His first challenge is to remember when it actually arrives because he usually forgets and is easily fooled when preying pranksters have a lend of him.
This can be any one of multiple children or grandchildren or a number of sneaky mates, each of whom warms to the idea of embarrassing him.
That leaves me as the only companion he can completely trust on Friday morning but it doesn’t result in me gaining any particular benefit, on past experience anyway.
Speaking of Friday morning, he said the rule when he was growing up was that pranks had to be played in the morning and should stop at midday; someone playing a prank after that was considered the fool.
But that has changed, he says, and he feels a little edgy all day.
There’s been some pretty famous hoaxes over the year – perhaps the biggest being the great spaghetti hoax carried out by the BBC in 1957, when its weekly summary of world events, Panorama, showed a Swiss family from Tricino harvesting spaghetti from trees “after an unusually mild winter”.
Narrated by the distinguished broadcaster Richard Dimbleby, it showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry.
Spaghetti wasn’t widely eaten in the United Kingdom at the time so Dimbleby went to town, explaining that the end of March was always an anxious time for spaghetti harvesters all over Europe, as a severe frost could impair the flavour of the spaghetti.
Some Poms weren’t impressed, criticising the BBC for airing the story on such a serious program.
But they were outnumbered by those asking where they could buy a spaghetti tree.
And when The Boss was over there in the mid-70s he remembers The Guardian running an eight-page travel supplement on April Fool’s Day, featuring the remote, unspoiled island of San Serife off the coast of Africa, complete with pictures of deserted beaches and sprawling green hinterland.
There was a well-known draft resister in London at the time who announced he would move to San Serife to avoid the long arm of the United States authorities.
But San Serife was a play on san serif type – any typeface sans (French for without) a serif, those tiny curls and angles on the end of printed letters that make reading easier.
It so happens, The Boss tells me, that the only place in the word that actually holds a public holiday on April Fool’s Day is the port city of Odessa, Ukraine – at least until recently considered “the pearl of the Black Sea.”
Of course, Mr Putin now wants it.
The day is called Humorina and its traditional festivities usually include a parade, music, comic costumes, dressed-up statues, roving clowns and pranksters.
Given the spirit of the Ukrainians, The Boss reckons they’ll probably give it a shot this week.
Good luck to them. Woof.
The General is The Boss’s dog. For more yarns, visit sheppnews.com.au/thegeneral
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