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| Yes, it is real: Scrubby Bottoms |
We have Chaucer to partly blame for promoting this strange annual observance, some 700 years ago in his Canterbury Tales. Certainly by the 16th century April 1st was celebrated for its foolish japes.
According to an entry in Wikipedia in 1698, several people were tricked into going to the Tower of London to "see the Lions washed".
There have been other classic pranks such as the Dutch television station in the 1950's who informed their gullible viewvers that the leaning Tower of Pisa had finally fallen over.
In more modern times companies such as Google have continued the tradition. This year is was a new piece of funcionality called Google Motion which claimed one could control Gmail with your body.
Another prank by Google has been to promote the often revelied font Comic Sans, because ithey discovered it "consistently outperformed all others when it comes to user satisfaction, level of engagement, understanding web content, productivity, click-through rates and conversion rates. We’ll therefore be rolling out Comic Sans as our default font across all Google products on April 4, 2011".
However not all strange stories on the first have been April Fools jokes. Take for example news that a 50-strong gang of chickens that terrorised residents in Southport has been evicted by Lancashire Police.
Or, news that a baker has been flooded with complaints after calling his shop Nice Baps.
But perhaps once of the most bizarre has been the revelation that Britain's National Trust has published a list of the UK's top 10 "silly walks" to such colourfully-named locations as Scrubby Bottoms, Pembrokeshire, Booby's Bay, Cornwall and Windy Gap in Surrey.
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