I was in a Business Studies lesson at school. I was bored. So I challenged my friend Sam Cobley to guess my dad's job.

"Gay porn star?" he said.

Nope.

"McDonald's janitor?" he said.

Nope.

"I give up," he said.

I shook with excitement. I couldn't wait to tell him. I knew he'd think my dad's job would be pretty darn cool.

I hesitated for dramatic effect, then said, "He's a children's entertainer." I beamed stupidly.

"A what?" he said.

This surprised me. I thought everyone knew what a children's entertainer was. So I grasped around for a description, like trying to find an iPhone next to your bed in the dark.

"You know. He goes to kids' birthday parties dressed up, where he does... balloon modelling."

Sam gasped. Then he said, slowly, with relish: "Your dad... is a clown!" And he roared with laughter.

Sam had struck upon comedy gold and it had to be shared. So he told everyone in the school year my dad was a clown. That's over a hundred people. I immediately suffered from daily clown jokes. Everyone was an amateur Peter Kay. If someone had big shoes, they were my dad's shoes. If a small car drove by, it was my dad's car. A student called Michael Cotton took particularly glee at honking at me while squeezing an invisible rubber nose on his face. Perhaps the lowest point of my entire school career was when the teacher left the class for a few minutes, leaving Michael free to honk honk honk away in the dragging silence. The whole class stifled giggles. I sat frozen like a clown in a tiny car's headlights, consternation all over my face like a cream pie.

People kept asking me, "Is your dad really a clown?" I'd shake my head back at them and spit out, "No, he's not a clown, he's a children's entertainer." But those two words meant nothing to them. No, a clown was the only image their tiny brains could imagine.

Here's the difference between a clown and a children's entertainer. Clowns wear face paint and work at a circus. They often don't speak. They make people laugh by pretending to be idiots.

Children's entertainers, on the other hand, perform at birthday parties and similar events. They entertain with a mix of magic, balloon models, stilts, juggling, and even fire-breathing. That's what my dad does. In fact, he doesn’t always entertain children - sometimes he makes penises out of balloons at student union parties.

He got interested in all this fifteen years ago, when he saw an entertainer in a school and thought, I could do that. Then he learned from a book how to model balloons. There was no YouTube back then so everything you wanted to learn had to be learned from a book or from a mentor. My dad didn't have a mentor so he used books instead. Like this he learned the basics of balloon modelling: various twisting techniques (pinch twist, loop twist, lock twist), leaving one inch of the balloon uninflated to allow you to twist and knot the balloon without it bursting, and so on. Fairly soon he was confident enough to come up with his own designs, like a mermaid with a bobbly tail. You could ask my dad to make anything you wanted, and as long as it was in the realms of imaginative possibility - he couldn't make a balloon model of a proton, for example - he could make it a balloon model of it.

And it was from books that my dad learned to do magic. I don't mean real wizard magic like Gandalf does, but magic tricks like card tricks, coin tricks, and a trick where you open a previously-empty metal pan and reveal a dove inside.

This one time, my dad learned how to levitate by watching David Blaine do it on TV. My dad stood in the kitchen and said, "I'm going to levitate." And then he did it: he fucking levitated, about two inches off the ground, right there in the kitchen. I'm not making this up. The trick was only slightly spoiled when moments later, he showed us how he did it: by hiding his right foot, which was still standing on the ground by the toes, behind his left foot.

What annoys me is that's not even his real job. It’s something he does on weekends. He’s a full-time primary school teacher. I only told Sam my dad was a children's entertainer because it sounded cool in my head.

So I categorically state that my dad is not a clown. He doesn't wear face paint, he doesn't work in a circus, he’s never been in a horror film, and he's not a clown. End of. So there. Finito.

Oh, and he has certainly never ridden on a tiny tricycle.

TL;DR If you're at school, don't imply your dad is a clown.