Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh

8^th October 2018

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.

I first read those words in West Lothian College Bathgate. It was 1998. My sister had passed me the book, I opened it and read it and there it was, the world – my world – reflected back to me through Renton and Sick Boy and Mickey Weir and shoplifting and everything else I’d never considered could be ‘literature’. I recall sitting in the café, next to a vending machine, no money for a can but no bothered, sat all afternoon reading and rereading the pages. I was no reader – I was actually confused at the shift in point of view from Renton to Sick Boy early on, nearly but no quite phoning my sister to have her explain – but I couldn’t put the book down. That was it: I wanted to be Renton and I wanted to be Irvine Welsh. A week later I wrote a story about a couple of gay lads living in Edinburgh and submitted it to my English teacher. She didn’t believe I’d written it until my sister – the same sister – phoned and said she’d watched me write it. They submitted it as part of my portfolio for the Scottish Higher and I got a B. But it didn’t matter. The sweat wis lashing oafay me just thinking about this world of words and writing and all the books like this I didn’t know – hadn’t been told – existed.

So, according tae Tom, it’s nae good telling us that ah’ve done well in ma exams, or got a good job, or got off wi a nice burd; that kind ay acclaim means nowt tae us. Of course, ah enjoy these things at the time, or for themselves, but their value cannae be sustained because there’s nae recognition ay the society which values them. What Tom’s trying tae say, ah suppose, is that ah dinnae gie a fuck. Why? So it goes back tae ma alienation from society.

This is maybe halfway into the book, Renton in counselling having escaped jail time for shoplifting, poor Spud sat inside. This was the moment, the elevation in my mind – and heart – in my love of the novel – from the original surge at just reading about these characters and a world not-too-far displaced from mine, to a Hibs-following anti-everything waster (in the eyes of the misunderstanding) breaking down his own mind, fears, anxieties and rejections through Welsh’s words. I read those pages hundreds of time – I’ve bought the book a good dozen times and still read them on occasion now – and in all the writing I’ve read since nothing’s ever bettered the sense of being encapsulated – lifted – in the writing.

This shite muddies the waters for us; confuses rather than clarifies issues.

The entire book sustained this level of engagement – for me anyway – throughout. The moment Begbie and Renton stand by the train station – the titular episode I suppose, made me want to understand people better. The ‘there is a light that never goes out’ entry created a sense of displaced nostalgia, entirely true and at once imagined. I’m still 17 when I pick up that book. It takes me back to the moment I opened it – confused, lost, neither a boy nor a man, kicked out of school and trying to avoid the factories, unsure where to turn or to run from. The Acid House, Glue, Porno and Filth had their moments – the fella can write – but nothing was ever the same as Trainspotting.