ALTHOUGH I have a terrific sense of humour, I have no sense of fun, and so I always spend the week of April 1st in great confusion unable to trust anyone or anything. I am one of the many who believed that they had found the arms of the Venus de Milo that time and wondered mildly about the spaghetti harvest because in the back of my mind I hadn't thought spaghetti actually grew in the ground. So naturally I was very reasonably annoyed when these things turned out to have been spoofs and people thought you were an imbecile for having accepted something that was on a trusted radio programme or a loved family newspaper.
Year after year I am taken in and then, after the event, enraged and amazed at my not being able to share in all the schoolboy enjoyment that everyone else gets out of it all.
I'm frightened of becoming like the Yorkshire man at a variety show sitting with a boot face through a great routine from a stand up comic. My father in law eventually said to him about the comic: "He's very good isn't he?" and the man with the face carved from Mount Rushmore said: "Well he gets paid for it, doesn't he?"
It's such a dour attitude that it makes me weep and I want no part of it. So, in case I end up like that, I try to be part of the April Fool bit every year, and every year I fail utterly.
This year I read solemnly a big piece in The Irish Times about the ozone layer and thought to myself how very little I know about the environment. I even wrote in my personal organiser that I should get a child's book about the ozone layer to bring myself up to some kind of basic level of information and then I heard that it was all a joke and I am livid with Brendan McWilliams.
And I read in a British paper that Mrs Thatcher would be appointed ambassador to Washington by Tony Blair when he gets in and I thought that was very odd of him indeed. I spent far too much time trying to work out his thinking. Was he trying to marginalise her was he thanking her for making his journey to government easier every time she opens her mouth? And then I heard the Knowing People all tee heeing about it being an April Fool and I was livid all over again.
The day went on and I read an item about the county in England that was once called Rutland and then became Leicestershire, now being changed back to Rutland again. I was, as it happens, delighted with this piece of news. I once had a great friend who campaigned long and vociferously against losing the name. I remember we could hardly see out other station wagon with all the stickers she had about Save Rutland and she was forever driving off to protest meetings and writing long letters. She is dead now but I felt she had somehow been proved right all along so I wrote a postcard to her son saying wasn't it all great. And just as I was about to put it into the letter box in Dalkey, I remembered that it was April Fools day and maybe it wasn't true at all, so I hastily put it back in my bag and then I tore it up in case anyone would think I was being an imbecile again.
And do you know, days later, I don't actually know whether Rutland has been restored or not; that's how bad it is. I don't want to ring anyone and have them guffaw at me. It's no use saying that I saw it in more than one paper; the others might have been fooled too. This can't be sane, for people to become hesitant and anxious and full of self doubt in the name of a bit of fun.
I WASN'T sure about the comet for a while. People told me they could see it with the tail and all, and I was afraid to go out and look upwards in case I was being an eejit again.
I know someone who says he has won a car in a raffle; he didn't even know he had a ticket for the raffle. He is sick with excitement (his own car is on its last legs) and keeps saying that he believes in everything again now - god, fate, gambling, the sheer goodness of people, the way that when you're down something always turns up. He's making vroom vroom sounds and can't understand why I don't have huge joy on his behalf. And I'm afraid to mention to him the date that he heard this news and the fact that I think there are a lot of sickos out there coming up with ever more unlikely japes every year. Still they would never pretend to some unfortunate that he had won a car if he hadn't. They wouldn't surely?
When I went to collect my winnings on the Irish Grand National I thought they were having me on at the bookies when they said my horse hadn't come first after all. Hadn't I sat in the armchair on Easter Monday and waved him past the post and now they were trying to tell me he hadn't won. Then they thought I was being a bad sport because I thought it was an April fool. Why wasn't it an April fool? Everything else seemed to be.
Sometimes people write to me asking me to contribute the charity books - My Favourite Recipe, My Most Helpful Hint. Today someone rang wondering would I suggest My Funniest April Fool. Boy did he get the wrong number.