So, it's April Fool's Day

It has never loomed large in my legend, AFD. My family was not a huge clan of pranksters, and without some decent planning it's actually quite hard to pull of a good 'fool'.

I do remember when I was a child reading books and comics and feeling like it really ought to be a more hilarious event than it ever was. Endless tales of boys in short trousers with muddy knees and catapults visiting jolly japes on milk-sop girls with ankle socks and ribbons made an impression on me, sadly one that I was never able to live up to - on account of the fact that I wasn't one of the famous five and it was 197o something and not 1930 something.

Anyway, one fateful AFD, the only one I can remember taking any significant role in at all, we were 'between houses'. In the process of relocating to the North East, we were staying temporarily in my grandparents' house, both of whom were already in their 70s.

Having read some comic or other, probably one I found at the back of the wardrobe full of fur coats, nestled up against a centaur and a Bakelite construction set, I had devised a series of chortlicious quips that I felt sure would endear the whole extended household to my mischievous nature. The first, and it turns out, last, was the age old tradition of substituting the sugar with salt.

My grandparents used a sugar bowl and breakfasted every day on porridge. I crept down early and effected my cunning plan. An hour later I was dumbstruck with embarrassment as my elderly relatives were dreadfully, awfully sick.

I decided to opt for the 'it wasn't me' defence, convinced that if I denied it vigorously enough and with a passion born of righteous indignation, everyone would come round to my way of thinking and know that the truth was on my side. It wasn't. They didn't. I was punished.

The thing is though, even now, 30 years on, what stays with me is not the joke (it wasn't funny), nor the punishment (I can't even remember what it was), it was, and still is, the crippling cringing disgrace, the utter disappointment in myself that I had made my beloved grandparents so ill. The memory still makes my face burn with shame today, made worse as I remember their attempts to be good sports about it all.

So, while it may have delivered one of the defining moments of my childhood, taught me a valuable lesson about thinking through the repercussions of ones actions, on the whole I think AFD should be quietly dropped from the calendar. Least said and all that...