WALKING the length of the London to Edinburgh train in 1994, after a trip to the buffet, I felt as if I must accidentally have downed a triple voddy. This was not because I was ricocheting bruisingly from side to side, but because everywhere I looked passengers were reading the same book.

I wasn’t just seeing double, I was seeing hundreds.

Row upon row, table after table, people were nose-deep in a silver paperback whose jacket showed a pair of young men in skull masks with teeth fit for a wolf. If this image was unnerving, the novel was even scarier.

By then, a year after publication, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting was a runaway success. It’s hard to imagine now, when everyone is transfixed by their phones, that a book, written largely in Leith dialect, could have gripped the population, let alone one that showed, unvarnished, the misery of addicts in Europe’s Aids capital.

Welsh didn’t merely crunch the rose-tinted spectacles underfoot. He positively revelled in the revolting degradation of his alcoholics and heroin junkies. Characters like Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud were prisoners of poverty and despair, yet they were galvanised by a furious energy that made Welsh’s story radiate humour as well as menace.

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Jeff Torrington enthused that “this marvellous novel might feel like a bad day in Bedlam, but boy is it exhilarating.” Three years after publication, in 1996, the film brought the story to an even larger audience. At a poorly attended screening in New York, my husband and a Scottish friend roared at the scene where American tourists stumble like wounded prey into a bar, to be pounced upon by jackals. Despite the subtitles that made their lingo intelligible, most of the audience at this point walked out in disgust.

Yet for all the story’s rip-roaring fame, it is only now that Welsh has hinted that he might soon write a mini-series for television. How late this is, how late.

In Trainspotting’s wake came gritty TV dramas such as The Wire. Why it has taken so long to rework Trainspotting for the small screen is inexplicable. Even so, the news is welcome.

In certain respects, the world has changed beyond recognition in the quarter of a century since Welsh’s scrofulous scenarios made readers choke on their cornflakes. Indubitably Trainspotting played a part in that.

From the opening pages, where Renton and Sick Boy try to hail a taxi, almost as miraculous a feat during the Edinburgh Festival as walking on water, this was Scotland as rarely found in print before.

As if a grenade had been tossed into the River Tay, Welsh’s pitiless portrait blew the heathery image of the country out of the water. Gone was the legacy of Monarch of the Glen, with its Victorian ethos of lairds and tenants. Gone too the idea of stoical, respectable or even noble working classes, getting by in dire need with only their left-wing principles to keep them warm.

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Instead, Welsh’s universe was the underbelly, the deadbeat part of society nobody wanted to see. These characters weren’t downtrodden intellectuals, as found in much kitchen-sink literature.

At one point Renton thinks, “See if it wis up tae me, ah’d git ivray f**** book n pit thum on a great big f***** pile n burn the f***** loat. Aw books ur fir is fir smart c**** tae show oaf aboot how much s**** thuv f***** read.”

This, then, was not a book intended for the literati or the middle-classes, despite being published by one of London’s elite houses. Secker & Warburg’s blurb proudly warned that, “There is not an advocate, a festival performer or a fur coat in sight.”

And, in his first interview, Welsh underlined the point: “The last thing I want is all these f****** up in Charlotte Square putting on all the vernacular as a stage-managed thing. It’s nothing to do with them.”

And yet he made people of every background read – even those in Edinburgh’s New Town – and, just as they were about to lose their lunch, he also made them laugh.

Almost overnight, the literary axis shifted from Glasgow to the east. The grip of the west, with writers of the calibre of Torrington, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Janice Galloway, Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, was loosened, for a while at least. In the process, urban fiction entered a new phase, although nobody could match Welsh’s raw spirit.

How long-lasting his impact has been on Scottish fiction is questionable. Not in doubt, however, is Trainspotting’s star role in reshaping ideas about the country. Sentiment was replaced with syringes, sunsets and sheilings with squalor and squats.

But it wasn’t just outsiders’ perceptions that altered. For those of us here, there was a sense that an uncomfortable truth had been spoken. Voice had been given to those dying on our doorsteps, from addiction, infection or torment. This was a country that needed to help itself, whose problems were too big to be swept under the carpet. By reaching readers and audiences across the social and political spectrum, Trainspotting helped to define modern Scotland.

The picture it painted was not flattering, but it was honest. It catapulted the capital onto the centre of the cultural stage while at the same time it challenged the authority of a country where such deprivation could thrive. Was it at this point that some began to wonder if the best way to sort things out was to strive for devolution, or even independence? That the disgrace of being Europe’s sickest cousin was something we should tackle ourselves?

We’ll never know for sure. But what can be said with certainty is that Trainspotting put the benighted, as well as the book, on the map. The cloak of invisibility that many would prefer to throw over the less fortunate – especially those as feral as Welsh’s characters – had been ripped away.

The face of Scotland – be it in Leith or Dundee, Inverness or Aberdeen – was visible for everyone to see. Those aren’t warts you see, but needle tracks and liver failure. Far from being timeless, a new telling of Trainspotting would be positively timely.

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