Yesterday was April First and I was up in the air - flying home from Boston after visiting family for Easter. So here I am again, baking bran muffins for neighbours and picking up the reins of a run-away schedule. If you are a list-person like me, you have an agenda for each day, not that it gets fulfilled each day but a man's (woman's) reach must exceed his/her grasp or what's a metaphor? April Fool'sDay, I gather, is a wide-open invitation for elaborate hoaxes made possible by hi-tech magic. In my day we didn't have YouTube, we just lied. One's success depended on how straight a face one could keep and how plausible the lie. Today anything is plausible, which makes it both easier and harder to fool anyone. People keep saying how stressed they are, so I guess a little techie joke relieves tension. It certainly draws attention to how beguiled we are by trivia. Trivia is global, actually, trivia are global. (When were we ever drawn in by one trivium?) Trivia have the potential of going viral, and do. You see it on the nightly news: someone or something has gone viral, Fools' Day or not. Newscasters welcome a trivial report. The old rule is inexorable for the evening news now: "if it bleeds, it leads." So, failing a battle, a flood, an earthquake or a famine, they are left with local murder and mayhem. How grateful they are for a giggle or a joke to sign off with. The more fool we. My muffins are ready.

"I'm so glad you don't whiten your teeth!" someone said to me last week. Thank you, I think. She said she meant that it was nice that I was "natural looking" and not fancied up with inappropriate window dressing. Yeah, well, my teeth are victims of the war - World War Two, darling - and I am not eager to call attention to my crooked smile. My father was overseas (that was inappropriate because he was too old, but he was a doctor, head of a casualty clearing station, like a MASH unit in the U.S., so he was allowed). He took a big deficit in his civilian income to serve, and then a demotion in his army rank (and pay) in order to get overseas, so there was no money to spare to do anything about my lopsided teeth. Well, one can smile and smile and be a villain and one can also smile and smile and mean well and try to look pleasant, if not happy. When Kate Middleton hit the national conscience, the Canadian national conscience, some photo-journalist pointed out, with samples, the fact that the Brit smiled with all their teeth and Canadians with far fewer, not a full-mouth smile. Suits me.

I just finished that when the computer ran out of power, so it's tomorrow now and charged, but a different date. So now I owe you one for today. Anon, anon.