The discovery of a medieval Scottish ferry with a roll-on, roll-off feature for carts also provided some much-needed levity
The media ecosystem may have changed since the BBC’s spaghetti harvest report in 1957 or the Guardian’s 1977 travel supplement about the island of San Serriffe, but April fool stories are still with us.
Indeed, if you picked up Wednesday’s edition of the Guardian, you may have been taken in by our report that evidence had been found of coffee being consumed in England a couple of centuries before the first known examples, thanks in part to an expert called Macky Arto.
Other April fool highlights from the media include the Byline Times story that White House officials had confirmed Liz Truss, the former British prime minister, was to join Nasa at the behest of Donald Trump, in order, she said, to fight “the dark forces of the deep space blob”. The tell in that story? It stretched credulity by claiming the US president was “a big fan” of Truss’s YouTube channel, when clearly, judging by the numbers, nobody is.
In an apparent jibe at the crisis-hit CalMac ferries, the Scotsman reports that a medieval Scottish ferry, found in Mull, appears to have been abandoned during the ninth century as a result of “technical difficulties”. Next to the remains, which it says had roll-on, roll-off capacity for carts, was a vellum manuscript wrapped in deerskin, which appeared to be a timetable – with “DeoVolente (God willing)” written after each departure time.
