ABSTRACT
Like most stories of writing, this tale begins with reading. Irvine Welsh is a famous writer, one of the select few whose name is larger on the dust jacket of books than the title. He is also aggitatively creative: he has built new vocabularies and graphologies, transforming how words appear on the page. But I did not realize the scale of his importance, relevance and generosity until I read his foreword to Paul Vasili’s The First Black Footballer where he outlines the social costs of a ruling class dominating the voices and attitudes of a time, spewing out values and ideas that create a narrow and damaging view of history and culture.
