Perhaps if
I’d had yesterday morning’s slot I could have tried out an April Fool trick on
you. Possibly I could have claimed they’d discovered that Roald Dahl’s books
were all written by a prototype bot commissioned by the MOD, so it’s all their
fault and not his, or that The Society of Authors had made a bit on our behalf
to buy Manchester United…
But of
course I can’t now the day after… or even the afternoon of April 1st. Who made
that rule up? Someone who didn’t like April Fool pranks I imagine. However, the
timing has made me think about April Fool’s Day tricks and such like. It’s
probably because I’m an ignorant under-read oaf but I don’t know of any
children’s stories based around, or even involving April Fool’s Day. If any of
you know of any perhaps you could enlighten me (though possibly you should only
be allowed to convey that information via a flying giraffe.)
I was
recently called upon to teach the meaning of ‘pulling someone’s leg’ to my
classes of Spanish students learning English via the internet. I used the
example of the time my dad successfully ‘pulled my leg’.
When I was
around 10 or 11 years old, it was my job on getting home from school, to repeatedly
fill up a watering can and water the plants. I’d been doing this day after day
for some time when I got home on a rainy afternoon. “As it’s raining, you’d
better put your raincoat on before doing the watering,” my dad suggested as I
entered the house. Dutifully I did so and after filling up the can strolled out
into the now driving rain to water the plants. It was as I was pouring water
into the sodden ground at the base of a rose bush, with my back to the house
that a sense of something not being quite right began to dawn on me. I turned
back to the house to see dad and my two sisters standing at the window watching
their daft son/brother watering in the rain.
It seems it
took me a long time to grow out of being naïve. When I first started at
university I was billeted with some of the third year students with a couple of
other wet-behind-the-ears first years. In the bar of our pretend college there
was a pinball machine which was a focal point of activity and discussion. One
of the third year students explained to us that in recognition of the gradual
decline in the number of pinball machines in pubs etc. in tangent with the
university’s desire that they not be lost to posterity that within the centre
of the university library the ‘Pinball Memorial Library’ had been instituted
with the aim of preserving the rarest and most significant examples of their
kind. I can only be grateful for being unable to find a member of staff at the
library to ask where to find the memorial library when I first visited the
library and after located the book I needed. Just as it had done in the pouring
rain all those years ago the penny finally dropped!
At least in
later life I managed to play a couple of April Fool’s tricks of my own.
In the good
old days before mobile phones, I called my best friends, Roger and Linda from a
callbox. Linda answered. “Good afternoon madam,” I began, making my best
attempt to imitate something like a Mediterranean accent. “Zis is Pablo’s
Exotic Pets. I am delighted to tell you that ze Boa Constrictor zat you ordered
is ready for delivery. She iz a beauty! We with be able to deliver ‘er zis
afternoon…”
Hearing the
panic in Linda’s voice as she insisted that they had never ordered a Boa
Constrictor I had to come clean.
In days long
gone by, that my doctor would have approved of rather than glaring at me, as he
does now every time I stand on the scales, I used to regularly go jogging in
the woodland close to our village. On returning home one April 1st I
adopted a concerned expression when my wife asked how the run had been. “Well,
you wouldn’t believe it,” I replied. “The woods were full of police officers,
firemen and people from a zoo.” Naturally Jan demanded to know why and I
continued, “It seems that at the traffic lights at the bottom of the hill, two
zebra that were being transported from York Zoo* to Chester Zoo escaped from
the van they were in and ran into the woods.”
“Oh, the
poor things, what can we do should we go and help?” Jan demanded, always the
first to support the unfortunate. If only I had been able to keep a straight face,
she would probably have tried to muster together a rescue to team of friends
and neighbours…
One other
year we had been invaded by the gas board. They dug a trench in our back yard
in order to replace the old pipes. The pipes were replaced but the trench remained
unfilled for week after week. Not only was the hole unsightly, it was barred
off by warning barriers that we had to walk around in order to get into and out
of the house. It was like living in a permanent building site. We even got the
local paper, The Wakefield Express, to do an article about it (our
neighbours had all suffered the same fate) though the cowards failed to name
the company responsible.
April 1st
that year happened to fall on a Sunday. While making the morning cuppa to take
up to Jan I knocked on our door and pretended to have a conversation. As I
passed Jan her tea, I told her how impressed I was that anyone would work on a
Sunday.
“What to you
mean?” Jan asked.
“Well, it’s
a bit like how the guides and scouts used to do jobs for people but this time
it’s trappist monks. They’re going from house to offering to help with any jobs
they need doing. They saw our trench and they’ve volunteered to fill it for us.
They’ve just gone off to find a cement mixer…”
I didn’t
actually finish the last sentence because Jan leapt out of bed like a rocket on
steroids.
“I’m not
having trappist monks working on my house!” she roared, ready to take on the
High Priest in a fist fight if necessary by the looks of it.
Well frankly
after the zebra incident she should have known better.
*I was
pretty sure there isn’t a York Zoo but I gambled on Jan not knowing that – they
needed to be crossing Yorkshire somehow to end up passing through our village!
~~~~~~~~~~~~
In light of the awful and tragic events associated with Ofsted I wanted to remind you about my story cum criticism of the pressures placed on teachers, including the dreaded inspections, Escape from Schoolditz. (ISBN 1720047944 ASIN B07H2KSBJB) Each night the four teachers who are locked in the staffroom each night plan their escape. The visiting Ofsted inspector accidentally discovers and destroys one of their escape routes that are inspired by the escape attempts made at Colditz.
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