This is a picture of my son, Owen, a few days after his third birthday. He's sprawled across our kitchen floor, playing with a truck. Except, to him, that's not the kitchen floor. It's a road. A busy road, twisting and turning, passing shops and houses. He's driving his truck, and its cargo of brightly coloured cars, from the car factory to the car shop. He once explained to me that you'd need a very big plastic bag to take cars home from the shops. Worth remembering, after all most car salesmen don't supply them.

When I was about his age, I used to do the same things. I'd be flat out on my bedroom floor, eye level with Han Solo or Princess Leia as they shot at the Empire's forces from behind the landing struts of the Millenium Falcon. I'd provide all the special effects, the laser blasts, the rousing music. It didn't matter that I only had three stormtroopers, each of them attired for wildly different climates, I'd come up with an explanation for it and a method to resurrect them when the heroes were least expecting another attack. When I was given a pack of four bounty hunter figures you could almost hear the sighs of relief from my battle-fatigued troopers.

Cardboard and polystyrene became highly sought after commodities in our household. A few deft prods with a pair of safety scissors and what used to be the bottom half of the packaging around my Dad's new portable stereo (this was the late 70s, so it came with a small trolley and a team of huskies) was now Ice Station Hoth, or Darth Vader's Imperial Star Destroyer. Polystyrene was great; you could fit the pieces of a poly wall back together so that the droids could crash through it again and again. If you were careful you could also do it without your Mum complaining about little snow storms of polystyrene all over the floor.

I'd build models of aircraft from kits, but making things from my own designs and ideas was much more fun. Kits models you could get wrong, but my stuff always turned out just right. After watching "The Spaceman and King Arthur", a fantastically poor Disney escapade based on Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", I was inspired to build a model space shuttle out of cardboard. I say cardboard, but if it was a can of food the list of ingredients (largest first) would be: glue, sellotape, cardboard. The film and the model shared the same level of quality, but I loved them both.

I was the writer, director, producer, special effects unit, composer, orchestra, set designer and actor in a million short films that played in my head. Sometimes I'd take pictures of the scenes I'd set up, but when the films were developed they just looked like toys standing in odd poses. Something was missing, you couldn't tell that Luke was shooting his way out of the base, protecting the droids from the advancing Darth Vader and the unstoppable might of his three stormtrooper army.

As I got older, I stopped playing with toys. I'm not sure why, probably because I convinced myself that it was all kid's stuff, that I should put more effort into being surly, growing hair and being shy around girls. The fun of disappearing into a world that wasn't real got packed away with the toys. I'd get something similar from reading books, or a good film - but they were other people's worlds. Their rules and their stories.

I'm envious of the young, successful artists, musicians, actors and authors. The ones that say in interviews that they "always knew they wanted to do this". I've only recently realised what I always wanted to do. To tell stories. To make worlds and take other people there with me. I've got a lot of work to do if I'm going to get as good as my son is right now.

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