YOU may wake up today to a headline in the T&A announcing that a great white shark had been spotted in Ogden Reservoir.

Rather than rush along there with your camera in hand, you’d do better to stay in bed.

We should know by now that on April 1 any jaw-dropping headlines should be taken with a pinch of salt.

It’s April Fools' Day, when practical jokes and hoaxes abound. From weird and wonderful headlines in national newspapers, to pranks played on mates, it’s the day when you have to beware being caught out and labelled ‘April Fool.’

Every year, as we were growing up, my dad would point out the wacky stories in The Guardian on April 1. It was the only time I actually looked at the newspaper. In 1977, when I was 16, I was fascinated by its travel supplement about a tropical island named San Serriffe, shaped like a semi-colon, with geographical features and landmarks named after printing terms. I thought it was brilliant and took it into school, where my friends couldn’t spot the joke. If I’m honest, I wouldn’t have spotted it either, had my dad not shown it to me. I still vividly remember that island.

It’s always a bit embarrassing when you fall for an April Fool. At the start of the pandemic, just hours after I had made an unsuccessful trip to two supermarkets to buy toilet roll, my husband waved a newspaper at me, incensed over pictures of Prince Harry wheeling a trolley piled high with loo rolls out of a store in America. “That’s disgusting,” I probably said. Neither of us registered that it was April 1.

Yet, at that time, who would have even suspected that such a tale would be false? After all, we were fast growing accustomed to stories about people being arrested for having Sunday lunch with their family and groups of friends being reprimanded by police for having a chat in public parks.

And would any of us have believed that the Government would pay millions of workers to stop what they were doing and take several months off? That’s got April Fool written all over it.

On top of the eyebrow-raising pandemic headlines, we are living in world full of fake news. It’s hard to know what can and what can’t be believed. The very existence of fake news lessens the impact of April Fool stories - is it fake news or an April Fool?

In 2020 many individuals and corporate groups cancelled April Fools’ Day pranks amid the coronavirus outbreak to avoid being insensitive. Today’s headlines are equally grim, but it would be good to have a distraction amid the gloom, something to cheer us up.

It’s more than 60 years since the ‘biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled’ took place. That’s how the American broadcaster CNN described the 1957 BBC Panorama spaghetti-tree hoax - a three-minute report broadcast on April Fools’ Day showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family’s spaghetti tree.

At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water. A number of viewers contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees.

Maybe this year someone will come up with something that will bring a smile to our faces: maybe a picture of Boris Johnson and his Downing Street staff living it up at a party mid-pandemic, or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle opening their hearts chat show-style to Oprah Winfrey. Oh, I’m getting confused, those things have actually happened, and not on April 1.