As a finalist, I don’t get out very often.
My daily movements usually consist of rotting in a library for far too many hours, chefing up questionable-looking food, going for a run (if I’m not feeling lazy) and winding up at a Cowley pub in the evenings. It’s a great routine that’s taken me three years to refine. I have no complaints. Am I boring? Yeah, probably. Such is the reality of final year at Oxford.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy going out. I do. I’ve simply reached the middle-aged mum mentality prematurely; I haven’t got the time or energy to write off the next day completely, nor does being sick into my bin carry quite the same glamour as it did in first year (if, indeed, it ever did). I’d rather be tucked up in bed at around 10.30ish, in time for tea and an episode of Derry Girls. Recently I’ve been quite upset if I turn back up to my room too tipsy to read my book before I go to sleep.
This means that when I do go out – and I mean out out – it’s quite an occasion. I have to schedule in doing-my-makeup time and decide whether to bother washing my hair. There’s at least forty minutes of me sitting on the floor crying, surrounded by abandoned clothes that just do not look right. As someone who is chronically late to everything, my friends will lie to me about pre-drinks starting times. If they tell me we’re starting at 8, and not 8.30, there’s a chance I’ll get there when everyone else does. More often than not, I still end up arriving last.
You’d think nights out would get less messy with age, experience and alcohol tolerance. I’d say this was generally true. I know my limits now. I stick to pints, avoid spirits, and never start so early that I’m gone by 9pm. I’m not overly loud or obnoxious. Pres and the pub might still be my favourite parts of the night, but I make it to the club in one piece, not crying and still able to string a sentence together. I dance with my friends and then we go home.
What my sensible third-year mentality had not factored in was the utterly unthinkable: spontaneity. Nights out were pre-planned novelties that I could structure work around, wash my hair for (or not), and look forward to. They were NOT last-minute commitments made by drunken finalists with far too much work to do, two hours before midnight.
Enter early Michaelmas, 2024. Two of my friends and I sat in a pub garden on a weekday, coats zipped up to our ears, pulling faces at the frequent exclamations coming from the packed table of obnoxious Oxford Brookes boys to our right. All pretty knackered, we had swapped the libraries of central Oxford for The Library on Cowley road at about 8pm. I don’t think we’d planned on being out late. Then again, it was still early in term, it was a pretty night, and we had a lot of overdue gossip from the summer to get through. It got to about 10pm, the Brookes boys had blissfully left, and I’d had several pints (of cider, duh). We’d had more than we’d intended. There is, as it turns out, quite a lot of liquid in a pint. It was perhaps not surprising then that despite being only five minutes from college, one of my friends announced as we were leaving that she needed to go to the loo. We hovered inside to wait.
She emerged a couple of minutes later clutching a paper flyer. It’s for the Bullingdon, she said. They’ve got something on tonight.
We craned our necks to look. “80s night at the Bullingdon! 11 til’ 3.”
It looked cheesy, but as Hilda’s students, we do love a Cowley club. And surely the DJ wasn’t going to be able to squeeze ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ into an 80s setlist. The alcohol settled it for us.
Staggering across the road to Cowley Tesco, we did some very quick mental maths and gauged that our cheapest and quickest bet was to split a bottle of Tesco vodka between the three of us. In our haste, we didn’t realise until we got back to college that we’d forgotten to buy mixer. It’ll be fine, my friend said, we can just shot it.
By the time we’d been to Tesco, arrived back at college, gotten changed and reassembled ourselves, I was uncomfortably sober. I say ‘uncomfortably’ because of the absolute whiplash that first double shot of tesco vodka gave me. It actually tasted like paint stripper. Have another one, my friend said, we haven’t got time to mess about. I did.
I think we did three each in the space of about three minutes. Not exactly wild stuff, but I was out of practice, and haunted by the last time I’d drunk vodka properly. As it turns out, drinking the stuff off a spoon will put you off somewhat.
“I’ve got some squash?” I said weakly.
The squadka didn’t much improve things. Pouring a tiny bit into a shot glass and attempting to mix it by tentatively swirling it around – losing half of it in the process – didn’t bring much success. Even when we remembered the existence of mugs, it didn’t help much. Debate ensued about whether to add water to dilute the squash first, which got quite heated. Shot measurements went entirely out the window. In the space of an hour we’d finished the entire bottle.
I have no idea what ensued between the hours of 11 and 1. Parts of it come back to me in waves – loud cackling, an attempt at a card game, and I’m fairly certain at one point we were all crying about something or other. I vaguely remember panicking about the time around 12.30, at which point we agreed to leave. It wasn’t until 1 that we apparently knocked on another friend’s door, where she greeted us half asleep and very bemused.
If you ask me in sixty years time – when I’m old and have lost my mind – about my time at university, I imagine I’ll include this story in my recounts of first year. That’s what it felt like. This was not a night out reflective of mature finalists – not that I’m a mature finalist normally, but I like to think I’m close. Legging it down Cowley road at 1.30pm, giggling and falling over my feet, was not exactly how I had pictured my night just a few hours earlier. We had a lovely conversation with a slightly creepy man about seeing a mouse on the floor, at which point someone started crawling around on their hands and knees to find it.
Around 100m from the club, we stopped acting like we hadn’t left the house in a week and pulled ourselves together. We needed to actually get in, or the whole night would be for nothing.
“Hellooooo”, I greeted the bouncer. An excellent start. In my periphery, I watched as one friend tripped over the curb, and the other got lost in the queue cordons.
“You can’t come in, I’m afraid.”
How can he tell? I thought to myself as I politely hiccuped.
“Club shuts in 20 minutes”.
20 minutes? How? It has said on the flyer that the club was open until 3. The confusion must have shown on my face because the bouncer followed it up with an explanatory “shutting early tonight.”
I glanced behind me. The others had spotted a cat across the street and were delightedly blowing kisses to it. I drew myself up. I’m a deeply unconfrontational person. I’m pretty shy. I would never dream of complaining in a bar or restaurant. I treat customer service workers with respect as a point of principle. I did not recognise the woman I turned into.
“Actually, we bought these tickets ON THE PROVISION that this club closed at 3. I hope that won’t be an issue?”
The bouncer just looked at me.
“Please?” I said in a much smaller voice.
He sighed. “Go on then.”
We were in the club for about ten minutes until, at 10 to two, they turned the lights on. The memory of the groan that resounded around the room is the only tangible thing I have of the event itself – that, and the video in my camera roll of my friend dancing to Rasputin with a shrill laugh echoing in the background.
We left. I was sobering up. My friend wanted a kebab. And my other friend needed a wee.
A dangerous combination, as it proved.
Kebab-friend dived off into a shop on the walk back. Wee-friend developed a look of quiet desperation. I dived into the shop to tell kebab-friend to hurry up. She gazed at me, bleary eyed and smiling vaguely, and told me she’d only be five minutes. I dived back out onto the street to attend to wee-friend. I could see in her eyes it was too late. I grasped her hands, tried to pull her to the side of the pavement. She looked at me, eyes full of sorrow. I’m sorry, she said. I didn’t even need to look down.
Moral of the story – save the silly decisions for freshers week. You’re too old now. Go back to the library. Perhaps, though, messy nights out make for good stories once in a while.