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Welsh has always been political and, as we walk around the area where he grew up, he describes how Margaret Thatcher ended centuries of shipbuilding in Leith "at a stroke".

But he's still plugged into the community that shaped him, and the Leith that he turned so spectacularly into fiction.

Irvine Welsh is pointing up to the second floor of a grey stone building in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh.

The son of a Leith docker and a waitress - who did a course in electrical engineering, spent time in a punk band and was addicted to heroin as a younger man - Welsh had moved back home to Leith from London and "just started typing".

The book and film tapped so successfully into the cultural zeitgeist that more than 30 years on, you can still book an official Trainspotting tour in Leith.