April Fool’s Day Brings Surprises

I was braced for some surprises today. My son in New Zealand likes pulling cunningly crafted April Fool’s Day jokes and a friend in Lewes is planning to repay the ‘Garden Gnome’ stunt I pulled on him (each day for a week I discretely slipped a new garden gnome – I had a few spare – into his garden, so that the little fellows seemed to be breeding like rabbits).

So I was a little skeptical when I received the following award

But clicking on it revealed that it was as genuine as the sunshine which now fills the garden, and that it was very kind towards ‘The Book of English Magic’ – which has been released in paperback today. Even though the hardback looked fantastic, this paperback version looks almost better – something about making it smaller in size makes it look more satisfying to the eye, and the publisher was good enough to correct a few errors that had been pointed out to us. The ‘History Today’ review wrote that we had the wrong photo of Tolkien’s ‘Eagle & Child’ pub, for example, and there were three other minor factual details that needed correcting. So now in the UK, with a new photo and errors corrected,  you can get it for only £9.99.

There are a few hours to go yet for April Fool’s Day, so I’m not relaxing completely yet!