There was great interest when the first "word processor", as the early fully electronic on-screen writing and editing machines were known, arrived at the Conoco office at Nigg in 1981.

It lived in a special sound-proof booth in the main reception area and the clerical staff told me it was a huge improvement on the ordinary typewriters that had hitherto been the mainstay of office correspondence.

But I wasn't that interested at the time: I was too busy dealing with all the cars the American engineers continually drove into winter ditches and I had no inkling that its technology would one day empower me to write.

But since then, the desktop pc has indeed revolutionised my life. The ability to check spelling and grammar, the ability to edit and move text, has made writing easy for me in a way that simple pen and ink could never have.

It was like a magic door being opened. Had that first word processor never been invented, then I would still be crossing out and experimenting with alternative spellings ("seperate", "separate") in the top left margin. I owe it to technology: without it the first column would never have been written

Last week I mentioned all the porkies.

My mother is an excellent storyteller, today as good as ever she was - and when I was small she used to make up bedtime stories for me.

One tale, about a giant cheese sandwich (so big that a little boy was able to eat his way into it and thereby create his own cheese-walled den!) which appeared one night next to where the grey Fergie tractor used to sit, stays with me yet.

This storytelling rubbed off on me in several ways. Firstly that, like many other children, I had an imaginary "friend".

He was called Mr Gogle and he lived behind the vast and ancient sycamore tree that looms over the building where today my brother makes his cheese. But what was different about Mr Gogle was that he was a sinister figure; an old man with a face you never quite saw and who wore a dark hooded cloak, and was most certainly not someone that you wanted to get too close to.

The speed with which I ran back in the twilight - from taking the cows back to the faraway field by the sea - had a lot to do with Mr Gogle. If bedtime stories did that for me, heaven knows what DVDs and computer games do for present day children.

But arising from Mr Gogle, my solitary childhood (until my brother appeared) and an over-fertile imagination, my flights of fancy gradually became ever more elaborate - culminating when I would tell the most jaw-dropping whoppers.

Not that they were lies along the lines of "I didn't do it!" in fact it was about telling any available young audience about my bold adventures and derring-do.

One particular Christmas, one we shared in Yorkshire with friends of my parents, I remember really going over the top. The other lads, both younger than me, were called Nick and Ben - and for hours after we should have been asleep I regaled them with tales of the Highlands, involving as they did blizzards, eagles, wolves, the German army, emergency rescues and, of course, my personal wisdom and valour.

But as I yarned away, and as the lads listened rapt, there was one small part of my brain that drew back and said "Jamie, what is all this tripe you are talking?"

And in the daytime, thank goodness, there was a nagging sense of guilt. It was wrong to lie. And then hours later, it was "Tell us another of your stories!" "Please please!!" and I was away again.

The irony is that Nick and Ben surely lived far more glamorous lives than I did. They went to boarding school and their father was the managing director of a family textile company. He drove a Jaguar, enjoyed his gin and gave me a £5 note for Christmas. This was a far cry from my parents' initial attempts at making crowdie in the bath, and our first car, a second-hand Ford Anglia van.

So my storytelling was much about escapism. Of this I am pretty sure. And although it fizzled out and I began to tread the path of (relative) truth as I embarked on my teenage years, it still tells you a lot about my childhood.

It would be wrong to say that I felt lonely or insecure, I was a happy little boy - and yet my life and background, though I didn't know it at the time, was absolutely shaping the way my mind works today. Those long days and nights by myself made me think

But the last thing I want to say about writing is this - just do it.

I have described before how my first ever published column only came to be because the late Jimmy Henderson, then editor of the Northern Times, said to me: "I think you have a column in you - have a shot, and send it up to Golspie".

How he knew I had a column in me, I will never know. Certainly I had no idea at the time. To be honest, many many thousands of words further on today, I still don't really understand where the writing comes form. It's a strange business.

I blame it on Mr Gogle.