my son's reading your novel. I cannot remember the last time he went novel because a lot of guys who are either musicians or in bands, they felt they had to read Kill your Friends. So it was one of those, I'm not going to say the last novel, but it was one of those few novels by a male writer. Young. I said, not that young, but I was youngish at the time. That seemed to punch through and find an audience of male readers.
Jack Aldane [00:23:03]:
You wrote Kill your friends in 2006.
John Niven [00:23:05]:
Published, yeah, published in it. What, of course, as we know, what the novel teaches you is empathy. Especially a first person novel that kill your friends teaches you how to live. It forces you to live in someone else's skin for however long it takes. I'm not claiming any kinship with Catching the Rye or whatever, but the same kind of novel that appeals to young men, it can teach them to speak a language which if you learn at the right age, you never forget. And I worry that that's getting lost. And with that goes empathy and you'll end up in the road. That's kind of portrayed brilliantly in something like adolescence.
John Niven [00:23:43]:
Well, that's a world of characters, young men without empathy who are just lost in this black hole of online and fellow machismo not walking. Not knowing what it is to walk away on someone else's shoes, which is what novels do. So how do you address that? I don't completely know.
Jack Aldane [00:24:02]:
Would you feel disappointed if the majority of people who come up to you saying that they loved reading this novel for the very reasons you've mentioned there were women? Would you. Would you hope that this would be picked up by a lot of men?
John Niven [00:24:14]:
Frankly, I'll take the seals wherever I can get them.
Jack Aldane [00:24:17]:
Yeah. There's always that. Yes.
John Niven [00:24:19]:
Essential, isn't it? I mean, there's a famous. I remember reading an interview with Noel Gallacher some years back. We speak. We're speaking here in the week of the Oasis Reformation. And I've. I've hung out with no. A couple of times. And he famously said that he doesn't really like.
John Niven [00:24:36]:
He doesn't read fiction, you know, and somebody said to him, he said. He said the kind of thing that the guy in the movie Sideways says, and I think somebody's made it all up. Who cares? Like, yeah. And somebody said, well, you like film. You like movies, though. And he went, yeah. And, well, you know, somebody makes that up. It's different.
John Niven [00:24:54]:
Different. Like a. Okay. But I don't think that view to you or I may seem insane and barbaric and clueless, but I don't think it's that uncommon.
Jack Aldane [00:25:06]:
Male literacy, of course, comes up in the book, let's not forget. Dan discovers that Jada has a bit of a literacy problem. And it's. It's a very tender moment between the two fathers, isn't it? Aha.
John Niven [00:25:17]:
Yeah. He finds out from, you know, spending more time with you that he's illiterate and teaches him to read. And this has sort of bigger repercussions later in the novel. Again, no spoilers. But part of the thing is that Dan thinks Jada's life is very much the unexamined life. There's no self analysis there, or he's just a sort of wrecking machine of crime and, you know, neglect. And then in the denouement of the book, Dan realizes that Jada. That the unexamined life is actually being examined.
John Niven [00:25:56]:
And he doesn't like what he sees. Jada. And he Sort of gains a lot of humanity in Dan's eyes when that, that moment happens.
Jack Aldane [00:26:05]:
It would be easy to imagine Jada as being just consistent throughout the book. Thank you. Consistently, Jada Hamilton never really having a moment to reflect on who he is and how he's lived. But in fact, both men have interesting trajectories throughout. The oysters have arrived.
John Niven [00:26:21]:
Can I just say that I'm staggered that the man who said I don't really accept seafood is happily splitting some oysters. That's fantastic.
Jack Aldane [00:26:29]:
I came round in the end. Just don't judge the way I eat mine because you're clearly more practiced at this than I am. Yes, please. Last time I had oysters, I think was at Borough Market, but it was years ago.
Jack Aldane [00:27:13]:
What did you make of your Dover soldier?
John Niven [00:27:23]:
Very good. But that's a well, well worn route for me. I knew what was coming and it.
Jack Aldane [00:27:28]:
Was as good as ever.
John Niven [00:27:30]:
The same as it ever was. Yeah, very good.
Jack Aldane [00:27:32]:
I believe there's another reading from the novel that you said you wanted to give us.
John Niven [00:27:36]:
Yeah, I thought we had a bit of Jada earlier and Jada is, as I said, she's preparing the sort of the readings for the book tour which starts next week. And it's kind of Jada heavy because, I mean, he's, he's funnier. And you know, writers have been discovering this since Milton wrote Satan in Paradise Lost and the bad guys are always more fun. But Dan has his fun moments too. So there's a moment here where Dan is, he's, he's out, he's buying some fish for dinner and he's got a half hour to kill. He's got a new baby, he's full of the joy of life and he goes for a few glasses of wine while he kills, you know, cupboard drinks while he's killing. Half, half an hour. And because he was a student in Glasgow himself, and if you know Glasgow, ubiquitous chip where he's sitting, it looks on to Ashton Lane which connects the university to Byers Road.
John Niven [00:28:31]:
So it's all just a thoroughfare of students and so Dan's sort of sitting looking at this, you know. As he drinks his wine. Dan felt himself growing expansive, poetic even as the wine tumbled through his veins, getting to work on his empty stomach as he watched the darkness falling. Many of the students were looking at their phones as they walked, the bright screens lighting up beneath the thin colourful nylon of their umbrellas. Reds and greens and yellows glowing like lanterns. Of course the students were different from back in his day. Today some of the ghettos look like boys and some of the boys look like girls. The spindly legged one in the miniskirt, teetering heels and bob with the Adam's apple like a fist and thick five o' clock shadow.
John Niven [00:29:18]:
The huge broad shouldered bruiser with short hair plastered to her skull and heaving tits strapped down. Dan recalled that his friend Ali's 17 year old daughter had recently told him that out of her 10 closest friends, 2 were bisexual, 3 were gay, 1 was non binary and and 2 were transitioning. 8 out of 10. When Dan was 17 they had poofy Colin, the one gay guy in the whole school of 900. Did this simply represent the way it was really meant to be? Was human sexuality always as diffuse and polyamorous but it never had the courage to speak its many names so loudly? Or did it just represent another escalation and the never ending rebel war Youth wages on age. Dan remembered an incident from his own teens when his father had wandered into the living room where Dan and his mates were watching a video of the New York Dolls. His dad had stared slack jawed at the screen for a few seconds, numb at the sight of David Johansson and Johnny Thunders, slathered in makeup and women's blouses as they tottered in stacked heels castlewauling their way through Jet Boy. Eventually his dad, born in 1938, had managed a stunned Jesus Christ before he backed out of the room, terrified and appalled.
John Niven [00:30:37]:
The boys had laughed and Dan remembered thinking something like wow, what are our kids gonna have to do to shock us here? It was then, dad I'm a bloke or dad I'm a bird because you couldn't really do much with the traditional tools of rebellion meetings, could you? Bands who cared. Your dad liked the New York Dolls too. Tattoos? Yeah, right. Everyone has tattoos. Your gran's got a tattoo. Haircuts? No chance. Everyone has a mad haircut now. When Dan was at university there was one barber on the West End.
John Niven [00:31:08]:
Now every other shop was a barber. All queued out the door from dawn till dusk as the kids obtained and maintained their elaborate premiership football inspired rugs. The day was fast approaching Dan reflected when the High court judge would saunter into the chamber with love and hate tattooed upon the knuckles of his heart there hands and the dotted cut hairline inked around his heart there throat pausing only to smooth out a full Mohican. He, she, they would wrap the gavel to bring the court to order. No, it seemed if a true rebellion these days you really did have to go with I'm getting my cock chopped off or I'm having a cock grafted on. And forget Ali's daughter's friends. There was Bob's nephew Gordon. Gordon was a furry only fully comfortable when dressed as a cat.
John Niven [00:31:57]:
Or there was Andy, the 18 year old cousin of Debbie from the office. Andy was now Andrea, having been taking the pills and growing breasts since he. Sorry she was 15. He she was scheduled to have his car penis removed this summer. She was now in a relationship with James, who used to be Janet, who had also been taking the pills since he was 16. The operation to remove her his breasts and turn her his vagina into a penis was scheduled for September at which point surely someone was finally getting pumped. It seemed a hard securities road though and Dan found himself wondering what might be a foot when Tom was that age about 15 years from now. Maybe every would be having everything removed by then.
John Niven [00:32:45]:
Just a nation of action men, groins dressed up as animals in say full Nazi uniform, all cyber sexing each other in the metaverse. Ah, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. True Will, true. There was more right now in Ashton f*****g Lane than Dan had ever dreamt of in his philosophy. Ach, what do I know. God love you all. He raised his glass and toasted them through the window.
Jack Aldane [00:33:11]:
Perhaps a very relatable passage for modern fathers these days. I've noticed John, that throughout this interview there is a sports car parked as you'd expect in Mayfair, right on the curb here. And as people have walked past the men have generally been looking at the sports car and the women have been looking at us, which I think says everything about me. Differences in interest when it comes to literature between the sexes.
John Niven [00:33:32]:
The women are probably figuring that we own that sports car. That's our car, we're sitting right next to it.
Jack Aldane [00:33:38]:
Okay, so John, I thought we would end this episode with something a little game around Glaswegian slang there's a lot of Glaswegian slang in the novel itself. I'm going to read out the slang in my best class region accent and you're going to tell me what it means in English.
John Niven [00:33:51]:
Okay.
Jack Aldane [00:33:53]:
Bafies.
John Niven [00:33:55]:
Bafies are slippers.
Jack Aldane [00:33:57]:
Brief.
John Niven [00:33:57]:
Brief is a lawyer.
Jack Aldane [00:33:59]:
Oh, it says here is a car.
John Niven [00:34:01]:
Oh, it can be a car too. Brief is also a car. So car and a lawyer.
Jack Aldane [00:34:05]:
If it's chunking outside, chunking is cold. You mentioned this one earlier. I enjoyed this. Although I'd really love to know the origin. A coupon.
John Niven [00:34:15]:
Coupon as a face.
Jack Aldane [00:34:17]:
Do you know where it comes from, that word for face?
John Niven [00:34:19]:
I don't know.
Jack Aldane [00:34:20]:
I don't. I'm asking.
John Niven [00:34:21]:
I couldn't. I couldn't go etymology in that.
Jack Aldane [00:34:23]:
Another part of the anatomy. Jegy. A what is it a gegy or jegy?
John Niven [00:34:28]:
Jegy.
Jack Aldane [00:34:29]:
G E, G, G Y, G, E.
John Niven [00:34:32]:
W. Gegy should be glasses.
Jack Aldane [00:34:35]:
It says here it's a mouth. Oh.
John Niven [00:34:37]:
Oh. Oh. As in shut your gege. Yeah, that's the mouth. Yeah. But you only ever hear it in the context of shut your gege to.
Jack Aldane [00:34:45]:
Get sent to the messages.
John Niven [00:34:46]:
Sent to the messages means you're going for the shopping.
Jack Aldane [00:34:49]:
Mince.
John Niven [00:34:51]:
Mince.
Jack Aldane [00:34:52]:
Mince.
John Niven [00:34:53]:
Mince. Mince. Beef.
Jack Aldane [00:34:56]:
M I, N, C. It says here it means rubbish.
John Niven [00:34:59]:
Oh, sorry. If you're talking mince.
Jack Aldane [00:35:01]:
Yeah. I should put this in more of a context.
John Niven [00:35:04]:
If you said to Scottish. But mince would mean mince. But you're talking pure mince.
Jack Aldane [00:35:08]:
A piece.
John Niven [00:35:09]:
A piece is a sandwich.
Jack Aldane [00:35:10]:
That's right. A cheese and onion piece. This one threw me. Somebody's gonna make me sound like Elmer Fudd. Wabbit.
John Niven [00:35:16]:
Wabbit.
Jack Aldane [00:35:17]:
Wabbit. W, A B I T. I don't know. Apparently this is tired. To be tired is to be wabbit.
John Niven [00:35:24]:
I've never. Where did you get that from?
Jack Aldane [00:35:26]:
This is all googled. But these are getting increasingly, increasingly dubious.
John Niven [00:35:29]:
I've never heard that. Crabbit. There's a crabbit. C, R, A, B, B I T. Which means looks sort of grumpy.
Jack Aldane [00:35:36]:
Moving on. A Ouija.
John Niven [00:35:38]:
A Ouija is someone from Glasgow.
Jack Aldane [00:35:40]:
And then finally there's a sentence here. Right, so here we go. Thought we'd leave it on the theme of the book, to shout at someone. Your da sells Avon.
John Niven [00:35:49]:
Your da sells Avon. I haven't actually ever had cause to use that one. But imagine it's your dar's effeminate.
Jack Aldane [00:35:58]:
It says here, literally, your father belongs to a multi level marketing company that sells cosmetics. A stock phrase that insults and emasculates the addressee's father.
John Niven [00:36:07]:
That's fairly on the nose.
Jack Aldane [00:36:08]:
Well, this has been an absolute pleasure, John. Thank you very much for joining me on the booking club at Scott's.
John Niven [00:36:13]:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Jack Aldane [00:36:38]:
