WE are a week late but never mind, let’s hear it for the Dads.

Last Sunday was Father’s Day, the day when we celebrate everything they do for their children, whether supporting their sporting achievements, playing with them, giving them a hand to help them along or even a shoulder for the best view in town.

There is an intriguing photo on this page which shows a dad at work with his children. A diver colleague demonstrates the job that dad would normally be doing on a work day.

The only problem is, we have the names of the children and the diver but no mention at all of dad - a metaphor, maybe, for how fathers are sometimes overlooked?

My children are in their late 40s and early 50s, born on the cusp of the era which would see parents co-parenting.

The norm was that dad brought home the bacon and mum cooked it.

I continued to work, so brought home my share of the bacon but my husband was the one who normally cooked it. The rule was: first home cooks dinner.

My disloyal children told their father that if I didn’t see his car in the driveway I drove around the block!

Ian was ahead of his time. He was changing nappies when disposable nappies were new, untried and far too expensive for normal households.

On my husband’s 70th birthday, our son presented him with a book about his life.

It was very clever, very funny and quite rude! At the back, slipped into the cover, was a stick drawing of a man holding a child on a bike.

That’s what fatherhood should be - not just helping children reach their milestone but doing it together and enjoying it.

It is lovely to see the proud fathers on these pages - the Sergeant Instructor with his daughter who has won the medal of honour, and Keith Harrison who not only welcomed his new daughter but also the first baby of the Millennium in this part of the world. Mum Trudy is now, of course, the MP for Copeland.

To all of you featured here, and to all those others not in our photos, a belated but sincere Happy Father’s Day!