How to Frolic

Some things serve a really useful but boring purpose (revision, the dictionary, early nights, salt). Other things serve a really fun, stimulating and yet ultimately less important purpose (pink squash, prank calls, doing bastardized ballet in one’s pants while listening to Wuthering Heights).

It is essential for the continued functioning of the universe that for every one of the former boring things, at least two really fun things happen.

Frolicking is one of the fun things, and due to the sheer quantity of useful-yet-dull shit going down this term, it is really quite important that people know how to do it properly. Here is how to do it:

Gymnastics

Handstands, cartwheels, round-offs. Crabs. (Not that kind.) Everyone loves a bit of spinal manipulation, and more so than usual when it is performed in the outdoors. Being momentarily upside-down is not only exhilarating, but it also gives the same kind of disorientating altered perspective that one might have to pay quite a lot for in the toilet of a grubby nightclub. Instead, frolic in the warm spring sun! For free, and with minimal implications on your psychological health and liver function!

On a much, much cruder level, handstands means you might get to see girls’ knickers and boys’ abs. To reiterate: the best things in life are free.

Here are some pretty ladies showing you how it is done, and flashing their pants.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSyVNPHaxEQ

Games

Football, yeah, obviously. Think outside the box for a moment. Go rogue. The best kinds of games are those which legitimise any of the following: violence, napping, shouted insults, or enforced kissing.

So, we have Sleeping Lions for the afternoon snooze, Bulldog for the violence, and Kiss Chase, quite obviously, to satisfy your kissing needs.

Some games, however, can cater for two or more of these criteria. Case in point: Duck-Duck-Goose. This game justifies the act of smacking as many people as you like on the head while calling them something insulting like ‘dog’, until you decide the time has come to end the circle of hellish emotional torture, and instead to elect the ‘BITCH!’ who you will hopefully further humiliate by out-running.

Some other handy D-D-G pairs might include: shitface/fuckhead, acne/dandruff, and Jodie Marsh/Dane Bowers.

Be careful where you frolic: some colleges love a bit of outdoors activity (Murray Edwards encourage students to range the grounds freely); others will snipe you down like Mr Fox if you veer from the pathways, like Trinity (unless you are a scholar. In which case, feel free to Kiss Chase all over Fellows’ Bowling Green).

Illustration by Amy Jeffs

Wildlife

All kinds of animals come out when the sun shines. Lambs gambol in the fields. Hideous pupae emerge as beautiful butterflies. Millions of chicks break their necks as they career into large expanses of glass on their maiden voyages.

Why not stage your very own Spring Watch? Don’t worry if you don’t live near a handy nature reserve: there’s plenty to see, even if you just go down the local Piece (Christ’s, Parker’s) or Green (Jesus, Queens).

Argos is selling National Georgaphic binoculars for just £4.99 at the moment. Or, if you prefer a more stylish spying accessory, check these out.

The Topless Man is one common specimen, native to the recreational ground and the Citroen Saxo. TTM is often spotted wearing his underpants very high. This might be because it is only 18 degrees centigrade, and he is a little bit chilly around the mid-section. Also, he might be showing off the fact that his knicker elastic has ‘Calvin Klein’ woven into it, because this is an important part of his mating ritual.

Courting tactics also include drinking lager on swings and performing similarly adult activities in an underage setting, such as rating babysitters’ breasts on a scale of ‘butters’ to ‘phwoar’.

Other fail-safe spots include Running Toddler, Crying Toddler (after the inevitable fall) and Harassed Mum (after the inevitable fall, and after Topless Man has rated her post-pregnancy breasts an ‘if I had to’).