The lost years 1945 to 1965 were a never-never land. Our exhausted parents, having won the war, set about winning the peace. Moffat begins wistfully and lyrically, like Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie. Then the hard tack, a New Statistical Account for Scotland format of data, facts, and evidence.

We learn how prefabs were built by the Ministry of Works and councils (quickly!). Glasgow’s rat-infested Gorbals were the other side of the housing coin, meanwhile Edinburgh’s demolisher-visionary, Pat Rogan, declared ‘It is a magnificent thing to watch – whole streets of tenements – vanishing into dust and rubble’ as thousands were banished to council estates.

We savour real local milk from real Kelso cows, and submit to the ‘Coop number’ test. In his case it was easy; Grannie 495; mother 2168. For your scrivener more challenging. Mother, 40789; father 376928, forever engraved on the memory for no sensible reason.

Aspects of that era have vanished. TV programmes often went out live and unrecorded. Tapes were wiped to make way for new material. The quality could be so forgettable that they were hardly worth preserving. As a former TV executive the author knows whereof he writes.

1945 to 1965 was hardly Scotland’s golden age. Over 500,000 emigrated, many as ‘£10 Poms’ to Australia. Then, in 1963, Philip Larkin invented sex “between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP”, Kennedy was assassinated, and deference died when That Was The Week That Was had us laughing at our politicians.

Landmark moments abounded. The 1964 film of Muriel Spark’s Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, exposed a douce Bruntsfield school as a hotbed of erotica. 1965 saw The Who’s ‘M-m-my Generation’, Dylan’s electric revolution, Joan Baez marching for civil rights, Mick Jagger’s no satisfaction.

With the end of the death penalty, Churchill’s funeral, and Kenneth Tynan broadcasting the F word came the countercultural future. Beyond Scotland, we have the rise of Mary Quant and are tiresomely reminded that 90 per cent of Manchester United fans live in Asia. Do we care?

We certainly cared about being belted at school. The barbarity of the Lochgelly Tawse, with 95 per cent of boys and 60 per cent of girls experiencing its cruelty, some as young as five or six, is a shocking litany of abuse in which demobbed teachers, many doubtless enduring PTSD, laid into their pupils with a savagery barely imaginable today. Alistair Moffat relays this tale of infamy with a chilling accuracy.

A prolific author of more than forty books, squeezed in between such tenures as Fringe Director and St Andrew’s Rector, he has been accused of spreading himself thin – as well as Birlinn’s To See Ourselves he is simultaneously promoting a Canongate offering, The North Sea.

Thus a simple question arises. Does this man ever sleep?

To See Ourselves: A Personal History of Scotland Since 1950 by Alistair Moffat. Published by Birlinn, 272pp, £18.99.