The best places to procrastinate in London during exam season
Just give up now.
Exam season is looming, but luckily we live in a city where procrastination is just a sweaty tube ride away. So here are some (not so) fresh ideas about where you’ll inevitably find yourself in the next month or so.
An obscenely over-priced café
When the Strand/ Borough are littered with pretentious eateries that serve their croissants on butchers’ blocks and their coffees in thimbles you just can’t say no, can you? It would look too fucking good on your IG.
With all this revision people are starting to think you have no life and you can’t let that happen. So by June you’ll have sampled every variation of product containing an avocado and Olly with the shit beard will know your drinks order by heart (flat white even though you still have no idea know what’s so outstandingly flat or white about it).
R.I.P positive bank balance (and dignity).
The library
It goes without saying that 90% of our procrastination actually happens in the last place it should. There are, of course, factors to blame in this: the pop up tent outside the Maughan where you have the chance to ride an exercise bike and win a tangerine; the distractingly variable temperature (2nd floor mezzanine = Mercury but not in a good way, 1st floor by a vent = the Arctic Tundra); the hot guy you’ve been trying to make eye contact with since 9am who turns out to be more of a 4/10…
Or maybe it’s just the fact that you’re a massive piece of shit. Brilliant.
One of the parks
On the 6th day, God invented exams but he deliberately put them in the sunniest, happiest months of the year so that all our lives were ruined. Could there anything worse than watching the 20 degrees and sunny Snapchats pile up on your phone while you’re eyeballs deep in Judith Butler? Not really.
Fuck it, you think, emerging from the depths of the library like a sad cave troll seeing light for the first time, only to bag an arm span sized spot in Lincoln’s Inn, have a minor breakdown and attempt to hold back the tears while you say a few desperate ‘oms’.
Should’ve brought the factor 50.
The gym
Lol, yeah. Apparently people actually do this and count it as ‘procrastination’ and ‘fun’ – who knew? But studies show that exercise can release endorphins and help you stay on top of your game during exam season. Whether it’s a calming yoga session or the worst spin class of your life, a few hours in the gym is guaranteed to take your mind off the 15,000 words you need to write for at least, like, 45 minutes.
Oxford Street
You know life is bad when you’d rather be dodging tourists and pushchairs in this hell hole than at your desk. No doubt you’ll find yourself rewarding 10 minutes of superb highlighting with a new pair of trainers (and another flat white?), or even wasting a good hour trying on every single novelty hat in Tiger.
Life well spent.
A gallery or museum
To be fair, this one is quite productive. There must be a way you can link that shit painting of Prince Charles in the Portrait Gallery with ideas about Romantic selfhood? Or some old rusty spoon in the British Museum with 3,000 words of utter crap on female domesticity?
And it’s basically an anthropological study isn’t it… sitting in a museum… watching people…soaking up the atmosphere? Even though you don’t study anthropology.
Even though you don’t know what an anthropology is.
The cinema
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 is out. You thought the first one was pretty bloody average but if it delays reading ‘Sister Carrie’ for a bit then it’s £10 well spent. (£50 with popcorn and a coke.)
In fact, one of the great things about London is that you can go to the cinema entirely alone and not feel weird about it; 12pm at the Peckham Multiplex is nothing but a baron wasteland, populated only by a couple of loners doing exactly what you’re doing – sitting in a darkened room rocking back and forth and pretending none of their problems exist.
Ministry of Sound/ Walkabout/ another shit club
‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’ ‘Weren’t the days of sticky floors and shit transitions over?’, you ask internally as you join the unfathomably long queue to an unfathomably popular venue, unfathomably sober.
Hey, maybe it’ll get better inside! You’ll forget you’re the only with 3 exams still to go, get a few Jaegerbombs down your neck and start grinding on a total stranger! This is what student life is all about, right? Right?!!
Umm, the shower?
Maybe I’m running out of places to procrastinate, but who loves the shower? I do. If you think about it it’s the one place it’s socially acceptable to spend half an hour alone, completely naked, singing. Maybe you could even waste more precious time making a playlist for the shower. And then spend another hour after you get out scrolling through Facebook and catching hypothermia in only your towel.
So many possibilities.
The Tube…….?
I guess you could also substitute revision time to ride the Northern Line from beginning to end?
Both lines.
Over and over again.
Until you die.
Online, reading a Tab article?!?!
Ok, so this is technically number 11. If you made it this far you really must be a mess.
(Yes, this was my procrastination. Feel free to join us for more on our Facebook where the memes are fire)