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Time scales

Three months

There are 52 weeks in the year so, roughly:

• 3 months = 13 weeks
• 6 months = 26 weeks
• 12 months = 52 weeks
• 18 months = 78 weeks

However, you need to bear in mind that these months are to be calendar months. So, if you start on day N of a particular month, the earliest you can finish is day N three months later. So 3 months after 17 February is 17 May. Six months after 9 April is 9 October. The precise number of days in these periods will depend on whether you happen to catch long months or short months, but you will find that the multiples of 13 weeks rule is more or less right. The concept of the calendar month is only really important (and then it's really important!) when entering the start and finish dates of a particular activity in your Record Books right at the end of the period when you are getting it signed off. Much the safest thing is not to write anything in your Record Book until you have had a discussion with AJPA at the end of an activity.

An hour a week

You have to put in an average of at least an hour per week. The averaging concept only works to a limited extent. Weekly totals of 2,0,2,0,2,0,2,0,2,0,2,0,1 would be OK for a 3-month activity, but 13,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 would most certainly not. Nor, actually, would 3,0,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,3,0,0,1. On the other hand 1,1,1,2,2,0,0,0,0,2,2,1,1 would be OK if the four 0s were over the Christmas holiday, when you simply didn't have access to school facilities. You can only cover the first two weeks of a holiday and the last two in this way: for the middle stretch of the Summer holiday the only way is to engage in the activity.

If you habitually do 6 hours a week on an activity then, even though only one of them is going to count, you should put them all down in your log.

There are one or two special cases. For example, it is recognised that stage lighting might involve intense weeks of about 20 hours interspersed with periods of three or four weeks in which you don't do anything at all. In these special cases, you are allowed to average over a longer period of time.

You should always bear in mind that the object is to demonstrate commitment over an extended period of time. Any deviations from the 'hour a week' basic rule needs to be consistent with this principle.

Breaks

You are allowed to take breaks. The commonest instance of this is when you are doing an hour a week and a school holiday comes along. Although you can stack extra activity into the two weeks immediately preceding and immediately following the holiday (see previous paragraph), you might want to do 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1, treating the holiday as a break. Here are two extreme applications of the principle:

• ½,½,½,½,½,½,½,½,etc would just about do at a pinch because you could argue that the second ½ came at the end of an eight-day week (in which there are now two ½-hour periods) and is followed by a six-day week in which you do nothing at all and take a break. So this would count as 1,0,1,0,1,0,etc. You obviously couldn't extend this principle to ⅓,⅓,⅓,⅓,⅓,⅓,etc because you wouldn't be able to find any seven- or eight-day periods in which there was an hour.
• Since you have from your 14th birthday until your 25th birthday to complete Bronze - a period of 11 years - you could in theory complete a 13-week stint by doing two hours in the first and last years and one hour in each of the other years.

Obviously, if you take breaks, your ostensible 13-, 26-, 52- or 78-week period is going to extend by the number of 'break' weeks that you have taken.