'I did wonder whether it might be better just to get shot dead and for it all to be over'

• Freeman, left, and Jos Cendn after their release

A QUARTER of a century on from my first drunken pub crawls down the Lothian Road, the Edinburgh of my youth is a distant place, blurred as much by the years as by the large quantities of McEwan's Lager. Having left the city aged 18, I have no idea whether such 1980s nightspots like Joe's Garage and the Bull & Bush still exist, or what became of many of my school-age drinking companions.

Two and a half years ago, though, those memories came flooding back – not while I was logged on to Facebook or Friends Reunited, but while sitting in a cave in the mountains of northern Somalia, wondering if I'd ever see Britain again. On assignment to report on Somalia's escalating piracy problem, my photographer and I had been kidnapped by the very men we'd been sent to write about, and were now stuck as hostages in the most lawless nation on the planet.

Held by a gang of Kalashnikov-wielding gunmen, we spent six grim weeks in captivity, living off a diet of goat meat and rice, enduring occasional death threats, and confined almost 24 hours a day to a mat the size of a picnic rug. A chess set made from cigarette-pack foil helped pass the first few days, yet as time dragged on, the greatest challenge in such Stone Age conditions was the sheer, crushing boredom.

It's in such circumstances that you hope your mind might rise to the challenge, using the enforced idleness to dwell on the big, philosophical questions that we normally never have time for. Instead, I found my tired, stressed-out brain preferred random trivia that would not even have qualified for a pub quiz.

"Name, in order, all the pubs from Morningside to Lothian Road."

"Who was your English teacher for Highers?"

"Who was the best-looking girl in Sixth Year?"

So much, then, for that expensive private education at George Watson's College. Yet this is one of the effects of prolonged incarceration as a hostage. Preoccupied just with staying calm, the mind prefers easy mental exercise, with the focus on the familiar past rather than the uncertain future, hence the frequent jaunts down memory lane.

Among my other thoughts, though, were that were it not for The Scotsman, I might never have ended up in such a jam in the first place.

It was back in 2003, when I gave up a reliable but dull reporting job in London to seek my fortunes as a war correspondent in post-Saddam Iraq, that The Scotsman foreign desk gave me my first break as a freelancer.

It was the start of a career that has given me the most exciting years of my life but, even then, the risks that went with the rewards were becoming clear. A fellow Scottish journalist, Richard Wild, who also freelanced for this newspaper, was shot dead in Baghdad by a random gunman. I myself got a bullet in the backside after being attacked by a mob of Shia militiamen in Basra. In the heavily-fortified hotel I lived in, no fewer than six other freelancers were abducted by terrorist gangs, to the point where rumours circulated that the place was cursed.

While all were eventually released, some were held for months by al-Qaeda – the group which beheaded the British contractor, Ken Bigley – their terrified faces staring out from terrorist video nasties. In a heartfelt piece for this newspaper in late 2004, I remember writing that kidnap was probably the one fate arguably worse than death.

So when fellow journalist Jos Cendn and I were spirited away at gunpoint in the ramshackle Somali port of Bossaso in late 2008, I had a well-informed sense of fear and dread. Might these people be Islamists, intent on torturing or killing us? Might we be held for months or years on end, to the point where even if we were released, it would be with neither body nor mind intact? And, worst of all, how would my nearest and dearest cope? Aged 38 at the time, I was young and reasonably strong, but for my parents, the stress of a prolonged kidnap saga could bring on a heart attack.

Just to complicate matters, I'd also been on the verge of splitting up with my girlfriend in the weeks beforehand: now she was about to go through hell worrying about someone who might not even want to be with her if he got released. For the first time in five happy years of cruising the world's troublespots, I realised that there were others as well as me who suffered if it all went wrong. Added to all this was a sense of embarrassment. As a foreign correspondent, you are paid to go to dangerous places and get out alive, to spot threats before it's too late. Yet the men who abducted us were our own bodyguards, the very people we had paid to protect us from kidnappers.

They had been hired by our local "fixers", who we believe may have been in on the act, and as we drove to the airport on what should have our last day in town, the guns that were supposed to be keeping us safe turned against us. The bodyguards forced us out of our car at gunpoint, hustled us into their pick-up truck, and then drove us off at high speed across the desert to a nearby mountain range, where we walked almost non-stop for two days until coming to a cave hidden in a canyon.

Exactly who our kidnappers were we never found out, although we were led to believe that they were a gang of "freelancing" local pirates, who'd snatched us on the orders of a local warlord. A smattering of Arabic was the only common language we had, which meant it was also hard to strike up any rapport.

Indeed, the only concrete thing we ever learned about them was that several were ardent Premier League fans: one of them, upon learning that I was British, suddenly piped up: "Ah, Breetan! Daveed Beekham, Paul-a Scoles, Thierry Henri and Mankester United." His knowledge of football proved almost encyclopaedic: when, in a bid to strike up a rapport, I eagerly replied: "Ah, yes, Thierry Henri – Arsenal," he frowned and pointed out that he had transferred to Barcelona the year before. In fact, the only blank look he gave was when I mentioned my home team, Hibernian FC. News of the feats of the men of Easter Road, it seems, has yet to reach the cavesfolk of northern Somalia.

Two weeks in, the matey banter came to an abrupt end, when one of the gang, an elderly commander who we nicknamed the Old Bastard, began threatening us. Just before a "proof of life" phone call back to London one day, he staged a mock execution, cocking an AK-47 in my face and threatening to beat me up. By the next day, though, I found myself glad that he was around, when men from a rival clan, who we believe were intent on "stealing" us, turned up at the cave.

A gunfight erupted, pitting the Old Bastard and a squad of his men against various rival clansmen arrayed, Wild West style, on cliffs overlooking our hiding spot. As Jos and I sat cowering in a corner, bullets ricocheting around the cave's stone walls, I did wonder whether it might be better just to get shot dead and for it all to be over.

Somehow, though, my luck turned good again. The rival clan backed off, and after six weeks of frantic talks, my employers, the Sunday Telegraph, together with what seemed like a cast of thousands of tribal chiefs, Somali politicians and diplomats, negotiated our freedom. One sunny morning in early January 2009, having spent Christmas, New Year and my 39th birthday in the cave, we were handed over to a group of clan intermediaries on a remote mountain pass.

They then whisked us back to a waiting plane at Bossaso airport, where an assembled Somali press pack asked eagerly if we had been tortured during captivity. When I said "no", they quickly got bored and left.

Since then, the fate of other kidnap victims in Somalia has made me realise just how fortunate Jos and I were. Paul and Rachel Chandler, the British yachting couple, were held for 13 months, while Nigel Brennan and Amanda Lindhout, two freelance journalists who were kidnapped in Somalia three months before we were, emerged another year later.

Many of the commercial sailors who have been hijacked have likewise languished for months, sometimes being beaten as well. Indeed, in the view of some fellow ex-hostages I have interviewed since then, my experience counts as "kidnap light". Peter Moore, the British IT consultant who was held for two and a half years in Iraq, laughed when I mentioned that we had something in common. "Six weeks?" he said. "Is that all?"

Still, when it comes to days served in captivity, I am more than content not to be in the record books. While it seemed like an eternity at the time, fact that I got out relatively quickly spared me from any lasting psychological trauma – save for a lasting aversion to goat meat. I still also travel to foreign hotspots for work, although one place I have no plans to return to is northern Somalia. Because the next time I fancy a pub crawl around Edinburgh, I'd rather it was the real thing.

• Kidnapped, Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage by Colin Freeman is published by Monday Books, 8.99. Freeman is the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph.