Irwin Welsh shows the second floor of a grey stone building in Leith, Edinburgh's harbour district.
As he prepares to release the sequel to the cult 1993 novel Trainspotting, the author shows me the window of the room, overlooking the local park, where he wrote that first book, which later became a hit film starring Ewan McGregor and Jonny Lee Miller.
The son of a dockworker from Leith and a waitress, who had completed an electrical engineering course, played in a punk band and was addicted to heroin as a young man, Welsh moved back home to Leith from London and "just started typing".
He tells me that before he wrote Trainspotting decided that "this is my last chance to do something creative."
Trainspotting follows the lives of a group of friends addicted to heroin in Edinburgh.
Violent, often shocking and full of dark humour, this book is a picture and an example of the social decay that triggered the decimation of British industry in the interior.
It was Welsh's first novel to sell more than a million copies in the UK alone.
But as he sat typing away in the early 1990s, he had no idea that the novel would do so well.
"I just wanted to finish it," he explains.
It certainly paid off for him.
The book and film captured the zeitgeist so well that more than 30 years later you can still book a tour of the main landmarks from Trainspotting after Lithium.
But on a windy Scottish summer day, I get a personalized tour from the writer himself, walking through some of the key places that inspired him.
We head to the so-called Banana Flats, a curved building officially called Cable's Wind House, which dominates the skyline of Leth and where his character Sick Boy (played by Miller in the film) grows up.
We visit the Leet Dockers' Club, where Renton (played by McGregor) goes with his mom and dad, and where Welsh remembers hanging out "like a kid sitting around with lemonade and crisps" and "feeling genuinely bitter" while everyone else got drunk.
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Welsh's latest return to these characters is called Men in love.
He has already written sequels and a prequel about a group from Trainspotting (apparently he can't get enough of them), but this new novel is set in the period immediately after the end of the first part, when Renton fled with the money he and his friends made from a large-scale drug deal.
This time, Welsh explores what happens when young men fall in love and start having relationships.
He was partly motivated to write it, he says, because "we live in a world that seems full of hate and poison... I think it's time to focus more on love as an antidote to that."
But don't expect saccharine love stories – this is, after all, Wales.
The cheating, lying, manipulative – and occasionally frightening – behavior of some of his characters is still very much present.
The book even has a disclaimer at the end explaining that because the novel is set in the 1980s, many of the characters "express themselves in ways that we would consider offensive or discriminatory today."
Welsh says the publishers insisted on it.
"They felt that we were living in such sensitive times that we had to highlight it."
"We live in a much more censorship-oriented environment," he adds.
While he accepts that the book's misogynistic terms like "fat fish" are offensive and that there are "good reasons why we don't use them anymore," he worries that if the state starts saying "you can't talk about this, you can't talk about that, I think we're on a dangerous path."
Story Men in love reaches the early nineties.
The novel will be published at a time when the UK is feeling a lot of nostalgia for the 90s, with the band Oasis on tour and Pulp's surprise set at Glastonbury, which garnered rave reviews.
Welsh tells me that he "never left" that era, but that younger generations also feel nostalgic for it "because people had lives back then."
He places part of the blame for the cultural shift on the internet and social media, which have become "a controlling rather than a liberating force."
As someone who understands addiction, Welsh hopes to be more "thoughtful" about social media use in the future.
He points to the way people "keep their phones glued to their faces" as they move around.
"If we survive the next 50 years, it will look as strange on film as smoking cigarette after cigarette did in the XNUMXs."
He also thinks the internet is making us stupid.
"When machines do your thinking for you, your brain just starts to atrophy."
He fears that we are moving towards a "post-democratic, post-artistic, post-cultural society, in which we have artificial intelligence on one side and a kind of natural stupidity on the other - we have become dumbed-down machines that just follow instructions."
Success Trainspotting it arrived partly, he says, at a time when people were willing to read more demanding books that were less formulaic.
And as the money started to come in, it brought him the freedom to write.
He is also a DJ and will release an album with Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra , which will accompany his new book.
These disco tracks relate to the characters, the story, and the "emotional landscape" of the novel.
Music is "fundamental" to his writing and he also "looks for that four-quarter time all the time he's typing."
He builds a playlist in his head for each character and theme.
Renton listens to Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Velvet Undergroundd.
Sick Boy also loves Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, New Order, he says.
Aggressive and violent, Begbie loves "Rod Stewart and power ballads."
The singer recently told The Times that the public should give the party leader a chance. Reform UK Nigel Farage.
I wondered if Irwin Welsh thought his characters from Trainspotting supported that party to grow up today.
He resists the idea, telling me that the Scottish working class "still has a very radical spirit. They're not going to be puppets for some idiot from a state school."
Although he later adds that "people are so desperate that they will stand with anyone who fosters that rhetoric of change."
Welsh has always been politically engaged and, as we walk through the area where he grew up, he describes how Margaret Thatcher ended centuries of shipbuilding in Leith "in one fell swoop".
Five thousand port workers have been reduced to zero.
Trainspotting also resonated, he believes, because it "announced an adjustment for people living in a world without paid work. And now we're all in that position."
His argument is that the British class system is changing "because of its massive concentration of wealth towards the rich".
The working class already has no money, and now the middle class is getting deeper and deeper into debt, and is less able to pass on assets, making life increasingly precarious.
"We are all members of the precariat, practically."
"We don't know how long we'll have paid jobs, if we ever have them, and we don't know how long they'll last because our economy, our society, is in a long-term revolutionary transformation."
During my time in Welsh's company, we didn't just spar with Lith, I got an insight into how his brain works, how his colorful opinions simply explode from our dystopian future, to how the best music was made in the analog era, and even whether he would accept being offered a knighthood (the answer, by the way, is no).
When our time is up, he heads to the bar at the Dock Workers' Club to see a friend he first met in elementary school 60 years ago.
His old buddy jokes with me that he's a plumber while Welsh is a millionaire writer.
You can easily see how much they love each other.
Trainspotting may have completely changed Welsh's life.
He remained, however, attached to the community that shaped him and the Lit, which he so spectacularly translated into prose.
Roman Men in love will be published on July 24, 2025
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