April 1st 1975.
We married on the first of April. “Why?” , you ask. I’d been married before and didn’t fancy repeating the mistake, but my son from that marriage was determined that Mark adopt him. We had to be married for Mark to adopt Adrian, so All Fools Day seemed a good choice.
The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools’ Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from a “spaghetti tree”. At the time of the report’s broadcast, spaghetti was relatively unknown in the United Kingdom, and a number of viewers contacted the BBC afterwards for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
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There is also a video here about the making of this programme:
Mark’s younger brother thought our marrriage invitation was a joke and didn’t come, though he did turn up for the meal at the Indian restaurant afterwards! Adrian told his school he’d be off for the day because his Mummy and Daddy were getting married, and they all said “Ha, ha!”
I’d thought it would be a quiet wedding, but Mark invited everyone he could think to, including my Dutch friend, who announced that she’d come to all my weddings. I think half of the 50 guests were staying with us, so Mark and I slept in the roof space. Mark prepared a huge wedding breakfast for everyone.
I wore a sari, because I’d always wanted one, and chose purple which is the colour of mourning. (Tradition says it should be red for a wedding.) Mark and Adrian chose to wear velvet trousers, which I had to make wearing rubber gloves as I can’t bear touching velvet. They wore kurtas over the top. Mark’s granny said in a stage whisper, “Oh look, they’re all in fancy dress!” Our hippy friends were in fancy-ish dress too. One of them acted as official photographer, his wedding present to us. He became a film producer shortly afterwards.
Photo: John Smith
Because we were getting married in those clothes, we had no pockets and didn’t think to take money with us. Our kind neighbour, who’d been fascinated by our 16-month-old tucking into the strongest curry, paid for the meal for all our guests, until we could repay him the next day.
It was the best joke ever. We’re still together 50 years later – still fools together.
Photo: An April fool in Denmark, regarding Copenhagen’s new subway. It looks as if one of its cars had an accident, and had broken through and surfaced on the square in front of the town hall. In reality, it was a retired car from the subway of Stockholm cut obliquely, with the front end placed onto the tiling and loose tiles scattered around it. Note the sign “Gevalia” (a coffee company) and the accident site tape with the words “Uventede gæster?” (unexpected guests?). Gevalia’s advertising featured various vehicles popping up with unexpected guests.
Photo: PD Lars Andersen, Wikipedia
What date holds a special significance for you? Can you create a poem or short story around a date that is significant for you? Or perhaps write about an April Fool.
I love your wedding photo, Gill. Congratulations on fifty years together!
Thank you Gail – where does all the time go?
Fantastic post Gill! Lovely wedding photo and wedding memories!
I remember the Gevalia April Fool – it was in all the papers here in Sweden. (Gevalia is a Swedish coffee brand.) Otherwise the April Fool everyone in Sweden remembers (everyone my age anyway) is from 1962.
Colour TV was a phenomenon in the US and Japan, but had yet to reach Europe, when a popular TV host explained – very seriously – how to get black and white sets to show colour by stretching a nylon stocking over the screen. Many people tried it and many people wrote in to complain after, some of them because it didn’t work, but many more (women) because their husbands and children had ruined their stockings and tights trying to stretch them over the TVs.
Supposedly, there were also some who wrote in and thanked Swedish TV for the tip – they were convinced it had worked. (Or they were paying back in kind.)
Mark remembers your colour TV hoax, but it was new to me. Great ruse.
I have mixed feelings looking at that wedding photo. My mother died a year later, and now I can see how ill she looked then, although never one to complain, and she was happy to see me in a happy marriage. Mark could do no wrong in her eyes.