April Fooled You!

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 Who’d have thought it…April Fools Day 2025 has passed without incident. The 1st of April , the date in the calendar when “Christmas comes early” for recidivist serial pranksters and practical jokers, allowing them to indulge their natural instincts with licence. We’ve survived all the “gotcha” moments in 2025, some more predictable than others. No, DCE, the ageing  tricenarian from the insular peninsula is not switching codes, going straight into the Wallabies test side to play his first ever game of 15–man rugby. No, Donald Trump has not annexed Moldova 🇲🇩 (although you never know!). Ditto any other outlandish scenarios of the overworked imagination you might come up with.

So how did April Fools Day get in the calendar in the first place? Well, no one knows for sure. One candidate favoured by a lot of historians however, stems back to 16th century France. This theory attributes it to the change from Julian calendar (new year beginning on 1st April) to Gregorian calendar (new year beginning on 1st January). Not everyone got the notification of this change and so some folk kept celebrating the event on 1st April, these people got widely mocked as “April Fools”.

In France the day is called Poisson d’Avril (“April fish”), with pranksters delighting in attaching “paper fish” stickers on the back of unsuspecting targets.