Good Friday Feeling, Enjoy this missing blog bonus…

Crazy world we live in; ain’t it? April Fools Day and scanning the news this morning, I can’t sift the fools fiction from the hilarious factual stories circulating the press. My favourite article was one on stories which should be fake but seriously aren’t. The list of the 10 hot stories (see link below) had me howling into my bacon and eggs. Maybe it was just the hungover me, but how funny is it that beards have been banned in China? Can you just imagine all the queues at the barbers? Hundreds of hairy men waiting for their facial fuzz to be removed. What about the activists? Would the police uncover a secret safe house rammed full of hairy ones refusing to conform? Maybe we should set up a helpline…???

The BBC are, to me, the trail blazers when in comes to April 1st. Being a fan of the Beebs hilarity of trying to pull the wool over the years, I always turn to them on this auspicious day. My childhood favourite was spaghetti trees becoming endangered ‘oh no!! What will we have with our bolognese?’. I do believe that sparked hundreds of calls (pre internet days when you either had to call on your circular dialling phone or post a letter) to Television House with offers of donations to help save the trees!! This year they were advertising new BBC3 show ‘David Attenborough: Life of Grime’, where the great one gets down and dirty in the musical genre, not the filthy streets of some shanty town on the outskirts of capitalist central.

As a previous activist for ‘days’ (did you know it’s National Pillow Fighting Day?), you might be surprised how much I love April Fools Day. I find it truly funny that we just ‘have a laugh’ and ‘wind people up’ and get away with it. As I said right at the beginning, it’s a crazy world we live in. Laughter, is quite arguably, the thing which keeps us all going.

Over to Channel Four for another one of my all time favourites, where the biggest and brightest brekkie show of the nineties played a blinder! The Big Breakfast were running an outside broadcast from some ubiquitous rubbish dump. They had a couple there who had thrown away a highly valuable lottery ticket. Cue many people turning up to help them look. Oh the laughs, the greed!!

That’s it though isn’t it? Humour, making a fool out of someone is very often at the expense of their vanity, pride, embarrassments…all the things we don’t want others to see (or hope they’ve noticed). Stripped, laid bare, oh how we like to giggle at another’s stupidity. Maybe it’s to make us feel better about our own sad selves. Maybe you can laugh at yourself (it’s the only way I get through it sometimes). Life is so incredibly short that I don’t mind others laughing at me, as long as I’m in on the joke too! I’d be a hypocrite if I said any different. I’m the worlds worst at pulling legs and don’t need a day to sellotape a friends stationary supply to their desk.

There is much ambiguity over the how it all began. One theory suggests April Fools originates from as far back as biblical times. Therefore implying that we’ve always liked a laugh. Apparently someone thought it would hilarious to tell Noah that the waters had receded, so he let the dove go!! More boring examples are that it comes from starting the new calendar and symbolising the changing of the seasons. I prefer to think of there being a pair of tricksters on the Ark.

Other past favourites are like the time it was reported that fracking was to happen at Buckingham Palace. As a royalist, I’d have chained myself to the giant railings and marched for the protection of our heritage.

One of my best friends is so on it it’s unreal. She can sniff out an April Fool at the opening headline. When I sent her an image of my £250,000 winning scratch card last year, she was straight onto me. Whereas the father in law was online looking for flights to America! This year we were both sent a story about ‘puppy mudder’. I felt sorry for the little ones. She was April Fooling it straight away. Which is strange as she’s always so literal…

So, fact or fiction?

Pamela Anderson loves Assange. Stating he’s freeing ‘the world by educating it’.

Strangely fact! I’d think the former Baywatch babe (still labelled after 20 years out of the red swimsuit) must have forgotten how the world was educated by hers and Tommy Lee expose!! Maybe that’s it though. Maybe she wants us all free of the shackles of secrets.

99p coins to become a new denomination.

Hilariously fictitious! What would happen to the humble penny? It would be out of business.

The new five star hotel in the Netherlands: A Crane.

Well, you crazy travellers guess what? It’s fact! Can you imagine? I love a good hotel room; particularly the luxurious beds. Can you picture yourself laying prostrate in a drafty cabin? No, me either.

Iceland to sell frozen flowers.

Unfortunately, this is fiction. I would have simply loved this. I’d much rather fill the chest freezer with blooms than steak, ice cubes and lasagne. It would have given the mid week dinner term of ‘freezer surprise’ a whole new meaning to the children’s dinner choices.

Finally I’m going to leave you with a sadly false story, which provides the most hilarious image:

‘Chinese zoo under fire as passing off hairy dog as a lion.’

April Fool’s Day: 10 stories that look like pranks but aren’t
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39452788