As I write this, my half-hearted attempt at a revision timetable lies despairingly crumpled in the wastepaper bin. Why? Because despite the exhilarating prospect of spending days cooped up in my room revising ‘basic verb inflections’ for my fast approaching Anglo Saxon exam, the temptation of the past week’s glorious weather has proved too much to resist.
I can’t be the only one. Students up and down the country, studying for everything from GCSEs to their finals, are surely experiencing a similar waning of willpower as the annual novelty of 30-degree heat and blissful sunshine strikes once again during our busiest time of year.
Just as the 1st of January routinely brings with it a flurry of gym subscriptions and supermarket trollies awash with nicotine patches, each and every year we approach the exam season promising ourselves that we will study diligently in order to avoid last minute panics. We are, however, just as able to rely on the fact that even the briefest spell of clement weather has the potential to devastatingly disrupt our good intentions.
It is a sad reality that earlier this week my flatmates and I joyously sprang from our individual pits of revision despair and raced outside in order to investigate the faintest jingle of an ice-cream van. I think we would struggle to reach such levels of excitement even if our beloved One Direction announced they were to perform live from our living room!
We are all safe in the knowledge that the moment we finish our last exam or hand in our final essay black clouds will roll in and that familiar pitter-patter of rain, synonymous with the British summer, will resume. In the meantime, it seems criminal to spend our days crammed cheek by jowl in the library, hunched over our notes, when instead we could be outside enjoying what the Daily Express is no doubt over-enthusiastically hailing as ‘the greatest heat wave since records began’.
Unfortunately though, the fact that I am almost certainly not the only one to have guiltily traded coffee stained textbooks for a cheeky gin and tonic and a deck-chair in the garden will provide little reassurance come my exam next week. I envisage turning over the paper and having the horrendous realisation that, had I spent less time soaking up the rays, I might actually be able to answer the questions.
Perhaps we should consider challenging the outdated tradition of the ‘academic year’ beginning in the autumn, which is responsible for all our woes! Why not adopt a system where studies begin in January, with a long break over the summer? Exams could take place in December, leaving everyone free to relax in time for Christmas.
Of course, despite all my complaining, this would perhaps be a bit of an overreaction to what is in truth a relatively minor problem. An easier and more appealing solution might be to embrace our love of the sun as part of our degrees! It probably says more about the History of Art department than it does about my own gullibility that I barely bat an eyelid when a friend joked with me that they would be introducing a 20 credit module in ‘sun tanning’!
By now you are probably thinking that I’ve completely lost it. To be fair though, it might not even be such a bad idea. After all, I expect even the most ambitious amongst us aspire to spend more time throughout our lives enjoying relaxing afternoons in the sun than examining Kandinsky’s use of abstraction, deconstructing Keats or indeed wrangling with mind-boggling formulae and equations.