Deadline have posted a great piece on how Irvine Welsh nearly lost much of the text of his new novel Skagboys because it was held on an Amstrad computer.

Welsh had written over 10,000 extra words when writing Trainspotting back in 1993 and didn’t migrate the text. After failing to buy an Amstrad on ebay he hired a specialist technician to retrieve the copy.

He said: “When I wrote Trainspotting I had 100,000 words at the start and another 100,000 at the end that I didn’t use.

“The stuff at the end I put into other books. The stuff at the beginning I had on some old Amstrad disks.

“I thought, I’ve gotta get this sorted. I tried to but an Amstrad on eBay, then I found a guy who could transpose the stuff on the disks.”