Now, Where were we? Oh yes, Trainspotting, in so far as one could decipher the Pictish dialect, ended with Renton’s drug-money scam: Sick Boy, Spud, Begbie and Second Chance left high and dry as our man took off with the cash (not that much cash, in reality) towards a new life played out a very long way from tanked-up, skagged-out Leith. Spud, the least devious and most sympathetic member of the cast, eventually got his share of the take. Psycho Begbie and the others did not, thereby offering a huge window of opportunity for the sequel which, some years later and at elaborate length, Porno now supplies.

Whatever one may have thought of Trainspotting, it undoubtedly fell into the category of literature defined half a century ago by Anthony Powell when he first came across Lucky Jim: those novels whose message in effect is ‘Life’s not like that; it’s like this’, and whose chief merit, irrespective of