'I felt very at home in Cuba ... it really got inside me'

The Glasgow screenwriter, who has provided scripts for This Life and EastEnders in the past, is just about to see her first film, Day Of The Flowers, reach cinemas this week. It is set in Cuba, as is the documentary about Cuban dancing - The Cuban Way - she's currently working on. She first went to the island in 1997 and has been back some 30 times since. Cuba, it's fair to say, is in her head.

We are currently sitting in her Glasgow home. On the walls there are a couple of paintings by her late mother and Houston's own painting of one of her grown-up daughters. The walls are, appropriately enough, red, given that she describes herself as a fourth-generation socialist. She's a woman of a certain age, one she's not keen on sharing. "There is still a lot of ageism and sexism in my line of work. Suffice to say, I've a couple of grandchildren."

So, what did Cuba mean to her when she first went?

"I felt Cuba's the last place that represents a kind of hope for the world, to put it dramatically," she says. "My Cuban friends would always say 'oh for God's sake, Eirene'. Now that's different because Latin America is really showing the way, but at that point of time in the mid-nineties it was Cuba."

The reality of the place never spoiled her vision, it seems. She's been conned now and then but, really, the island has given much more than it's ever taken from her. "I still have that romantic idea. With a lot of realism. But I still think Cuba has the soul of the world with it, because its values are so different."

Then again, she adds, they're not that different. "I think Scotland and Cuba have a lot in common. I think we have a basic sense of wanting fairness. I don't think anybody is driven by money. I mean, obviously there are a few people, but you don't want to be mega-rich at the expense of someone else. It doesn't make you happy.

"I always joke that the only thing [different] is the climate. We like to party and we have a sense of fairness. And we enjoy a sing-song. I felt very at home when I got there. It really got inside me."

Houston's screenplay for Day Of The Flowers offers a vision of Cuba that comes via Glasgow. It's the story of two Glasgow sisters - both party animals, albeit different kinds of party - who travel to Cuba with the ashes of their dead socialist father. "It's not autobiographical but, as every writer does, a lot of stuff is personal and you take different bits from different areas and gradually that builds up.

"One of the things that happened was my sister and I were talking about my mum's ashes and we realised we didn't know where they were. My mum had died quite young and I think it was just that dad was so upset about it that he didn't talk about it. That was a strange realisation. And my sister is very different to me - not in the way these two sisters are. But that would be something I would use."

The sisters in the film, played by Eva Birthistle and Charity Wakefield, are two versions of her in a way. "I think a lot of writers do this. You split yourself in half. I am quite a party animal. People will slag me off as a champagne socialist. I don't think it's a slag-off. I think we should all be. The director would say 'Eirene, there's not enough champagne to go round.' And I'd say, 'yes, but there's Cava, there's Prosecco ...'"

It is one of Houston's great embarrassments in life that she was not actually born in Glasgow. She didn't move there until she was three months old (after being born in Oxford), and was brought up in Whiteinch, the eldest of three. Her name is the Greek word for peace, the result of her parents' involvement as students in the struggle for Greek democracy in the 1940s.

Houston went to Glasgow School of Art and got pregnant in her first year. "I had my daughter in the holidays, then went back to art school two months later and ran home all the time. My mum helped out before she was ill."

At art school she worked on textiles, and was even invited to London with her best friend Pam Hogg for an exhibition in the design centre. Hogg went on to be one of the movers and shakers in the London fashion scene in the 1980s, but Houston was already pregnant with her second child.

"At that point I had got married and thought 'I'll be a part-time teacher and mum. That was my set then. One of the wonderful things about having kids so young is you then get the best of both worlds because you can go and have your career later, plus you have kids and then your grandkids."

There was a performing gene in her, though. She started playing in Glasgow country bands and was soon writing songs too. She also was part of a comedy double act Lib and Rene with Libby McArthur. "We were called Glasgow's answer to French and Saunders once."

By now she was a single parent and working full-time as a teacher and eventually exhaustion beat her. "I got ill with ME for five years and that knocked me a bit. I don't like talking about it. I'd rather leave it behind."

In 1993 she won a place at the National Film School for 10 months. Two years on she was still there. "I just had to be skint. My mum had died before that so I had a wee, tiny bit for whenever I was desperate. Whenever I needed a nice bottle of wine I used my mum's money."

It turned out her experience of songwriting was good training for becoming a screenwriter. They're similar skill sets, she says. "That conciseness that you need to be a songwriter really helps you in dialogue and telling a story for a screenplay."

Television series This Life was her first proper job out of film school. "A lot of people don't understand why that was successful. They think it was because it was about lawyers. But it's because they let the writers do their thing and that doesn't happen now."

Why not? Isn't that the HBO model? "I have absolutely no idea. And the soaps are getting less and less popular. I really enjoyed doing EastEnders, but there's less and less possibility to dip in and out like you used to be able to do."

Maybe it's a simple thing, she says. TV execs just aren't man enough. "They want something new but they don't have the balls to let it happen."

Houston wanted to write something set in Cuba almost from the first time she went there. That it took so long speaks volumes about how difficult it is to make an independent film these days. In Cuba she learned how to dance - "salsa is just the best thing. I think it's scientifically proven it's very good for depression" - and she learned to live in the moment.

"Because of the economic situation Cubans really know how to live in the present. As soon as I come back here I want to buy stuff, but when you're in Cuba the last thing in the world you want is to go shopping. There's always big queues. There's not much choice. And I love you can't get on the internet. They hate it."

I wonder, though, what do Cubans know about Scotland?

"Some of them will know and some of them will just look at you. The ones who do know will say 'whisky', 'the men in skirts'. And they've all seen Braveheart. They love this movie."

Maybe that's appropriate. What does Cuba represent to Eirene Houston, after all, if not freedom?

Day of the Flowers is in cinemas on Friday.

Eirene Houston will hold a Q&A after the opening night of Day of the Flowers at the Renfrew Street Cineworld, Glasgow, at 6.30pm on November 29.