AS PARENTS, you encourage your children to tell the truth. But it reminds you of the lies you told your Mum and Dad.

The biggest childhood whopper I spun was when I was 11.

We had heard a local pond had been stocked with rainbow trout. So a friend and I agreed to go fishing there – or poaching as it’s now called.

When the morning finally came, it was blowing a gale with lashing rain. And in a moment I lived to regret, I grabbed my Dad’s giant and prized fishing umbrella from the cupboard under the stairs.

Dad’s expensive fishing gear was strictly off limits. Taking it out of the house was a criminal offence.

Sure enough, an hour into the fishing and a massive gust of wind scooped up the brolly and chucked it into a tree.

To my horror, I discovered the metal brolly pole snapped clean in two. I can’t describe my abject terror. There was no getting out of this! He would go beserk.

Disturbed by my growing distress, my friend concocted a cunning plan.

His Dad worked in the Barrow shipyard. He would get it welded and get it back to me.

The only niggling doubt was if my Dad found the brolly missing while it was being fixed.

So we set the plan in action. For a long, torturous, horrible week, I lived in fear of every passing second. If Dad went near the cupboard, I flinched thinking he would find the brolly missing.

Days at school were ruined by imagining my plot had been uncovered.

But eventually, my mate came up trumps – delivering the neatly-welded umbrella back to me.

With a sigh of relief, I safely returned it to its rightful home.

Then a few weeks later, Dad appeared with the brolly.

In a highly-accusatory tone, he asked: “Have you been touching this?”

Sinking inside, I insisted: “No. Why?”

“Well...” said Dad. “I snapped it in half a month ago and was going to chuck it out, but its been magically fixed by a welding fairy...”