Groomed, abused and plunged into a world of addiction in West Lothian, advocacy worker Aidan Martin tells his story in Euphoric Recall

ADDICTION, abuse and a two decade battle with his demons left 34-year-old West Lothian author Aidan Martin looking into the abyss many times in his life. Groomed as a teenager, he turned to drink and drugs as his coping mechanisms during a 20 year ordeal that only ended last year.

It's a journey that he has charted in his no-holds-barred memoir, Euphoric Recall, published by Guts Publishing earlier this month. Today, Aidan, from West Calder, works in advocacy, representing people caught in the lifestyle he has now left behind.

"The advocacy work I do is for anyone with substance issues," he explains. "My role is to act on their behalf, to be their voice when liaising with the local authority, government, elected members or other related services."

It's a role that his personal experiences make him uniquely suited to as anyone who reads his book will discover. Euphoric Recall opens as the 15-year-old Aidan prepares to meet a man who had been grooming him since the age of 13 for the first time, however, as the book continues, it becomes clear that he was a troubled child even before that incident.

"I went to a very good primary in West Lothian, Peel Primary, but high school was horrendous," he recalls. "I don't think I was nurtured at high school but I discovered I could write – when, on my dad's side of the family, his mother passed away I wrote a poem and everybody loved it. When I left school, my mother used to say to me my dream was to write, but then I got heavily involved in drugs and forgot about that ambition. Even so, the older I got, going into my teen years, when I felt very dark and suicidal, poetry became my outlet for that too.”