Never work with kids or animals is what they say... maybe so, if you’re a big movie star, that wants all the limelight, but I can’t think of any two things I love more.

As the owner of a nutty Boxer dog, I could go on forever about the things dogs do... but that’s for another time.

Kids – it’s not just the things they do, it’s the things they say, that gets me. They make you realise that they are often looking at things from a totally differently perspective to an adult and it’s that perspective that has you splitting your sides.

One of my first recollections is of my gadget and toy-mad eldest son being told, before he got in the car for a long journey, to go to the toilet.

At the tender age of two and sitting on the loo at the top of the stairs he was unable to “do one” and shouted down that: “It’s not working, mummy, the batteries must have gone.” Another time I was asked by another son from the back seat on a long car drive what a “fumer” was.

Much as I tried to say, that he had probably heard the French word “fumeur” ie: a smoker or maybe someone trying to explain that it was a car, that belches fumes out, he was adamant that wasn’t what he meant.

So when I eventually asked him to put it in a sentence, he thought deeply and said: “Well, my teacher says I’ve got a good sense-of-fumer!” I give up. The same son on his first long car trip came out with those dreaded words “I feel sick” to which I replied annoyingly “Just ignore it; it’s all in your imagination”.

A few minutes passed and just before that awful familiar smell drifted across my nostrils, he said “Daddy, you know that thing, that was in my imagination; well my imagination’s on the floor now!”

Number one son also arrived home from school one day declaring that lunch was wonderful because he had baby pickled onions and custard as a dessert and was adamant that’s what it was when my wife questioned him. Just to put him right she phoned a best friend whose son immediately confirmed, that they really had scoffed baby pickled onions and custard. It took a third call to solve the mystery of this gourmet school lunch, revealing that it had been gooseberries on the menu!

My wife, who is a teaching assistant in a primary school, comes home with some real classics.

One of my favourites was when she was desperately trying to get a delightful, but not very bright, little girl to grasp the concept of expressions such as a “drop” of water or an “ear” of corn or a “gust” of wind and so on.

Realising that it just wasn’t sinking in, she put one piece of rice in her hand and looking for the word “grain” said to the girl, “Let’s start with one piece of rice; now, this is just one piece of rice; what do we call one piece of rice?”

The girl’s face lit up as if in some form of divine revelation and she replied “I know it, I know it... it’s lonely!”

Another little boy was asked what he thought was happening next week, when his school was being closed for a day.

Delighted at his grasp of national news and politics, he proudly stood up and said: “I know Miss, there’s going to be a General Erection”. The same lad wrote the word “bran” in a sentence where his description and the way he used the word just didn’t make sense.

When my wife asked him to explain it, he said: “Oh Miss, you’re fick; ain’t you never ‘ad bran bread wiv bran sauce on it?” We had a very pompous vicar in our village at one time, who came into school every Thursday to talk to the children, but he had just about as much talent for communicating with kids as Maggie Thatcher did with miners.

He gave a long and convoluted talk about Jesus and the Prophets and then asked them what a Prophet was?

One hand shot up immediately and exclaimed excitedly: “I know sir; it’s when my dad tarts up a dodgy old a car and sells it for a few grand – he says he makes a big fat Prophet”.

The noise of 200 children and staff rolling with laughter, was probably only offset by the sound of his father revving up one of his cars, ready to leave the country... or did he sell one to the vicar?!

Oh well, as they say never work with kids. The trouble is, that only kids could come up with all this; the best scriptwriters on telly can’t touch them and even then it wouldn’t be the same – you just couldn’t make it up. Now I wonder what it’s like working with animals.