Newspaper reporters have to deal with a fair amount of trauma in an average month.
It’s not much fun having to attend murder and rape scenes, horrific car crashes, angry public protests and the heartache of poverty, loneliness and destitution – not to mention the boring political meetings.
And so we relish the first of April as a time of amusement when we test our wits against our ever-alert readership.
The game is on: we try to invent a plausible story that they swallow hook, line and sinker, while they in turn delight in letting us know they have not been fooled.
I was looking forward to this year. We had concocted a story about a young man who had survived an electric shock and on regaining consciousness was suddenly able to speak every known language.
The secret, we have learned, is to get buy-in from co-conspirators who are held high in public estimation; therefore we would have got comment from eminent brain surgeons, psychologists, paranormal specialists and linguistic experts.
It’s a proven recipe.
Like the time I announced that a section of Naval Island was to be declared a nudist beach.
Then mayor, Denny Moffatt, was quoted as saying it would make us one of the naturism meccas of the world, and with our climate would attract thousands of tourists every year.
It so happens that 1 April was a Sunday and in spite of the fact that it was a cold and rainy day, many a young motorist did more laps around the island than what one sees at the average grand prix.
Naval Island was also the scene for the Great Huberta hoax, thanks to input from then tourism committee head Errard Sullivan, who reportedly erected a giant inflatable hippo as a sort of Statue of Liberty attraction.
Alas, the ropes that secured the huge artificial beast, visible from 80km at sea, were cut during the night and the plastic balloon disappeared into space in the early hours of the first day of April.
Richards Bay Airport’s Chief Traffic Controller, Peter Bezuidenhout, put out an all aircraft alert to watch out for this dangerous UFO, while two old dears in Hluhluwe phoned to say they saw it passing overhead.
The Department of Home Affairs were also good sports, giving me an ‘official’ letter saying that, in the spirit of the rainbow nation, every child born would have to registered with an African name.
The father of Johannes Jakobus Petrus Jabulani van Wyk was not too impressed, but many loved the idea.
And in the early 90s, when the first pilings were sunk at the Hillside Smelter on 1 April – no joke – we had them striking oil! A photo of a North Sea oil rig on the site was enough to convince the skeptics – and I heard the share price altered.
Captain Chris de Wet of the SAPS dog unit made headlines with his sniffer crocodile Poseidon, especially trained to retrieve bodies from the notorious Enseleni River.
To this day, many still believe that bit of nonsense, thanks to the confirmation from Ezemvelo’s Dr Roy Jones at the Enseleni Nature Reserve.
There have been many more…and no doubt the contest will be resumed when normality returns.
Apologies to those who searched in vain last week!
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