Beware! April Fools Day is looming large - so will you be too clever to get caught out this year?
This April 1st coincides with Easter Monday - an incredibly rare occurrence when Easter weekend and April Fools Day drop on the same date. So rare in fact that it has only happened 12 times since 1714 and will not happen again until 2029 . . . or are we just making that up?
Many eagerly anticipate the dates but for greatly differing reasons. Easter is the time Christians celebrate Christ's resurrection following his crucifixion, while April Fools Day is the culmination of weeks of planning when pranksters play out their carefully worked-out tricks on unsuspecting victims.
Origins
The term Easter is actually only mentioned once in the King James Bible, Acts 12:1-4, and has links to Eostre - the pagan fertility goddess of crops and humans. The way Easter has been calculated dates back to the sixth century when it was decided that Easter Sunday would fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21st.
As for April Fools Day, it is widely believed that it dates back in some form to the days of the Roman Empire.
County prankster
We had a perennial prankster right here in Shropshire in Derek ‘Poddy’ Podmore who was infamous for his antics which left him in hot water with authorities on more than one occasion. In 1977 he accepted a challenge to break into the Dana Prison in Shrewsbury, dressing up as Santa and hurling presents from the roof to the shocked inmates in the yard beneath.
On another occasion, he ended up in Market Drayton Magistrates’ Court on animal cruelty charges after swallowing a live frog. An appearance marked by his arrival in court dressed in a frogman’s outfit and flippers! Another prank saw him scatter a fine of £80 in halfpennies across the floor of a court - action that resulted in him earning a brief stay at the Dana Prison.
Fun pranks in farming
Being a rural county, the people of Shropshire and we at the West Midlands Agricultural Society are of course proud supporters of our farming industry and we thought you might be amused by some farming-related April Fools Day pranks that have caught folk out over the years:
- In 1878 a story ran in multiple papers detailing Thomas Edison’s creation of a food machine - a wonderful invention that turned water into wine and soil into cereals with a claim of ending world hunger.
- In 2016 Farmers Weekly reported on a new directive from the EU limiting the amount of hours worked by farm animals.
- In 2002 Tesco ran an advert in a national newspaper heralding the development of GM whistling carrots.
- In 1983 the New Scientist reported on the first plant-animal hybrid called the Biomate - a tomato with the genes of a cow providing animal protein between two outer layers of tomato.
- In 2016 BBC Radio 4 reported on a new blue variety of Red Leicester in cheese and onion crisps - to mark the success at the time of the local football club Leicester City.
April 1st is bound to produce some innovative pranks again this year and that’s fine providing they are not malicious - but remember, the joke may just be on you!
