I USED to hate summer. For all it meant was the onset of the exam season where life was spent with your head nose-dived into a book as you tried to remind yourself of the contents of the periodic table or whatever, while wistfully looking out of the window at all those grown-ups apparently having fun.

Revision and exams - didn’t you just hate it? That feeling of impending doom as you dragged your heels to the exam hall because you knew you’d not done nearly enough revising to take you remotely successfully through the following three hours.

That sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when you turned over the question paper and realised there was barely a thing on it that you were capable of answering.

Or that demoralising gaze round the room desperately in search of inspiration as you wondered how the heck you were going to drag out of your grey matter mire enough of the who did what in the English Civil War to fill in the answer book.

Although I was once memorably inspired enough to write ‘post no bills’ in the margin of every page during a biology exam rather than answer the questions such was the famine in my knowledge about rats innards and the photosynthesis of plants. Got an ‘unclassified’ for that lack of effort though I did think the examiners could have given me a couple of marks for innovative thinking….

But if it’s bad enough for those sitting the exams – especially those of idle ilk like me who thought of school as one big playground - think of the teachers who are invigilating them. It must be as boring as watching paint dry or porridge set. It must make them want to climb up the walls with the tedium of it all. And how on earth I wonder - as someone who can fall asleep at the snap shut of an eyelid - do they manage to stay awake?

By organising pencil-sharpening races that’s how. Or playing slow motion ‘chicken’ in the aisles between desks and holding silent, rubber-soled ‘running’ races around the room. One teacher told of a colleague at one end of the hall who would make movements that invigilators at the other end of the room would have to copy.

Stroking a nose, folding arms, standing on one leg (bit dangerous that, in case you fall over and make a racket), twiddling with hair – all seemingly innocuous stuff and all the more ridiculously guffaw inducing because of it. Which made it all the more attractive because there was an elemental riskiness of destroying the nib-scratching peace and concentration of the exam room because of it.

Another teacher was known to practise her belly dancing routines, though I never saw the likes of her when I was gazing around for inspiration, that’s for sure. And remember the Pink Floyd track Another Brick In The Wall? Well, apparently some teachers do their own rendition of that by counting another brick in the wall of the exam room sports hall to stave off the yawns.

Counting the number of students wearing specs or odd socks, sporting red hair or blonde tresses is the stuff of unstultifying boredom, but at least it keeps invigilators awake as their charges toil over algebraic equations and the formation of rift valleys.

Still, I suppose the reward is getting to see some of the belters that have been scribbled frenetically on the answer papers. Like one pupil when asked to define capital punishment said it was getting in to trouble for putting a capital letter at the start of a sentence.

Or the one who, in naming three benefits of training wrote: 1) It’s cheaper than driving; 2) You can read on the train and 3) They have a snack trolley.

Another, when asked to write the ‘longest sentence you can, using appropriate punctuation, wrote ‘50 years to life.’ Which is exactly what it felt like in the exam room all those years ago….