Ma spell cheque says me store is all write... I INTEND to spell check this article. When I finish it, that is.

Spell check is something the teacher did at school when I was a lad. She also checked your sentence construction, syntax and grammar and woe-betide if you got it wrong.

Spell-check has come to mean something quite different in this computer age. Type something on screen and your computer checks it on command.

Unfortunately, computers aren't teachers. They don't check your grammar. They can make mistakes, serious ones.

Now that we're supposed to be part of Tony Blair's computer revolution, it is timely, perhaps, to warn of the pitfalls of spell-check. Or could I write the spell falls of pit check. And spell-check would still mark it correct.

The worry is that writers begin to rely on it. It's one of the reasons why you see such appalling English and such annoying mistakes in all kinds of printed matters.

Spell check will spot the odd spelling mistake but it will never pick up recognisable words used incorrectly. It didn't, for example, see anything wrong with Maurice Miner when someone wrote an article about the car.

We journalists were in the firing line for the early idiosyncrasies of computerised checking and layout more than most. We even had to train systems in how to split words at the end of a line of print.

One early lesson concerned the reporting of a court case in which a man was accused of rape. The defence called a behavioural therapist. By the time the newspaper had reported the therapist's evidence, the computer system setting the story had, unfortunately, split the job description as best it could and turned him into the- rapist!

One of the first problems discovered with spell-check was, that if it didn't recognise a word it tried to suggest a substitute, prompting you into replacing it with the word you MEANT to write.

I suppose the newspaper to suffer the worst fate of all this at the hands of a computer system was one of our oldest and most revered national organs. During Mrs Thatcher's premiership this newspaper had prepared for the Iron Lady's visit to East Lancashire with a review of employment problems afflicting Blackburn and Burnley.

The article went on: "Clitheroe, however, will be a source of greater pleasure to Mrs Thatcher. Employment here has risen ..."

When spell-check was applied to the story, the computer had never heard of Clitheroe and suggested the writer might have meant a particular personal part of a woman's anatomy. Unfortunately the weary, overworked sub-editor pressed "Replace!"

Next morning, the phone lines between No10 and the luckless editor were incandescent and there followed a grovelling apology.

Well, as I said at the beginning, I ought to spell-check this article. But, thinking about it, I daren't!