Because I'm basically decent and honest and have a poor sense of fun I believed that they had found the arms of the Venus de Milo. I just wondered how they knew they were hers, after all these years and why they hadn't crumbled.
And I certainly believed there had been a particularly great spaghetti harvest that time in Italy, with people going out and cutting it down with scythes. I suppose I asked myself why I'd never actually seen any spaghetti farmers whenever I was there, but just assumed that I must have been in the wrong region.
I totally accepted that there was a new, undiscovered magical island called Sans Seriffe which was a tourist paradise which had a ready-made air strip on it and was going to be the big place for holidays. That's because I believe what I read in responsible newspapers .
Then about lunchtime on every April 1st, people start falling around with laughter and saying wasn't it all wonderful and some eejits really believed it and wasn't the paper so clever?
And I sit there with darkening brow and sense of humour failure written all over me, unable to find anything remotely funny about printing lies.
They go on about the gullibility of the reading public, and people being as thick as short planks and how on earth could they forget the date? In my world you shouldn't have to look at the date before deciding whether what it says in the paper is true or a mad joke. So I wrote a note in my diary for Wednesday saying: Don't Read The Papers. It Will Only Annoy You.
So I didn't, but every year people told me about these various screechingly funny things, these jokes - as they called them - or lies - as I called them - which had reduced the country to tears of laughter.
There was a programme where they said the Millennium Dome in London was going to create its own micro-climate and that it would start to rain inside it. I think this was idiotic because the whole Millennium Dome idea is so mad and peculiar already. What would you expect but that it would start to rain inside it?
And there was the usual crop of pub stories where awful demented fun-loving wives who asked barmen to pretend that their husbands had won the lottery and the awful conniving barmen did, and the awful fun-loving wives then learned many more truths about the nature of their own marriages than anyone would want to know.
And some person pretended to a new author that the Oprah Winfrey Show had rung looking for him. Now, I want you to know that if someone had done that to me I would have killed him by strangulation without a backward glance at the person who played the fun joke.
Fortunately, the first-time author is a young man with a sense of fun who remembered the date and didn't kill anyone. Then I heard of some fourth year children in a school who made a bonfire in the car park and told their teacher that her car was on fire. And she broke down and cried and told them that her life was over. And everyone is meant to think that it was all very funny because at the end of the day her car was still there.
But I keep thinking of the way she lost control and told the class how she had to drive her husband to his Fas course every day and I would like to hang every single one of those fourth years in that school from a lamppost. And a boy said proudly that he had told his mother that their cat Basil had eaten all the fish mousse she had made for a dinner party and his mother had belted Basil in rage before she realised what fun the whole thing was, and now Basil will never trust anyone again. Try explaining April First to a cat.
And anyway these days who needs an April Fool joke? Things happen these days that would definitely have been considered pranks some years ago. Most of what you read in the papers at the moment is totally surreal.
The banks are admitting to robbing people, and taking their money. They are actually saying in public that there have been some areas of misunderstanding and it will all be given back somehow and that everything will be done within the framework of the law. The banks are saying this?
The Christian Brothers are putting big advertisements in the papers saying they are sorry to their pupils over what some of the brothers may have done to them in the past, belting them and abusing them. The brothers are saying this.
The coverage of the court case about the Tribunal has suggested as a serious possibility that if it goes one way rather than the other Charlie Haughey might be looking at a jail sentence.
Haughey in jail?
On American television the talk show hosts look earnestly at the camera and say they are worried, very worried, about the president being abroad. While Clinton is out there in Africa doing good and building bridges, they ask, who on earth is sleeping with the interns?
They ask this about a US President who is still in office?
And in Coronation Street, which for a lot of us is genuinely like real life, Deirdre Rashid is in prison for a crime she didn't commit. And Ann Doyle's cats have told some terribly indiscreet things about her on the Late Late Show.
And we seem to be into the Single Currency.
And they still expect us to be entertained by April Fools.