One of my favourite sounds when I was a child, apart from the sound of my mother mixing the Yorkshire puddings on a Sunday morning of course, was the satisfying ‘plop’ of the newspaper as it came through the letterbox.

I would rush to pick it up and carry it to the back room and put it on the kitchen table where my parents would take turns to read it.

These days, of course, papers are very rarely delivered, but that means that the delivery, for people like me who love a newspaper, has been replaced by the early morning trip to the paper shop.

I love buying newspapers and, in some kind of echo of my childhood experience, taking them home and putting them on the kitchen table.

When I’m on holiday at home and abroad I like to buy newspapers, even if they’re written in a language I can’t understand.

I remember my joy, on an early stroll through Pickering in North Yorkshire, at finding a newsagent’s that was open at 0530, the perfect time for a paper shop, in my opinion.

I remember making a radio programme many years ago in a place called Georgetown in the depths of rural Maine in the USA and every day I would wander to the tiny shop and buy a paper.

The local news was very local and the adverts were for shops I would probably never visit but the joy of holding the newspaper in my hands was something that felt exhilarating and comforting at the same time.

And now, of course, I could access the content (to use a very 21st century phrase) of those Georgetown papers online without having to catch a plane to Maine and a bus to Georgetown but of course that isn’t the same.

There’s no physical interaction with something online, apart from a kind of clicking sound.

I realise that online is the present, never mind the future, and that newspapers are the present and that for some they have a whiff of the past, but my view is that newspapers, particularly local ones like the Barnsley Chronicle, can survive and thrive as physical objects in the same way that vinyl records can survive and thrive in a world of downloads.

And, in a world where everyone (quite rightly) has opinions and everyone (quite rightly) wants to share them in cyberspace, my favourite bit of any newspaper is this bit that you’re reading now: the column written by a human being and committed to print.

I love columns. As a child I would read columns in daily and Sunday papers and magazines that really got me hooked into these forms of short, whimsical pieces of journalism.

There’s an American magazine called The New Yorker that I’ve subscribed to for years simply because of the quality of the prose in the columns.

The ones I like best aren’t strident or opinionated; they’re just gentle and thoughtful and sometimes a bit nostalgic and sometimes a bit wistful, and they’re the kinds of columns I like to write.

I remember when we used to go to see my dad’s family in Peebles, a beautiful town in the Scottish borders, and of course I bought the Peebleshire News which had a lovely column in it by someone with the pen name ‘Gutterbluid’ and once, when my dad caught a huge salmon in the River Tweed, he was featured in the column, which I wish I’d kept.

What I recall of the column is that it told the story of the salmon in a funny way; I recognised my dad in it but he became a fictional character.

My brother was in it too, because he’d also caught a big fish, and the way the piece was written taught me so much about how you can take real life and just alter it a little to make a story that is funny and thoughtful and, to use a word I’ve used a lot in these paragraphs, whimsical.

So I’ve always wanted to be a columnist in a newspaper and I thank my lucky stars that I’ve been one in this space for a number of years. And long may newspapers continue to be sold and read.

And as long as I can keep coming up with ideas, long may I keep writing for them!