An April Fool writes...

As someone who celebrated his birthday on April 1 - thanks for all the cards, folks! - I've always been a big fan of April Fools.

The Journal's current policy is not to do any April Fools. I think that's a shame, though having been on the end of phone calls over the years from irate readers who've been hoaxed I can probably understand it.

I've been here long enough to remember some good ones - the bridge to Lindisfarne and advertising being sold on the wings of the Angel of the North stand out.

I have a fondness too for a story that my first paper, the Hexham Courant, did in the early '90s where Wanney Crags - a rock formation in Northumberland that at a certain angle looks like a man's face - was going to be made into a "Mount Rushmore-style" monument dedicated to an obscure Tynedale councillor.

Most of the attention this year has been focused on a high-tech April Fool set up by Google in which Richard Branson talks about his plan to colonise Mars.

There was a good one in The Guardian about Carla Bruni being recruited by Gordon Brown as a style adviser to the Britain and another in which Nicolas Sarkozy was going to undergo stretching treatment to add five inches to his height.

But I think my favourite this year came from the website Digital Spy, which claimed that Fearne Cotton had been named new head of Entertainment at ITV and planned to make the channel "less serious".

Can anyone top that?

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