As a leisured Chicagoan, Irvine Welsh is an outsider in Scotland now – but when he comes back he still pulls the odd all-nighter. As his 10th novel appears, he explains how he lost his taste for dancing, when he last took a class A, and why Sean Connery couldn’t persuade him to join the SNP
• Guardian Live: Irvine Welsh and Jesse Armstrong discuss the art of writing comedy, 21 April
A pot of green tea ordered at 9.15 on a Sunday morning is neither the beverage nor the hour one most readily associates with Irvine Welsh. And yet, though his dancing and drugging days are not entirely done with – more of which later – Welsh is a realist, too. Thus he begins a long day of events to publicise his 10th novel, A Decent Ride, in sober form.
Born and bred in Edinburgh, Welsh is now a visitor here. Even if the pull of his elderly relatives means that a good chunk of the year is still spent in Scotland, he is mainly resident in his wife’s home city of Chicago (“like New York but without the arseholes”). It’s a strange thing to think about a man whose literary output so defines the modern Scottish novel, but it does give him a unique outsider’s perspective on the political upheavals of the past few years, and their latest extraordinary incarnation in the SNP’s prospects of a share of power at Westminster. “In some ways it feels like a different country already,” says Welsh. “I think it’s got that confidence now, whatever its future is, whether it’s an independent country or a change-maker within the UK.”
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