April Fooled

Have you ever been done like a dinner on April Fools' Day, Dear Reader? Both Mr. P & I fell one year hook, line and sinker for a very amusing spoof magazine feature on a Nordic ice cream tycoon and his family. But hunting the interwebs for delicious evidence to share has left me empty-handed and now wondering if I dreamt the whole thing. Perhaps this is the key to being properly April Fooled?

Despite spending an unseemly amount of time today perusing archived 1990s trashy magazine covers seeking editions around the beginning of April and only becoming reacquainted with the likes of Claudia Schiffer (so many times) and Jane Seymour (so many children) and 90s-headlining royal covergirls in their prime, Mr. P reassures me that he, too, can visualise the whole glorious thing. So we can't have imagined the magazine spread. But it does seem to have suspiciously vanished from said archives.

We've all pored over the occasional Exclamatory(!) guilty-pleasure magazine in the dentist's waiting room (and, ahem, purchased the occasional copy with an alluring cover) so you can picture for yourself the glossy images splashed across several pages with their breathless yet almost tongue-in-cheek captions:

The Family Portrait comprises a handsome middle-aged tycoon with a nonsense Nordic name posing in his lavish mansion, his sullen and beautiful blonde adolescent scions from a first marriage surrounding his baronial throne, his 20-something sultry and beautiful blonde second wife at his side and at their feet their sweetly blonde twins.

Subsequent Home Interior photos have the trophy wife draped provocatively across furniture, pouting at the camera in a new ensemble for each shot, the sulky adolescents glowering at the camera in the background. The accompanying editorial sings the praises of the brilliant tycoon, gushes admiringly over his beauteous family, the exquisite taste of the home, the furnishings, the fashion labels. It was all so utterly convincing and a brilliant parody of the typical spread found within their pages any other week.

And we fell for it. For an embarrassingly long time. Maybe even for weeks. I can't remember when the penny dropped but it finally did. But in the meantime, I did even tell people, sensible adults, that the Scandinavian millionaire founder of an ice-cream empire had wittily named his twins Ben & Jerry.  

Image credit: via Google