I remember a time in the near-distant past, when Mac computers were those hideous turquoise bubble-machines, and E-numbers were an expected phenomenon in crisps. This was the time when the Easter holidays were actually a time of fun and frolics and plentiful chocolate. Boredom would only arrive when your Gameboy ran out of battery.
The reality of university holidays - no, let me be more specific - the reality of university holidays for a third-year English student involves soul-destroying amounts of boredom. For the past two weeks, I have been confronted by my dissertation (on Catholicism in Graham Greene novels, don’t you know) everywhere I turn. This is because there is nothing else to do, no distractions other than traipsing after my mother around the supermarket. The situation is made worse by the fact that all of my chums are sinking in mires of revision and essay-writing; home instilled within me the unavoidable need to do work, probably because I have never been able to stand libraries. For one thing, I have never been able to produce anything decent in a room full of brains that are all fizzing with intense, work-focused thought processes. Libraries are useful for one thing, and one thing only: observing odd people. Contemplating examples of undisputed abnormal behavior is an arresting enough distraction all by itself. I once watched a man of about thirty remove his shirt (this was mid-January, might I add) and kneel upon what can only be described as a prayer cushion, instead of using a chair. He then proceeded to get out a pad of paper, and drew hundreds of circles upon one page for the next forty minutes. All the time I was transfixed by this phenomenon - meanwhile, no progress was made with Ulysseus.
I’ve had almost two weeks off so far, and it has hardly flown by. Each day is the same, sitting at my computer, surrounded by books, attempting decent thought. A few days ago however, I reached something that I suppose can be described as ‘breaking point’. Yet, by 11am, I had drunk fourteen cups of tea, read all the newspapers and then...and then what? Catholics.
By lunchtime, I was so bored that I decided to mop the kitchen floor. So, I found a mop, and later my mother came along to mop over all the bits I’d missed - the whole floor, in other words. I then tried to fix my chest of drawers, which broke the day we bought it. And later, my mum came along only to put the drawer back together again. Days like this went by in slow succession. I am now at the point where I find myself staring at the day through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Each morning, bed and the blessed relief of unconsciousness seem so far away.
I half suspect that I’ve begun to wear a groove in the kitchen floor with endless trips to the fridge, hoping against hope that I have somehow missed a plateful of apple pie on the previous 4,000 excursions.
I decided, following the chest of drawers debacle, that the next day should involve visiting the bookshop, to buy books to read for pleasure. This is now an alien concept to me, after two and a half years of being bored to death by various catastrophes of literature - primarily Austen, Defoe, Donne, Joyce, Beckett, any of Chaucer’s contemporaries... it is amazing that I still like reading at all. Having selected my light reading, it occurred to me that my choices are somewhat reflective of my own present situation in life. Namely, if it involves my dissertation, life is dire. I chose Karen Maitland’s medieval murder-thriller-mystery-thing, in which the lives of the characters are so wretched, so full of unfettered, unrelenting misery, that it makes you feel thankful that you were born in an age of sanitation and sewage-systems. A few weeks of dissertation torture is preferable to death by plague before your 20th birthday.
The next stage in combating my boredom requires some effort. It now seems appropriate that I develop some kind of illness. This is a good idea when you are at a loose end, because everything, up to and including herpes, is better than being bored. It is hard, I know, to summon up a bout of genital sores at will, but what with it being unseasonably warm at this time of year, pollen is about. And if pollen is about, it is more than possible for me to develop hay fever two months early. If I whimper enough, it could easily pass for a “summer cold”, as my mother would say. And yes, even ingesting enough anti-histamines to place you into a state of self-induced drowsiness is preferable to spending days on end contemplating the nuances of the Catholic attitude towards felix culpa.
