You can pinpoint the moment at which national April Fools’ Day fatigue set in on Friday by the timestamp on this tweet from the modern-day Milk Marketing Board:
— BRITISH MILK COUNCIL (@BuyBritishMilk) April 1, 2016Oh I dunno, off the top of my head, we now sell unicorn milk?
Just a little after 10am. The first day of April can now be exhausting, as you confront every new piece of information, from Facebook post to Today programme package, subconsciously checking for signs that it’s a hasty spoof.
This time, it got to the point where, when I saw this paper’s report on the backfiring of a Google marketing stunt, I read it as if it were a meta-joke (which was actually incredibly enjoyable).
One place where, unusually, there was hardly any pranking was the crossword page. I try to solve as many puzzles as I can every 1 April because of the tradition of tricks and themes across the broadsheets. But this year, unless the knavish tricks were too subtle for my solving brain, I found nothing.
There were a couple of exceptions: if you missed Phi’s Independent cryptic, you can solve it now (and thereby show your support for the continued existence of that paper’s puzzles), and the New York Times had a sad announcement that, happily, was really an acrostic lark.
So what’s going on? Are setters and editors concerned that solvers are so weary of April fooling that they are sparing us further capers?
If so, what a pity. The cryptic crossword is an activity where you are already aware that things are not as they seem: in fact, solvers are willingly putting themselves up for being hoodwinked. If anything, it is a disappointment to find so many puzzles that seem like they could have been published on a non-fooling day.
Please: bring us back our devious puzzles. More foolery. (But only from crosswords.)
