Readers’ letters last week, responding to your Helston Flora Day April Fools Joke report, were . . . shall we say . . . “interesting.”

Personally, wearing my hat that says “retired journalist and lifelong Packet reader,” (as opposed to “heavily biased current Packet columnist”), I thought the piece was absolutely brilliant, in both its conception and the writing.

It was only towards the end that the penny began to drop for me, and then of course you made it perfectly clear that it had been a spoof.

Or so it seemed.  Clearly a number of readers were not quite so sure.  Ye Gods, even my wife was totally taken in by it, eventually entering the feeble defence that she had “not read right through to the end.”

But I can’t talk.  On the same day – April 1 – I was well and truly had by a national news story revealing a new electronic gadget that would wake me up whenever I began to doze while reading a book or watching the telly.

I was all set to order, with credit card at the ready and life transformation in prospect, only to be mystified by the absence of any meaningful results when searching for the product and its creators on the internet.

But even that paled alongside the memory of the fictitious fire in Falmouth Bay on April 1 in 1970, when I was a raw trainee Packet reporter.

I took an early phone call from David Rye, Falmouth port health officer and as colourful and mischievous a character as they came.

He tipped me off to the effect that there had been an overnight blaze aboard a ship called the Loof Lirpa.

I immediately launched into intrepid reporter mode, firing a furious round of phone calls to the emergency services.  But nobody – coastguards, fire brigade, police – knew anything about it.

Desperate to leave no stone unturned, I tried the harbour master, Captain Frank Edwards.  There was a pause, and then he replied:  “Mike . . . have you tried spelling Loof Lirpa backwards?”

Mike Truscott,
Falmouth