IT’S ONLY BANTER.

AUDIO QUACK. SKIP INTRO 2:01.

I spend April Fool’s Day like I’m a contestant on Traitors, not trusting anything anyone has to say. This year was particularly tricky in distinguishing which headlines were true or not. Haha, Greenland, haha. Good one.

My local cinema announced that it was no longer selling popcorn, and BrewDog was launching hot beer. But they didn’t fool me. Not this time.

The only time I have been caught out was when I was an Oxford tour guide and believed an April Fool’s Instagram post that Tolkien had a pet lion when he was at Oxford University, resulting in me telling my tour group this fact with unwavering confidence. You can read that story in this old Quack.

Humans have been pranking and bantering since the dawn of time. I can imagine the cavemen being like builders on a site; making shadows that appear like dinosaurs to frighten their mates, or trapping each other in caves with boulders, or asking the young caveman to go hunting for the ‘walking salmon’.

“You can’t miss it, Rocky. Orange thing with legs. Just catch it with net…”

As the youngest of two brothers, I have been the butt of pranks my whole life. One of my earliest memories was when I was around 7. I was standing in our kitchen, begging my brother Joe for one of his giant Haribo cola bottles. He told me that if I closed my eyes, he would feed me one. So I closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, I had a mouthful of instant coffee. He was laughing, I was getting sick, and he was laughing some more.

When I was a teenager, all the boys were obsessed with Jackass, which was a show that had a bunch of Peter Pans in trucker hats and plaid boxers, pulling painful pranks on each other…for some reason. Once they gave each other paper cuts between the webbing of their fingers and toes. Another time, a guy had his tooth pulled using fishing line and a Lamborghini. WHAT IS THIS? How is this funny? How are these people not dead?

The prank show I could get on board with was Punk’d – a young Ashton Kutcher ran around Hollywood like the annoying kid in class, pranking celebrities. Avril Lavigne was told to help push a car, and so she did, and it rolled into a can of explosives. And then everyone blamed her. That kind of thing.

One day, when Sausage and I were 14, we tried to punk our friend Sahra.

We didn’t have MTV’s budget, so explosives were off the table. Instead, we told her that Sausage had to return to America forever and was going to leave at the end of the day. We got the rest of the class involved, putting on a small goodbye party for Sausage, who delivered an excellent, teary goodbye speech. We felt we had gone too far when Sahra told us her mum was out buying a leaving present, so we made the announcement in Geography class.

“YOU’VE JUST GOT PUNK’D!” We yelled.

Sahra blinked hard. “What?”

“You’ve been Punk’d…” we repeated, quieter. We then had to explain the joke – which is never a good position to be in. “You know, like Ashton Kutcher? MTV? Avril Lavigne?”

“So…Sausage is not leaving?”

“No…”

“Never?”

“Erm. No.”

“So…. you just made it up?”

“…Yeah”

Sahra put up her hand and excused herself from Geography. She needed to call her Mum to tell her that she didn’t need to bring a leaving present after all.

I’m well aware this wasn’t a good prank. It was quite lame, really. And I could blame the budget, but even if we could afford explosives, I don’t think we would have the heart to use them. We felt rotten enough that Sahra’s Mum was having to make an extra trip to M&S that day.

I asked a couple of guys what pranks happened in their school.

Joe told me some guy in his year, took all of his belongings out of his dorm room and displayed it on the table in the common room with a ‘FOR FREE’ sign. People grabbed what they wanted, and it took Joe forever to get his stuff back. Joe described it as ‘banter that went too far.’

Poetry Ed said someone in the year above him released a cockerel on the school grounds, which managed to avoid being captured for a while, and as the headmaster’s son, Poetry Ed lived on-site and was woken up every morning at 5 am by the cockerel’s call…

These were different kinds of pranks, to say the least. More ballsy, perhaps? And I wonder if it’s because boys (on the whole) are more natural at being pranksters. I mean, it wasn’t a woman who was having a tooth pulled by a Lamborghini…. Maybe it’s fair to say that men’s humour (on the whole) differs from women’s humour. For instance, putting instant coffee into your sister’s mouth is funny to them, and not to us.

During those teenage years, I watched with astonishment as boys clumsily worked out that the humour which impressed their mates wasn’t necessarily the humour that impressed us girls.

“It was only banter, Rosie….”

“YOU POURED VODKA JELLY OVER ME, STEVEN! WHAT THE FfHSHFHGUSDHGK??”

Now we are tucked up in adulthood you would hope that the boundaries of banter have been clearly defined – that no woman is being dunked under water in their honeymoon pool.

And yet, last year I was talking to a man on Hinge who kept forwarding me Stephen Hawking/Jeffrey Epstein memes. We never met for a date.

Once I was sitting on a sofa in a pub in Clapham Common, patiently watching my then-boyfriend play pool when his best friend walked over, bent over in front of me, and farted. We were 25. Twenty-f*cking-five.

(Don’t laugh).

All I hope is that if I do have a kid with a guy, that the boy prankster has left his fully grown husband body. The last thing you need is your partner photoshopping your baby being lobbed in the air.