FOR one reason or another, us poor dads always seem to have a lot of explaining to do. We’re forever finding ourselves in trouble, digging holes for ourselves, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, plunging ourselves into embarrassing situations, and inevitably ending up in the dreaded doghouse. It just comes with the territory.

And, more often than not, there’s a perfectly innocent explanation – like the time I romantically set up a secret ISA bank account with the sole purpose of saving a few quid every week in order to surprise my wife with a holiday cruise for our silver wedding anniversary.

Despite giving Santander strict instructions to only use my work address for correspondence, the bank managed to send a statement to my home. My wife – in her established role as manager of the household finances – opened it and, naturally, thought I was up to no good and leading some kind of double life.

“I set it up to take you on a silver wedding cruise – honest!” I declared.

“Yeah, right,” came the icy reply.

It took days to overcome the suspicion, but my mate Dan, a middle-aged father-of-two from the tennis club, is in an even bigger pickle – not with his wife, but with every other female member who now suspects him of untoward behaviour.

You see, Dan was late home from work one day last week and was due to play tennis so he’d had to get ready in a hurry: rummaging through the laundry to find a sports shirt, shorts and tracksuit bottoms.

His car screeched into the tennis club car park and he jumped out, full of apologies to his disgruntled opponent for being late.

The other courts happened to be full of women playing in doubles matches as Dan ran past, all of a fluster. It was while running that something dropped out of the back of his tracksuit bottoms.

“I think you’ve dropped a glove or something,” said one of the women, picking it off the ground and holding it up in full view of everyone.

It wasn’t a glove. It was a pair of women’s knickers – very skimpy knickers. The collective sharp intake of breath could be heard all around the club.

The trouble with men is that they’re really bad at sounding convincing when they’re under pressure from the opposite sex.

“Look, I know this probably looks very suspicious, but I can absolutely assure you that they belong to my daughter,” gushed Dan, as the knickers were handed back to him and he instinctively shoved them in the pocket of his shorts.

Unsurprisingly, his explanation was met with a stony silence.

“Honestly, I was in a terrible rush and I suppose I must have picked them up by mistake when I was getting ready,” he went on.

It’s not something I’ve ever seen happen to Roger Federer at Wimbledon…

The things they say

THANKS to Amanda Adeola, of Darlington, for letting me know about her four-year-old son Jadon’s weekly telephone catch-up with her dad.

“Did you die in the Army?” the little lad asked his very-much-alive Grandad.

THE splendid Gary Philipson, from BBC Tees, told me how his son Tom, eight, was looking at black and white pictures of Saltwell Park in Gateshead and asked: “When did the world turn colour?”

THANKS also to Karen Westcott, of Middlesbrough, for getting in touch to tell me how her son Ethan, four, asked: “Mummy, how do trains fly?”

“They don’t – they move along tracks on the ground,” Karen explained.

“But what about the Flying Scotsman?” asked Ethan.

Have you got a funny “Things they say”? Email me at peter.barron@nne.co.uk