When I was a kid my mother would always try and catch my dad out on April Fool’s day. She’d wake him up with some piece of surprising news and generally catch him off guard so he’d quite often fall for it. In an ironic twist my brother would also try and catch my mother out – with a pretty high degree of success too!

Trouble is, when truly bizarre things would happen we’d think she was joking. One time she came in and said that a herd of cows was in the garden and we thought she was up to her old tricks but it turned out that a herd of cows really was chewing up our garden! They’d escaped from a nearby field – what are the chances?!

I had a bit of a sleep in this time since I was knackered and was woken up by my girlfriend bursting in at about 10.30 to tell me that one of her friends just texted her say she’d just won £100,000 in premium bonds. The way she spelled it out: “one… hundred… thousand… pounds!” made me realise she believed it, but my brain immediately started looking for reasons it wasn’t true and then it occurred to me it was April the 1st. I told her and the smile dropped a bit as she realised she’d been had, then started laughing. She had already replied to congratulate her friend!

When you lose someone close to you it’s the little things you miss. Sometimes you don’t think about it at all, and then a day like April Fool’s Day comes along and a load of happy memories come flooding back. If I recall correctly my mother actually fell for the BBC’s Spaghetti Trees joke of 1957 so she wasn’t entirely immune to it herself!