JOAN Burnie, Daily Record agony aunt, columnist and last month's winner of the lifetime achievement award at the Scottish Press Awards has more than a touch of Jekyll and Hyde about her.

In person there is nothing to identify this grandmotherly figure as the author of some of the most vicious words ever committed to British newsprint.

It barely does her justice to say she takes no prisoners. After a documentary was broadcast about INXS singer Michael Hutchence's death in his hotel room in 1997, Burnie wrote a column suggesting that Paula Yates would have considered "cosy" three-way sex with Hutchence and her teenage daughter.

Turning up at the front gate of Burnie's small but perfectly pruned front garden in Edinburgh's west end, I am welcomed inside to a steaming bowl of onion soup. "The witch", as she is known in the blogosphere, couldn't be more polite in conversation or considered in argument. Can a dog-lover who fought to bring her Jack Russell, Oscar, to the office really be the man-hating moralist monster of journalistic legend?

"I am the most evil woman in Britain," Burnie laughs, revelling in her provocation of liberal readers.

"I can say some pretty awful things about people, but I only try to say them about people who are big enough to take it. You say things because that's how you feel. Life is in shades of grey but columns are in black and white, You say what you think at that time, but you may change your mind."

Yates died of an accidental overdose in 2000, but Burnie still does not regret writing that Hutchence column: "Not for one minute. I knew Paula Yates. I know how tough it is when mothers behave to a certain extent like Paula. The may not have spiky hair, they may not have their faces in the papers but they damage their children. Why shouldn't I say it?"

Burnie's pungency leaves none of her readers agnostic. There is a Motherwell guitar band called the Just Joans in homage to her agony column. There is also a website entitled We Hate Joan Burnie. But those who know her never confuse the woman with the persona.

"Apart from the dogs I never really write about me. The person I am with my children and my grandchildren - slightly dipsy, who's always getting lost, who's always leaving things behind - is not Joan Burnie. I'm mother and granny, not the person who is in the column. I keep the two separate."

Born in Glasgow in 1941, Burnie never wanted to be a journalist. A former pupil of Hutchesons' Grammar School for girls - she was suspended for having the wrong number of buttons on her cardie - she wanted to be an actress and only ended up in print when she mucked up a temping job filing pictures for The Herald. She was encouraged to write instead by the then industrial editor Douglas Crawford, who would later become her husband and the father of her two children.

She filed features for The Scotsman and The Herald until, hitting it off with Deirdre McSharry, the then editor of Cosmopolitan, she took a job with the women's magazine. She claims never to have read the Daily Record before she started to write for it and won the agony aunt spot after being offered to the paper as a "bright Scottish lassie" when the tabloid phoned Cosmopolitan asking for a different writer.

Burnie says: "I thought they were very lucky to have someone like me writing for them and they changed every word of my first piece."

It was not a habit Record subs were allowed to get into. Burnie says when her columns go through production, she stands behind the desk making sure they do not alter a word. "I use a lot of Scottish words and when they used to change anent' to about' I went scatty. If it's got my byline on it then I feel it should be me."

Officially, Burnie is in semi-retirement. She is only in the Edinburgh office one day a week and ranges less widely for the paper than she used to. Still an associate editor - "well that's what is still says on my card anyway" - those who have worked with Burnie say there is far more to her than Just Joan. One former colleague remembers her turning up first thing on the morning of Princess Diana's death with a list of story angles it would have taken other papers weeks to have thought up.

Despite her claims to being a "slightly batty old woman" there is more going on with her upstairs than any good journalist should admit. Her pride in her work is fierce and, for good or ill, she expects the same rigour from colleagues.

She talks of one former award winning journalist as a "dismal failure" during their time at the Record and points out the small number of journalists who move successfully from broadsheets to tabloids.

And here she is on another fellow Record writer: "Her column didn't make sense. It didn't have a verb or any full stops - which is quite difficult. It was jibberish. I went and found who had written this and asked her if the subs always changed her copy. She said yes and I asked her if she wondered why they were changing it. That was all I said. The next minute she's sobbing at her desk."

Doesn't she take it a bit far with readers' letters that show every sign of being made up?

Not so, says Burnie: "It's the first question you are always asked. They are heavily, heavily edited. I change the names, gender and sometimes the circumstances but the kernel of them is true."

Burnie says this will be her last year of writing, while admitting that she has being saying that for five years. She expresses a longing for her "garden, her dogs, my daughter's house in France, my friends", but it is hard to imagine her packing in a job that still fires her up. Asked what motivates her she says, quick as a flash, "anger and shouting at the TV".

If the equivalent of Diana dying were to happen now, would she turn up with the ideas?

"Och yeah, I'm such an interfering old cow I probably would, but I wouldn't feel I had to, that's the difference."

Indeed, times have changed. As she is no longer staff at the Record, and now that her old dog Oscar has passed on, Burnie is forbidden from bringing his successor into the office after a colleague complained.

In a Press Awards acceptance speech that had hacks cackling into their free booze, Burnie pointed out that all of the six editors she had worked for were men. Having played such a pivotal role in the Daily Record's history, does she think she should have been given the big job?

"There's no point in feeling that way. I've been very lucky. I have no qualifications. I can't even type properly. I can't spell. I don't do shorthand.

"I really have been very, very lucky - but of course I am also very, very good," she says, with what can only be described as a wicked smile.