NEVER the happiest of travellers, Mum looked suddenly very nervous as she waited to go through security at East Midlands airport.

“Are you worried about flying?” I asked. “No,” she said. “I’m worried about looking after him for three days on my own.”

The ‘him’ in question was my father, and I had to admit she had a point.

Mum and Dad were about to fly to Venice for their golden wedding anniversary, and it would be the first time they had been on a foreign break that wasn’t a package holiday.

With no tour rep to bail us out, Dad had just given Mum, me and the other half heart failure by cracking a joke at the airport check-in desk.

The Easyjet woman had asked the standard question about whether there was anything in the bag that was forbidden.

“Nothing apart from my syringes,” Dad said, turning on his finest roguish grin. He was trying to imply he was a 70-year-old drug addict keen to threaten cabin staff with potentially lethal infection.

Oh, Dad.

The gods must have been indulging us, because the Easyjet woman either did not hear him, or she chose to ignore this particularly hilarious jape.

“Tony!” hissed my other half as we bundled Mum and Dad away from possible arrest over the grounding of a passenger plane. “For God’s sake, don’t say things like that when you get to customs or the gate. No jokes about guns, bombs or knives – people have been jailed!”

Clearly, the terror alert was not high on Dad’s radar because, despite his assuring us several times that he had no liquids in his hand luggage, he was later stopped at the security checkpoint. To Dad, a bottle of Aramis did not count as liquid, presumably because he would not willingly drink it.

Good grief, I thought, as we abandoned Mum and Venice to their fate. Would La Serenissima keep her cool in the face of a visit from my father?

It’s small wonder to me that Mum has a nervous disposition. It’s much more amazing that she and Dad have made it to 50 years of marriage.

Dad likes a lark, you see. There was the time he bought a ‘Naughty Fido’ fake dog poo and left it on the sitting-room carpet for Mum to find.

Unfortunately for my little brother, she thought he was responsible and had visited her wrath upon him before my dad could intervene.

Then there was the time he bought a baby grand piano which he knew would never get in to our modest Barratt house. Even if he’d managed to squeeze it through the front door, he would never have got it past the far more formidable barrier of my mother’s implacable opposition.

It was going to be thrown away, that piano, so he had to buy it. To this day, several decades later, it remains, quietly mouldering in the garage, so that his far more useful car is left to rust upon the drive.

The piano was the largest, but not the only musical folly brought home by Dad in his quest for musical excellence. Clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, mouth organs: all are somewhere in the attic after ear-splitting failed attempts to conquer their mysteries.

In the end, Dad settled for his voice. He used to charm us kids into relative quiet by mimicking famous singers, and some of the most harmonious moments of my parents’ 50-year marriage have been spent in jazz clubs and music bars, Mum nursing a sweet Cinzano and lemonade and listening to Dad singing Satin Doll with his best Sinatra phrasing.

Happy anniversary, Mum and Dad. I’m sure it wasn’t roses all the way, but with dad around, it’s not likely to have been boring for long.