I was bored before I even began

Having around two months of holiday over the summer and an empty to-do list can seem so overwhelming that it becomes more stressful than term time.

Fear of losing my sanity to Loose Women and Homes Under the Hammer has forced me to look elsewhere for daytime entertainment. I tried cross-stitch but I'm not getting very far and am pretty sure I've already fucked it up.

Needless to say the Guardian's G2 crosswords prove useful on a day of nothing. But my new found time-wasting exercise is doing jigsaw puzzles.

I bought this from Oxfam for a couple of pounds. I love the tube map so it is the perfect 500-piece puzzle for me.

Charity shops are great for jigsaws as they are cheap, most have been checked and because they are so unpopular (probably because most people on the planet with taste have better things to do) there is normally a fairly good selection.

My next tip will both consume time and improve health - another activity I am dallying with is exercise. Me and Tom (of this very blog) have begun a weekly tradition of tennis followed by the excellent Rough Trade pop quiz at the Lexington. Tennis is perhaps the only sport I can play that is for enjoyment rather than health purposes/pain/misery.

Not only does sport fill one's time and potentially put off death for minutes, hours, days etc. but it also gives a good excuse to try out some interesting sportswear. By wearing clothes made by the same label, you can pretend to be sponsored by a certain brand. Personally I have selected purple Adidas running shorts, Adidas Stan Smith trainers and a Fred Perry t shirt (tennis would not be tennis without some Fred Perry attire). The look is completed with an Adidas jacket and with a bottle of orange squash and my racket slung over my shoulder I really look the part. Of course this is most of the fun and perhaps I have taken it too far by choosing to actually partake physically in exercise. Luckily for me all my apparel were bargains from second hand shops or old sportswear I found around my house; a good sports outfit can be very pricey. American Apparel has the triple advantage of i) being expensive ii) appearing to be cheap and brand-less iii) not being as suitable for sport as you'd hope. But you could always buy a swimsuit and pose at London Fields lido instead.

Anyway my third tip for curing summer boredom is the much more enjoyable prospect of learning something new. The past couple of years I have considered languages, photography, even calligraphy. This summer I am in the throes of learning the piano accordion. I managed to borrow a full-size 120 bass piano accordion that looks a little like this:

This photo does not fully display the dimensions of the instrument. It measures approximately 50cm lengthways and 40 cm widthways, and weights around 8 kg. Now on a fairly small female such as myself this takes up a considerable amount of my body and overwhelms me somewhat, I cannot practice too long for fear of back and arm ache. Seeing as beginners are supposed to start on the 48 bass size (48 buttons under the left hand rather than 120) you could say (as Tom of H.V. often does) that I have "taken on too much".

The piano accordion is a pretty amazing instrument that I would recommend learning if you can get hold of one and has proven itself to be very versatile. I have learned a few bits and pieces like La Marseillaise and the Red Flag as well as playing along to Beirut and trying out bad cover versions.

Boredom quasher 4: Thanks to the internet there is an endless scope to time-wasting activities. Youtube leads from one to another, and my recent favourite has to be this.

But aside from Pavarotti's freaky eyebrows I have been somewhat consumed by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which is a dream come true for Wikipedia users like me who are frustrated by the gaps in knowledge in their biographies. Today's Biography of the Day was none other than Tom Kilburn – not the TK of TGK Graphic but the man who pretty much invented the computer. As Tom G Kilburn puts it, he's the reason TK's beautiful bearded face will never appear on Google image search.

What you really want to be doing on the internet is watching the film used in Adam Curtis' recent art installation project. It is both amazing and a bit of a headfuck thanks to his abilities/perseverance regarding archive footage. Nonetheless he is a genius and pretty much all his stuff is captivating and entertaining.

Any tips on staving off boredom greatly appreciated. As long as I'm not reduced to reading Iain Dale's blog or Philip Schofield's twitter to fill my afternoon with comedy I'll be content.