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Good Morning. Returning from the supermarket a while back I unloaded the weekly shop onto the kitchen table. My wife looked surprised at the large number of bread rolls. ‘Yes, sorry,’ I apologized, ‘I could only get 88 rolls, that’s all they had.’ But why do we need all those she asked. I unfolded her handwritten shopping list. ‘Look,’ I pointed, ‘100 rolls.’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘That says loo rolls.’ I suppose these days I’d have texted to check… instead of assuming some family gathering had slipped my mind. I felt a little foolish. If there’s a stupid kind of foolish there’s also a wise kind and on April Fool’s Day it’s good to notice the wise fools all around us. I’m giving thanks today for a group of fools in our neighbourhood who’ve given up their nights for the last three months to host a shelter for homeless people. They’ve put in the hours cooking and washing up, doing laundry and doing listening. Foolishly, come the end of every shift, none of them calculates their hourly rate or submits an invoice. Volunteering is just one of the foolish things many of us take on – a lot of daily life can be seen as unwise. Stopping, when you’re in a hurry, to talk to a neighbour - or reading a book with a small child. Poor time management. Unproductive. Inefficient. But these acts only appear strange in a time when everything must be weighed, measured and have a price tag stuck on. For all its benefits, one of the downsides of market capitalism is our attempt to quantify everything, to price things that are beyond value - family life for example or public service. The cultural critic Lewis Hyde explored this in The Gift, a book where he showed how art and creativity don’t really fit in the world of market forces. Sometimes it’s better to see life as gift than commercial transaction. But while we can’t live without poets and novelists, most poets and novelists can’t make a living. The stupid version of foolish. History is full of jesters and clowns including a long line of ‘holy fools’ – counter cultural figures like Francis of Assisi, who step out of the mainstream to challenge prevailing wisdom. We dismiss these fools as eccentrics and misfits but sometimes they see life with more clarity than the rest of us. So why not mark today by being foolish? Take ages to handwrite someone a letter ? Waste some hours on a pastime you haven’t got time for. Consider getting in touch with that person you fell out with. Don’t count the cost or look for a return on your investment. Imagine that life is about depth, not length or width. Experiment with what TS Eliot called that ‘condition of complete simplicity’ - which costs ‘not less than everything.’ Sometimes the sensible decision is daft and the foolish choice is wise. As the early Christian teacher Paul put it, ‘the wisdom of this world… is foolishness.’