Stormy Weather, Raining in my Heart, Ain’t no Sunshine when she’s Gone. What do these have in common? They are all examples of society mistaking various physical weather events for feelings. This confuses Mig and Nat, greatly. Mig has spent years telling people he felt partially cloudy, when in fact he meant to say, ‘slightly disheartened’. When Nat checks the forecast, he always hopes it will be elated, but it never is. On May Exeat, we asked the question, ‘is weather in the mind or the senses’ through a carefully planned experiment. The rules were as follows:
With help from the Oundelian team, we devised a list of the ten best summer activities in Oundle. Then, to test whether ‘summer’ is in fact weather-related or rather, a state of mind, we attempted to do all of them in the space of an hour and a half on a miserable, grey Monday morning. In short, we attempted the first out-of-season summer. This is how it went.
We can all agree that nothing feels like summer more than a cooling trip to the swimming pool on a hot, sunny day, but no one is quite certain as to whether this is a result of the hot sunny day or the swimming. At 11:19, a rather chilly and disgruntled Nat and Mig arrived at the school swimming pool. We gazed at those in the water, experiencing a comfortable freshness unique to the months in which freshness is a choice and not a fact of leaving the house. It was a promising start to the day. Despite this, we were quickly intimidated by the sight of an elderly gentleman doing a tumble-turn with far more finesse than we could muster, making us feel too inadequate to swim. Economising on time, we chose to utilise the Sports Centre’s Beans café and purchase two milkshakes. Malteser and Oreo respectively. We felt good. It left Nat cold and the thickness of the milkshake led to a mild asthma incident in Mig. Nonetheless, we agreed the seasonal boundary had been crossed emotionally, despite the miserable weather.
Milkshakes in gradually numbing hands and hope in lightly frozen brains, we watched cricket on the pavilion (Oundle vs. the nomadic Free Foresters). A large portion of our list was composed of grass-based leisure, so we settled onto the Rugby first team pitch to read a few pages of a book. It was quite windy, but this provided the sense of festive adventure one gets from performing a traditionally indoor activity outdoors.
Once we had rested and digested our milkshakes, the sports section of the morning began. We found one tennis racket and played a unique version of tennis with it. An apt ending to the sports portion of the morning. Tired, we played a game of the less Olympically recognised, Mafia (renamed topically to ‘Midsummer Murders’). Featuring exciting characters like civilians, the murderer, the seer, and the doctor, it was difficult to play as only two people, but entirely manageable.
In need of another break from the excitement, we lay down and soaked in some grey skies in the hopes of working up this year’s beach tan.
Despite Oundle’s small scale, it boasts four charity shops, all less than five minutes’ walk apart from each other. It being a bank holiday, most were closed, but we had the carefree summer experience of perusing the Bary Manilow records in Oxfam, accepting every opportunity the town has to offer.
An easier job, we smelled some flowers on the chapel lawns and discussed topiary. Not much to report.
And finally, the true summer sensation, we returned to the English department and wrote an Oundelian article. This was the only suggestion offered unanimously by the Oundelian team, leading us to wonder if they had much else going on in their lives. Nonetheless, we had promised to fulfil all of their Summer suggestions, and with that, our task was complete before one o’clock.
Across the course of the day, we relaxed, exercised, consumed, discussed, and played. We were left colder, and more goose-pimpled than when we began. As a result of this, we felt the day had been a reasonable success. We had completed everything anyone could hope to do during the Summer. Despite this, we felt the physical element of summer was more important than we had expected. To conclude, one’s wishes to enjoy summer to its fullest rely on it being summer. Otherwise, it’s slightly unpleasant.
