The kid who once claimed he had forced Gary Lineker to spit on his penis had a whole heap of tales to tell, and as he lived quite close to my parents I have a full lifetime of them.

When we were about 6 he claimed that the sound of a bicycle tyre bursting was so loud it could knock down a house. If ever we were upsetting him he would brandish a hand bike pump menacingly and threaten to knock our houses down. When a friend and I saw, about six months later, a bike tyre bursting at the local garage with nothing falling down as a result we couldn’t wait to see what his answer was. We goaded him for a bit until the threat came out, then revealed what we had seen. “Don’t you watch the news?” he asked “The government replaced everyone’s bike tyres last week to make them safer- except mine”

He was – aged 8 – on the books for Chelsea football club where he would be playing full time from his 12th birthday

Aged 9, he repeatedly claimed his uncle would take him to space for an evening – but rather than claim his uncle was an astronaut, he used the much more believable lie that his job was to pop up and clean satellites before coming back down and landing in the North Sea. He also said Ruud Gullit had gone with him but couldn’t go again as the rest of the team refused to pass to him out of jealousy.

By far my favourite lie was one he told to my dad, when he was about 12 (the boy, not my dad). My dad asked him why his dad was looking so glum (knowing full well it was due to their divorce). “It’s cos of Take That innit?” was the response. Upon being asked why, he claimed that his Dad (mid-40′s, bald with a beer belly) was a founding member of Take That before Gary Barlow had replaced him with Jason Orange. My Dad, stifling his giggles, asked who else was in this improbable boy band and was told “Gary Barlow, my Dad, Russ Abbott and the bloke from Erasure”.

When he was about 19 his lies backfired when he took the credit for an arson attack he had nothing to do with, in a bid to impress a pub full of people- and an undercover copper. He disappeared off the radar for several years and was last seen selling flowers at the side of an M1 service station

(thanks to @weaselpipe)