Unrelated to literally anything you've been talking about, but is there some rule that April Fool's is supposed to end at noon somewhere in the UK? (I've been rewatching Ghosts and it suggests that.) I've heard of lunch breaks but never a cutoff like that.
Yes, although I don’t know how common it is for people to actually do pranks in the UK. Last month I did meet someone who did, though, and she talked about this.
On this past April 1, I purchased new shoes for Mouse (2) in town, and popped their old shoes into the basket of the pushchair. We walked across a pedestrian crossing and entered an indoor shopping area.
An old British lady caught up to me and said urgently that she had just picked up a toddler’s shoe in the crosswalk and placed it on a bollard (in the charming way of people setting high-value lost objects on little pedestals wherever possible.) she then saw that I had a child of the correct size, so she escorted me very excitedly to recover the shoe.
I thanked her, and she was the kind of old lady who doesn’t mind explaining it all over again, so that she can be thanked again. We did this a few times, in mutual courtesy. She was quite a classy lady; the sort of old British lady in her 80s who puts on her pearls and cashmere cardigan and trots briskly around town with a wheelie shopping basket, like in children’s books. They get magnificently old, unbelievably old, and are still very perky and witty, and will often tell you the strangest things.
She then added, looking very wicked, “it’s April Fools, so I could have been playing a trick, but I wouldn’t do that to you now. It’s after 12 o’clock.”
I thanked her for not playing a trick on me.
Sensing that she was in the presence of someone who would truly appreciate her, she came in closer and lowered her voice and proceeded to describe the chaos she had sown that morning. She took my elbow. She was intense.
She had tricked her neighbor into turning back after leaving the house by telling him he’d left his lights on.
She’d tricked another neighbor with a lie about their roses that made them run outside in a dressing gown and slippers (I didn’t catch the specifics.)
She got on a bus and pretended not to know about contactless. I think she then got off the bus, essentially just having boarded it to sow chaos.
She told many people that they had something small but distressing wrong with them - that a baby had dropped their shoe, a bird had shat on their rucksack, and so on.
Just before 12 she walked past a bus (or possibly coach) with its door open, so she shouted in at the driver, “do you know your boot (trunk) is open?” Causing him to panic and dash out to check. When she told him it was an April Fool’s he needed some time to recover.
The people on the bus were quite cross, she said, evilly.
At bang on 12, she stopped.
Thankfully, a decent grasp of company manners can usually provide you with something polite to say in any situation, including when an elderly fiend takes you into her confidence and admits to being a one-crone crime wave.
I said, “I admire your commitment to stopping at 12.”
She said with great dignity and satisfaction, “I would never go on past it.”
And that is really all I know on the matter.
