Rhodes on sunny summits, ploughperson's lunches and moments of confusion for The Who

This year's G20 summit will be held in Bali. Officials from Whitehall and local councils are just back from a controversial conference on “investment opportunities” in Cannes. Strange, isn't it, how these “business” events never go to Skegness?

April Fool's Day again and with it that annual flush of shame from yesteryear. I was on a newspaper (far away and long ago, you understand) and we thought up a couple of cracking gags for the First of April. Mine was a news report on the Common Market introducing decimal time based on the deca-second and the euro-minute. As far as I recall, it didn't fool a single reader.

The women's editor, a kindly soul, wrote a spoof feature on the Prune Diet. The article was full of giveaways, including that it had been invented by Dr John Trotter of Looe. The more you read it, the more you realised it was all about laxatives and would fool nobody. Or so we thought. But for the next few days the phones hardly stopped ringing as hordes of readers, in various stages of some appalling intestinal complaints, pleaded to be put in touch with Dr Trotter. Moral: When people are desperate they will put their faith in anything. And you try telling them: “It was meant to be a joke.” From that day to this, I have avoided April Fool's gags.

A review this week of The Who's concert at the Royal Albert Hall refers to “confused song endings.” Given that one of The Who's greatest hits ends with the phrase “I'm a boy” repeated 12 (or is it 14?) times, is anyone surprised?

How journalism works. Two years ago a pub in Devon, rebranded its ploughman's lunch as a ploughperson's lunch. A few days ago someone noticed it on the menu and commented on Twitter. Another Tweeter called it “wokery”. The Twitter-obsessed media picked it up and it was given big headlines, presumably by journalists with too much gullibility and not enough memory. For this is nothing new. The ploughperson's lunch yarn dates back to the 1970s and possibly beyond, as a wacky example of where rampant feminism might take us.

See how, in an age of social media, a non-story becomes a big story? The most honest headline would have been: “Person reads old menu.”