April Fool – well nearly

Last year I had a spectacular success with my April Fool on R.  It was all documented on my old blog – but basically I had him completely going on the fact that we had a squirrel in our attic when in fact it was squirrel noises played on my iPhone.  We laughed.

So today I tried to duplicate it.  R’s car “Voyager” is normally parked in front of the house where we can see it while we are having our morning coffee.  So I decided to stage a car theft.  I got up at 6am and very quietly crept downstairs (shutting Saphy in my bedroom to make sure she didn’t get outside).  I took his spare keys and carefully moved the car round the side of the house where it couldn’t be seen from the dining room (remembering as I did so what a large car it is compared to my little Aygo!).  Then I crept back upstairs and waited for him to call me down for coffee as usual.  I did not think he would immediately notice that Voyager was gone, and then I would casually mention “where’s the car?” – I hoped this would cause a brief moment of panic before I put him out of his misery.

But in fact he just said “Why did you move the car without telling me?”.  We had had a drain unblocked the previous day and he had assumed that I had moved it to give the workmen access to it.   When he didn’t see it there, he just looked out of the back door and checked that it was at the side of the house.  So that didn’t work – I knew I should have done a more radical version of the plan and moved it to Fluthers car park – I hadn’t because I thought he might go straight and call the police without waking me up.  That would have been extremely embarrassing.

The other thing I did today was start clearing out our ponds (we have three) – there was masses of debris in them – mostly dead leaves but also an excess of aquatic plants.  So I scooped it all out and piled it on the stone edging to give any creepie crawlies the chance to go back into the water.   Tomorrow I will put a few of the water plants back.  I am trying to source some frog spawn as there doesn’t seem to be any amphibian activity in the ponds.