Finding out your father wears women's underwear

I suppose there are many ways of finding out your father wears women's underwear. The most common way, I should think, is to walk in on him with his trousers down by mistake. The least common way, I should also think, is to have it announced to you at Sunday lunch with a table full of guests. Which is how I found out about it, of course.

There we were, my mother, my father, three friends from the village and me, enjoying roast beef with roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, gravy, drinking our way through a couple of bottles of red, a lazy afternoon at Forest Lodge, when my mother turns to my father and asks, "Have you still got my knickers on, darling?"

Our guests and I stop talking and look at my father expectantly. Well, has he?

"Bloody hell, yes darling, I think I have," he says, as he takes a quick peek down the top of his trousers. "I'll just be a tick." And off he pops upstairs to the bedroom. To get back into his y-fronts, presumably.

This was three years ago. By now, of course, it's common knowledge across the village, much to the delight of all our friends in the local pub. Not that that bothers my father. If anything, he stands at the bar looking smug when someone questions him about it.

"Is it true you wear women's knickers?" someone might ask him.

"Yes," he'll reply. "Don't you?"