It was our first time.

‘Maybe Coatbridge isn’t as bad as people say?’ I chirped to my partner, as I drove our family through the urban murk of the town. Her eyes remained fixed on the view outside the passenger-side window. I’d seen that same blend of guilt, horror and wonder on her face when we’d driven past serious road accidents.

‘I mean, we’re from Grangemouth,’ I said, continuing to plead Coatbridge’s case. ‘And even it’s got nice parts, right?’

Even Frankenstein’s monster’s got nice parts, I suppose. I’ve learned that it’s best not to be too harsh on other people’s towns when your own town could be twinned with post-apocalyptic Springfield; or is practically ‘The Wire’ with an all-white cast. As the old saying goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. As my variation on that phrase goes: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and then use one of the fallen shards of glass to open a vein and spray ‘I’m something of a hypocrite’ in blood all over the floor.

I tried to give Coatbridge a fair crack of the whip, I really did, but pesky reality kept knocking the rose-tinted specs off my face, and after a while I stopped trying to put them back on, so I just slipped on a pair of black-as-death-tinted specs instead.

The deeper and deeper we drove into the town, the progressively less beatific the surroundings, until eventually we became convinced that we were trapped inside a Ken Loach film set in the late 1970s. As surely as the grass makes up the African plains, the landscape of central Coatbridge is a patterned hotch-potch of impregnable steel shutters; towering, dust-drecked high rises and walls swirled with hastily scrawled tribal markings. Every street we turned down was littered with little people with limps listlessly smoking their way back whence they came, or onwards, whence they were going.

Sorry if my whencing was a bit off there. Was my whencing on point? One so rarely gets the chance to whence these days, and when one does one can never be sure if one’s whencing has behoofed anyone except oneself, or made one appear – and I make no apologies for the strong language I’m about to use here – a crinkum-crankum. Or, heaven forfend, a fandangle! Hey, if you’re going to whence anywhere – or indeed do anything that seems like it might be better suited to the nineteenth century or earlier – then it might as well be in Coatbridge, a town that’s famous both for having a Time Capsule (its Ice Age-themed swimming and leisure centre), and actually being one.

Coatbridge isn’t a Blue Peter-style time capsule, filled with fluffy, fun and life-affirming things that children of the future will be fascinated to re-discover: Coatbridge is a time capsule containing only shit things. Upsetting things. Deeply traumatising things. Things that have been left there as a warning to future generations never to let this shit happen again.

The invisible, town-sized time capsule covering Coatbridge has a cracked outer case, one that exposes the town’s surface to the rust of modernity, but keeps its sedentary core protected and intact. This produces a strange effect. At any given point in the town’s geography it’s somehow simultaneously 1876, 1915 and 1982, like you’re inside a malfunctioning, open-top TARDIS. It’s the kind of town where you might stumble across a junkie wearing a shell-suit and a miner’s helmet angrily challenging you to a duel on horseback.

At the risk of labouring the point, Coatbridge puts the Ark into archaic; the punk into steampunk; and the ‘fuck’ into ‘fuck, I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa’.

‘I think we might’ve found a place that’s worse than Alloa,’ I said to my partner, my eyes wide with fear and fascination. ‘If ever there was a place too broke to make a bridge out of anything other than coats, this is that place.’

My partner felt my forehead. ‘Worse than Alloa?’ she said, with a worried look on her face.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s worse than Alloa.’

It was a weekday morning, so the swimming pool at the Time Capsule was closed until the mid-afternoon. We didn’t realise this until after we’d pulled into the car-park with our two restless children. ‘What are we going to do in Coatbridge for four hours?’ my partner asked, but imagine she’d asked it all in block capitals. I thought about it. Our options pretty much boiled down to one: sit there in the car park and stay really, really still, like they did when the T-Rex attacked in Jurassic Park.

I spied a Chinese takeaway at the top end of the street, on the side wall of which somebody had spray-painted ‘PIRA’ (the ‘P’ standing for ‘Provisional’, the IRA standing for, well, IRA). Say what you like about Coatbridge: you can’t say it isn’t multicultural.

After a few moments of panicking, we asked our pal Google for help. She suggested Summerlee, the Museum of Scottish Industrial Life (Google is definitely a woman, given that she’s always watching you, and she knows everything), which was only a short drive along the road from us. So off we went, travelling back through time on purpose for a change.

Now, on paper I’m a huge fan of museums. They hold obvious historical and educational value. They help to record, preserve, maintain and advance culture through a shared process of remembering, sifting, shifting, expanding and evolving. Museums hold a mirror up to us; one that doesn’t always reflect a pretty picture. Sometimes the story a museum tells is one of tyranny, theft, enslavement, genocide and cultural appropriation. After all, he who controls the past controls the cultural narrative, and thus holds the key to the future. That also explains why groups like ISIS are so hell-bent on the systematic destruction of museums and historical sites – not everyone who wants to challenge or re-write the narrative does so from a place of virtue.

But even if we don’t always like what we see, museums force us to look, and look hard out at the world, into our shared pasts, and deep into our selves. As the old maxim goes: he who does not understand history is doomed to repeat it. I get all that. I do. Museums are important. They’re worthy. They’re vital.

But Christ they’re fucking boring.

I try. I do, I really try. I want to love them. I walk around museums with an intense expression on my face, nodding solemnly at the plaques as I try to give even the smallest of fucks about a special kind of steel hinge that was first manufactured in Paisley in 1928. Or get excited that some dead rich guy managed to score himself a collection of old pots from Peru.

Actually, though, Summerlee is different. While I’m generally never one for the minutiae (of life, not just of museums), there’s some really great stuff there, not just inside the main exhibition hall but all across the 22-acre site, from recreations of old shop facades and miners’ cottages to hulking great chunks of antiquated mining equipment to a working tram to boats to steam engines to interactive displays for the kids – including a recreation of a gigantic iron works’ furnace complete with audio and visual effects. The folks in charge aren’t daft, though. They know that if daddy’s prone to boredom, you can triple that for the kids, so there are toy trains and Duplo blocks everywhere. Actually, I think the kids liked the trains and Duplo blocks the best, the little philistines.

Maybe I’m not anti-minutiae. I think I’m possibly just more interested in people than I am in things (though I concede that’s a pretty daft statement, given that the story of one is usually incomplete without the other). I spent a lot of time that day staring at ashen-faced, cap-wearing men in old black-and-white photos from the days when Coatbridge was still an active mining town.

Camera technology was in its infancy then and photography had scant few practitioners. Developing a photograph was a time-intensive and expensive process, so nobody was fucking around in front of the camera doing duck pouts or taking selfies. They stood like statues, staring straight ahead, like they were locking eyes with their firing squad, or caught in the paralysing gaze of a demon who was about to extract their souls and sell them to the highest bidder.

We look at old photographs as if we’re looking at cardboard cut-outs or lab specimens: men from a forgotten world; men from an alien world. I like to imagine the moments after the light from the flash-bulb has faded from their vision; imagine them shuffling awkwardly, telling bawdy jokes, spitting, shouting, joshing each other. I imagine how fun and unencumbered their lives must have been, but also how brutish and brutal. I bring these men to life, make them real, but then it makes me said, because I have to let them die again. Old photos are tombs we’ll all climb inside eventually.

Looking at these pictures makes me feel angry too. Places like Coatbridge used to keep this country running by keeping the fires burning. Generations of men – not just in Coatbridge, but all across the country – toiled under the ground day after day in hazardous and hellish conditions so that the rest of society could enjoy heat and light and power, and all of the myriad things we as a species would come to take for granted. These men gave their health, their families, and in many cases their lives. Their families, their town, should’ve seen the fruits of their labours. To see the rundown state of many parts of Coatbridge today is an almost unforgivable insult; it’s like the government and the power companies sucked the town dry and then callously cast its carcass into the dirt. No wonder there are so many wee people limping and smoking their way through wrecked and ruined streets, or in the shadow of grim Soviet-style high rises.

The older you get, the less comforting nostalgia becomes; the more everything reminds you of death. Sometimes when I hear songs I’d remember my sister listening to in the other room when I was a kid, I start to cry. Because it’s gone, it’s all gone, and none of us ever thought it would go, that we’d lose it, even though older people did nothing but constantly warn us about it. As a species we can go to Machu Picchu, the South Pole, or the Moon, but the one place we can never go – and the only place we all sometimes yearn to go – is back. You can never go back.

Thanks, Coatbridge. You’ve made me clinically depressed.

At the top end of the Summerlee site are four refurbished miners’ cottages, each made to resemble a different era: the 80s, the 60s, the 40s and the late 1900s. The 1940s cottage even has an air-raid shelter in the back garden. Nice touch.

This area of Summerlee was my favourite – but also the most bittersweet – part of the experience. When I stepped into the living room and kitchen of the 1980s house it was like stepping back through time into my own childhood, into the homes of my parents and grandparents. The attention to detail was exquisite. I had to ask my partner and kids to be quiet so I could soak up the feelings. I felt like I was standing not inside a room, but at a graveside.

The silence was only broken when Denise Ferry burst into the living room singing ‘My Boy Lollipop’.

After passing a wonderful few hours at Summerlee we went to the Time Capsule. It was as fun as I remember it being when I was a kid. Seeing the little ones laughing and smiling and having a great time always helps me make peace with my mortality. I remind myself that the world isn’t built with me in mind anymore, or at the very least the days of my relevance swiftly are coming to an end. I shouldn’t be sad for myself, but happy for them, happy for the happy things they’ve yet to experience that they’ll hopefully grow old enough to be able to look back on with great, great sadness. Now that‘s a Scottish sentence for you.

Driving out of Coatbridge we fringed Drumpellier Park, threaded in and out of well-kempt estates and peaceful side-streets. But our trip’s true ending – the real fade-to-black, cut-to-credits scene – was our post-swimming meal at Burger 7.

Burger 7, despite being nestled in less than auspicious surroundings, is quite possibly the best café/restaurant I’ve ever eaten at. That’s not hyperbole. I mean it. Maybe I felt that way because the day’s heady mix of fun, philosophy and soul-searching had finally made me appreciate life’s minutiae. Maybe it was just because they did an awesome vegetarian hotdog. Whatever the reason, we all loved it. It was homely. Welcoming. We were made to feel like we were the only customers in the world at the last restaurant in the universe.

Inside, Burger 7 looks like the diner that Tony Soprano visits with his family in the final scene of The Sopranos, but it feels like Artie Buco’s restaurant, Vesuvio, that Tony visits with his family during the big storm in the closing minutes of The Sopranos’ first-season. Whenever I think of Burger 7 now, I always think about the speech that Tony gives his family, as they huddle contentedly in the cande-light at the very end of that episode:

“I’d like to propose a toast. To my family. Some day soon, you’re going to have families of your own, and if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this… that were good.”

Thanks, Coatbridge.

You’re alright.