How NOT To Do: Summer time

Believe or not, Nottingham is finally seeing some sun. As the exam season draws to an end (but just not quite), the warm weather waits temptingly for us to frolic in.

Dusty windows are finally being cracked open in Lenton, suncream is suddenly on offer in Boots and there are wasps EVERYWHERE.

It can mean  only one thing; people are going to be acting like dickheads. Now, everyone should be able to enjoy the sunshine and you may not even be aware you are pissing people off, but the fact is you need to be told in order to make this rare happy time tolerable.

Flip Flops In The Library

You can hear them from a mile off in the silent section, flapping away as a foot-wear equivalent of the town-crier:

“IT’S WARM OUTSIDE. I AM WEARING FLIP FLOPS. LOSE YOUR LAYERS.” First of all, it’s always a sauna in Hallward so there’s nothing new there.

Secondly, there’s a time and place. Flip flops are for holiday, nowhere else. Take your noisy shoes to Portland, I have no interest in them.

A barbecue is lovely, of course. But most student houses are cramped together like Lego city, with each there is a small concrete area attached which can only be deemed as a place fit to tie up a badly behaved dog.

Trying to cram all seven of you round a disposable barbecue is just sad to watch. Even worse, the smug barbecuers who drag their sofas out to their front garden, instagramming photos of themselves entitled “summer swag”.

Your sofa is in your garden, time to reevaluate your life.

Lenton Manor’s finest…

There are certain places that just should not be tanned. The top two inches of a builder’s crack, for example.

And god forbid the brave girls who go topless, it may be sunny but we are still in the oh-so-British state of fearing social awkwardness/embarrassment. Save that shit for the Mediterranean.

Please tell me more about your Summer Studies BA? You are working really hard towards it. Wait…you’re not revising for an imaginary degree? Oh I see, that’s cute now leave me alone.

That Ice Cream Van

If I hear “Just one Cornetto” ringing through the streets one more time – just one more time – I am going to scream.

Do not bow to the pressure, it’s like feeding a seagull, give them business even just once they will sit outside your drive playing that incessant tune just waiting for more bait.

“It’s too hot, let’s work outside.”

No. There are people there. People in flip flops, having barbecues, bordering on indecent nudity whilst playing with water pistols.There is sun glare on my laptop screen; all my papers are flying about in the wind and with the sun beating down on me, the very last thing I want to do is a 3,000 word essay.

Give me a cold, dark room with no happiness or distraction in sight then I will be able to work.