Alex Niven (@Alex_Niven)

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Wrote this essay for @TheLondonMag about Sycamore Gap, Roman ruins, decline and fall, remembering the dead, caring for kids. It’s kind of a dark autumnal read, but heatwave respite perhaps.

thelondonmagazine.org/article/essay-…

thelondonmagazine.org It's a Devil of a Gap by Alex Niven - The London Magazine Nearly three years on from its felling, Alex Niven considers the implications of the Sycamore Gap Tree crime, looking back at the history of the site.

Alex Niven @Alex_Niven 16h

Inter alia, KK and Pav are dead, Terry Mac has dementia, Gavin Peacock is a right-wing Christian fundamentalist, and Lee Clark has somehow grown a head of hair and is a smart middle-aged man about Jesmond. Life moves pretty fast

The Extreme Football Enthusiast Verified account @ExtremeFootbal4 1d

Newcastle United celebrating lifting the First Division trophy in May 1993.

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Alex Niven @Alex_Niven 16h

M John Harrison’s Booker win is great for the culture (and v moving) but it is slightly sad that someone like him should only feel like a ‘proper writer’ when given a prize/marketing anointment. And being subsumed into a culture that presents him like this will come with costs

Alex Niven @Alex_Niven 1d

British noughties culture was the all-time worst. The fag-end of Britpop but with the irony, nuance and class politics removed, the cultural centre transferred to seedy light entertainment. It was late New Labour, the mode of a post-Iraq War establishment with zero morals left

The New Statesman Verified account @NewStatesman 1d

THE DISMAL WORLD OF DAVID WALLIAMS
(This piece was first published in September 2023.)

Why does David Walliams retain such a grip on our children’s imaginations when his own is so impoverished? His 2008 debut, The Boy in the Dress, a story of a cross-dressing lad gaining acceptance from his divorcee father, was elevated by illustrations by Dahl’s former collaborator Quentin Blake. But Walliams’s subsequent output has offered diminishing returns, and the “World’s Worst” series is, well, the worst. Let’s put to one side the dubious stereotyping of Mr Raj the Asian news agent, the Chinese boy Brian Wong “who was never wrong” (but was later deemed to be “wrong” enough to be removed from publication) and the women who are constantly brandishing mops and “bog brushes”. After all, Dahl was a reliable source of unpleasant prejudices, as the row over “updated” editions earlier this year reminded us.

But Dahl’s work has a subversive linguistic energy that cannot be denied. Walliams’s only gifts are for repetition. Characters are scatologically formulaic: Windy Mindy and her lethal “bottom burps”, Terry Tetch, whose “chunder thunder” ends up on his own face. (In The World’s Worst Pets Walliams raises the stakes and introduces a goldfish that can “furp” – “when someone, or something, farts and burps at precisely the same time”.) Original scenarios are rare. When Posy Pooch’s two Tibetan mastiffs conceive, they have 99 puppies, leaving a household of “one hundred and one dogs”. Bertha the Blubberer is a Violet Elizabeth Bott-style screamer, so of course her nemesis is called William.

newstatesman.com/culture/books/…
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Alex Niven @Alex_Niven 2d

100%. They’re not a 15 min meal, but you can rustle em if you’re keeping it simple

Elvis Buñuelo @Mr_Considerate 3d

Not that there isn't a learning curve, but I think if you make enough of them, they start to come together pretty quickly.

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Alex Niven

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