April Fools’ Day

Keep your wits about you today. There’s a very good chance that you’ll see an announcement or headline that looks somewhat odd or suspicious.

Colourised still from a 1957 BBC Panorama April Fools’ Day story purporting to show Swiss farmers harvesting freshly grown spaghetti

Today is the first day of April: April Fools’ Day.

But where do we get the strange custom of playing pranks on 1 April? The short answer is that nobody knows for sure, and this ambiguity has in fact long been acknowledged.

“T…