everything then nothing

It's kind of warm. I am torn between jumping up and down and shouting you-call-this-hot? (in defence of that point of view, it's actually twenty-four degrees Celsius) and agreeing with the general consensus that yes, it has warmed up a bit. Obviously this is not like Indian heat - why hello there, forty-four degrees and permanent unconsciousness - or indeed lots of types of American heat (there's an inhospitable continent), but an English summer is marked in that it's experienced by English people, who have no physical or mental infrastructure to cope with heat. So when it gets to not-wearing-a-jumper temperatures, people bask or complain but definitely do one or the other. I love living in a country where summer is a pleasant surprise (nearly) every year.

The other thing that marks an English summer is how beautiful it is, of course. I have spent a couple of days artfully draped over the Master's Field in an attitude of somnolent recumbency, which is supposedly a good idea for revision purposes - it keeps me away from distractions because I have to stand up and go up five flights of stairs if I want to get to any - but in practice not, because I have been lying looking up a sky blue from horizon to horizon, and watching the way the sun flickers through the leaves on the tree beyond my window, and noting the occasional thwap of leather on willow as the Balliol teams play slow lazy cricket, and... yeah. The heat unzips the tension beneath my skin so I just sort of flop, flat, with highlighers and notes in ineffective piles all around.

The thing is, I don't think revising inside makes any difference. ( obligatory Finals burble )