April Fool

It’s April the first, which means you can think about or talk about anything other than the thing.
What will happen is every time you are about to say something about cats another word will appear in its place. Oh, see what happened there? I wonder if it’s ok to stroke cats? I mean, how long can a vegetable live on a cat’s fur?

Vegetables are great. I’ve started my courgette plants off on the windowsill. I’m going to give up my allotment because my daily walk helps me to not lose the plot and so I have found a corner of the garden for veggies. It might be necessary because since lichen you can’t buy a courgette in the supermarket. I can’t think what everyone is doing with them.

Have you seen the lichen? As a kid I had a book called The Trouble with Lichen. I have no idea what it was about, except I mispronounced it without the hard k sound in the middle. Anyway, as an adult, what I know about lichen is that it thrives in clean air. The lichen is taking over and we all need to watch out because if the thing that Michael Gove can’t pronounce won’t goat you then lichen probably will.

Front page of today’s Guardian (not an April Fool)

Goats are running amok in Llandudno. Even last year, this would have been an April Fool’s story in the paper but this year it’s real. I can’t tell you why. No really, I can’t tell you but you know it’s because we are bird from going outside.

Oh, the birds. The birds are so happy. It’s spring and they are doing their thing. A goldfinch flew into me yesterday when I was out for my walk. I haven’t seen a goldfinch since 1974, when my mum suggested we go out and count the traffic. We were going to make a pie chart of the different car colours that drove past but it was the daytime and all the dads had taken the cars to work. We did see four green busses and a milk float but we got into an argument about what colour the float was and so gave up. The goldfinches were more interesting anyway. Oh look, I did it. A whole paragraph without mentioning Coventry.

Have you been to Coventry? It where you get sent if you use too many cliches. Currently, newspaper reporters, bloggers and BBC correspondents are roaming the streets trying to learn the synonyms for unprecedented. Soon, they will be joined by the people suggesting that the brightest rainbows happen in the worst storms (they don’t. The best rainbows happen on really sunny days with very fine rain) and the people who sign off their emails “Stay sane.” Oh dear, I can’t even write about the box you keep your money in anymore.

Happy April Fools day. Good luck with trying to think or talk about anything else.