Rimmer found the process of revising so gruellingly unpleasant, so galling, so noxious, that, like most people faced with tasks they find hateful, he devised more and more elaborate ways of not doing it in a "doing it" kind of way.
In fact, it was now possible for Rimmer to revise solidly for three months and learn nothing at all.
The first week of study, he would always devote to the construction of a revision timetable. At school Rimmer was always at his happiest colouring in geography maps: under his loving hand, the oil-fields of the Middle East would be shaded a delicate blue, the prairies of Canada would be rendered, centimetre by painstaking centimetre, a bright and powerful yellow, and the regions of tundra in Siberia slowly became a luscious, inviting green. Up until the age of thirteen, he was constantly head of class in geography. After this point it became necessary to know and understand the subject, and Rimmer's marks plunged to the murky depths of "F" for fail.
He brought his love of cartography to the making of revision timetables. Weeks of patient effort would be spent planning, designing and creating a revision schedule which, when finished, were minor works of art.
Every hour of every day was subdivided into different study periods, each labelled in his lovely, tiny copperplate hand; then painted over in watercolours, a different colour for each subject, the colours becoming bolder and more urgent shades as the exam time approached. The effect was as if a myriad tiny rainbows had splintered and sprinkled across the poster-sized sheet of creamwove card.
The only problem was this: because the timetables often took seven or eight weeks, and sometimes more, to complete, by the time Rimmer had finished them the exam was almost on him. He'd then have to cram three months of revision into a single week. Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he'd then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.
Because five days now had to accommodate three months' work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed - to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.
Within an hour of getting up the next morning, he would feel inexplicably exhausted, and start early on his supply of Go-Double-Plus caffeine tablets. By lunchtime he'd overdose, and have to make the journey to the health centre for a sedative to calm him down. The sedative usually sent him off to sleep, and he'd wake up the following morning with only three days left, and an anxiety that was so crippling that he could scarcely move. A month of revision to be crammed into each day.
At this point he would start smoking. A lifelong non-smoker, he'd become a forty-a-day man. He'd spend the whole day pacing up and down his room, smoking three or four cigarettes at a time, stopping occasionally to stare at the titles in his bookcase, not knowing which one to read first, and popping twice the recommended dosage of dog-worming tablets, which he erroneously believed to contain amphetamine.
Realizing he was getting nowhere, he'd try and get rid of the tension by treating himself to an evening in a quiet bar. There he would sit, in the plastic oak-beamed pub, nursing a small beer, grimly trying to be light-hearted and totally relaxed. Two small beers and three hours of stomach-knotting relaxation later, he would go back home to bed and spend half the night awake, praying to a God he didn't believe in for a miracle that couldn't happen.
Two days to go, and ravaged by the combination of anxiety, nicotine, caffeine tablets, alcohol he wasn't used to, dog-worming pills, and overall exhaustion, he would sleep in till mid-morning.
After a long scream, he would rationalize that the day was a total write-off, and the rest of the afternoon would be spent shopping for the three best alarm clocks money could buy. This would often take five or six hours, and he would arrive back home exhausted, but knowing that he was fully prepared for the final day's revision before his exam.
Waking at four-thirty in the morning, after exercising, showering and breakfasting, he would sit down to prepare a final, revision timetable that would condense three months of revision into twelve short hours. This time, he would give up and go to bed. Maybe he didn't know a single thing about anatomy, but he'd be fresh for the exam the next day.
Which is why Rimmer failed exams.
Extract taken from "Red Dwarf", by Grant Naylor, published by Penguin Books, 1989.
. I dont do timetables unfortunately though - I plan it out in my head.
