CR5 Issue 155 April 2018 digital

Fool me once, shame on you…
…fool me twice, shame on me.
The first of April is traditionally April Fool’s
Day, or more correctly, All Fools Day.
Its origins, like so many traditions that have
been handed down to us across the generations,
are shrouded in a certain amount of
mystery.
It might be related to the ability of Spring
weather to provide us with theunexpected,
sunshine and showers in close order, or even,
like this year, snow at Easter.
There’s the possibility that it’s the
celebration on the fruitless expedition
by the crow on Noah’s ark to find dry land.
Some speculate that it comes from the Hindu
festival of Holi or Huli, where the celebration
of the defeat of evil takes the form of people
throwing coloured powder and water at each
other. Others suggest that it’s an evolution of
the medieval Feast of Asses or Feast of Fools
which had its beginnings in France. Certainly,
the most modern form of All Fools Day started
there. You have to remember that up until
1582, when Pope Gregory brought in a new
calendar, the 1st April was the start of the New
Year, not the 1st January. It’s why, at least in
part, our tax year still works along those lines.
(Now there’s an April Fool’s trick. Income Tax
was first introduced in the UK back in 1799
purely as a temporary measure to help pay for
the war against Napoleon. Note the use of the
word ‘temporary’. Two hundred odd years later,
and I’m still waiting for the Chancellor to leap
out from No.11 Downing Street and shout ‘April
Fool! You can have it all back now…’)
They really knew how to celebrate in those
days. Not for them a quiet evening with some
Aldi Prosecco and Jools Holland’s Hootenanny
on the TV, oh no. The celebrations lasted a
week and ended with parties, dancing late into
the night and the giving of presents. But when
the Gregorian calendar came in, not everyone
knew about it. It took a long time for news to
travel. Pope Gregory couldn’t just tweet ‘Let’s
make the calendar great again. It now starts in
January’ and the known world suddenly,
simultaneously, upgrade to Year V2.0 (Papal
Edition). Some didn’t hear about it, some did
and refused to accept the change. Others
frankly forgot about it. But what began to
happen was that people who had made the
change began to play tricks on those that
hadn’t, by inviting them to non-existent New
Year’s Eve parties.
And those who fell for it became ‘April Fools’.
The tricks, or pranks, began to develop, getting
people to believe that something that was true
was actually false. And the tradition began to
migrate, reaching England and the rest of the
British Isles in the 18th Century.
Nowadays it’s usually the reverse,
with the media often cunningly and
meticulously crafting fictional news stories and
articles which have just enough credibility to
possibly be true. In 1957, the BBC famously ran
an item on the deadly serious news magazine
programme Panorama in which they explored
the problems experienced by spaghetti farmers
on the Swiss/Italian border. In 1964, Swedish
Television announced to their viewers that they
could convert their black and white televisions
to colour through the simple expediency of
pulling a nylon stocking over the screen.
Sir Patrick Moore once announced that a
unique planetary alignment would result in less
gravity on Earth and that if you jumped at a
particular time you might even float.
In 1998 Burger King announced the launch of
the left-handed Whopper burger.
The Independent wrote an 8 page pull-out
special on a wholly fictional Caribbean island,
with detailed information on its culture, trade,
tourism and history.
Waitrose advertised the Pinana, a banana/pineapple
hybrid. Did people fall for them? Oh yes.
So, this April 1, keep an eye out for
the pranks and the tricks. And look hard.
These days they’re a lot trickier to spot. It’s
not that they’ve become so much more clever
and sophisticated, it’s just that the real news is
often so unbelievable…
Paul M Ford writes for GrayDorian
– The Writing Bureau
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