Here's Everything That Will Happen in a Nightclub This Fresher's Week

It might be a side of clubbing we like to ignore, but truthfully fresher’s week is probably one of the few times every year when a nightclub actually serves the purpose of communality, and achieves the social significance, we so loftily like to afford it. It’s a week when going to a club and getting smashed is loaded with meaning. Whether it’s making friends or making impressions, sweaty basements and funny smelling superclubs across the nation become playgrounds of formative experience. For once, house actually is a feeling — and the feeling is “what the fuck am I doing here, I want to go home immediately”.

That being said, the significance afforded to fresher’s week by promoters, older siblings, and quasi-Buzzfeed survival guides also tend to over do it. You’re unlikely to experience any truly “amazing” nights out, and even less likely to make the best friend you ever make in the SU bar on your third night. Rather it is better just to treat the week as your clumsy first stumbles into whatever weird new social group you’ve just unwittingly joined. Settle down, sink as much alcohol as your homesick stomach can hack, and enjoy the ride. These will be some of the weirdest, worst (and possibly first) nights out of your life, but in a few years time — once you’re settled into a stiff routine of the same aftershave, clubs, and friends week in week out — you’ll pine for a week of unpredictable, unmanageable mayhem with a bunch of people who have no previously held opinions of you whatsoever.

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Fear Will Triumph, and You Will Spend £60 on a Fresher’s Wristband

There’s no escaping it. The promoters behind fresher’s week club nights market an economy of fear. The amount of significance placed on five sloppy drunken nights is completely unfounded — you could miss every single one and still have mates — but nobody actually wants to be the person to call bullshit on this. So, despite knowing deep down that spending £60 on a wristband that gives you guaranteed entry to five nights you have no interest in going to in the first place is a completely ridiculous waste of money, you will do it anyway. After all, what if that night called “First Kiss” at a club called Dominion is actually the sickest, most important experience of your peer group’s collective lives? Probably best to play it safe…

Someone Will Vomit Silently Into a Toilet and Tell Absolutely No-One

Third night on the trot, one cigarette pushes them over the edge. They smile a little too enthusiastically, nod at whatever is currently being said to them, before forcing out a curt “I’m just gonna…toilet”. They will re-emerge 14 minutes later, asking for a chewing gum, and when everyone is thinking of leaving.

You Will Hear “Bump N Grind” by Waze & Odyssey

And then, against every instinct in your body, you will shout “my mind’s telling me no”, while a complete stranger puts their arm around you.

Someone Will Write “I Love Cock” On Your T-Shirt in Felt Tip

Like an unattended Facebook account, the fresher’s nights involving blank t-shirts and felt tips tend only to inspire one joke. As sure as east is east and west is west, if you hand somebody a felt tip and the blank canvass of a t-shirt they will invariably scrawl “I love cock” on it. “That’s problematic,” you’ll think to yourself, “that ridicules and maligns the experiences of homosexuals.” “Cheeky bastard!” you’ll say.

You Will Dress Up as a Smurf

You’re not going to feel good about this, but don’t give yourself a hard time. It’s something we all have to do. As the blue paint matts with your straggly chest hair, or smudges your mascara into a bruise-purple, just remember: I’m doing this for me. This is me time.

You Will Briefly Befriend Someone in a Smoking Area, Probably Based on What They Are Wearing, and For a Brief, Passing Moment Think “Yes, I’ve Found Them, I’ve Found the Best Friend For the Rest of my Life”

You will either never see this person ever again, or you will speak to them two days later when sober and discover they are really boring.

An Irish Guy at an English University Will Make Loads of Jokes About the Fact He is Irish to His New Friends at the Bar

The Irish guy at an English university, so eager to beat any cracks about his accent to the post, will spend most of his first evening loudly talking about being Irish and Ireland and Guinness and stuff. As coping mechanisms go, it’s flawed.

Aaron From Geordie Shore Will Make an in Club Appearance

Just think, you’re only in a nightclub, in a new city, surrounded by people you don’t know for one week. For Aaron from Geordie Shore, this is his career.

You Will Dress Up as Wally From Where’s Wally?

Because nothing says “party” like a character famous only for hiding behind shit.

Everyone Will Pretend They Think 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” is an Absolute Classic

Middle aged DJs up and down the country will be dropping this, sending rooms full of largely white students into ironic frowns and faux-gangsta posturing. Classic.

You Will Hear Omi – “Cheerleader”

Two People in Your Block Will Start Getting Off With Each Other and End Up Having Sex and the Next Day Everyone Will Be Talking About it

But for some reason, you didn’t see it. How did you miss the biggest talking point of the night? Then you remember that 50 minute conversation about anarchism with the guy in a black trench coat.

An Older Girl Will Molly Coddle Another Slightly Younger Girl Because She is Too Drunk/Crying

A classic technique of ingratiation for at least one girl in every block of flats is to play mother hen, taking the vulnerable under her wing and asserting a calm social dominance over proceedings. She’ll have added you on Facebook in the queue. She’ll know at least three people who live in your home town. She’ll probably make you a cup of tea when you get back and call you petal.

You Will Dress Up as a Geek

You might even go sexy geek. You know, short school skirt, three freckles, thick rimmed glasses. Sexy.

One Fateful Night, You Will Bump into the Ski Society

The night’s going well. You actually like a lot of these people, and they seem to think you are alright. The music in here isn’t pissing you off, and you reckon you nailed it in terms of your T Shirt choice. Then, an unruly horde of Jack Willsians, addled by Jager and steroids, chanting about blow-jobs and making people do press-ups on tables, will arrive. They bring with them the air of a pound-shop hedonism, the smell of regret and subsequent denial following them like flies, one of them will push past you, knock your drink to the floor, laugh the word “oops” and never apologise. You will either curse them for the next three years, or join the ski society the next day. Choose wisely.

A Relatively Well Built Bloke Called Harry Will Buy You and Everyone In Your Group Drinks

Why don’t you like Harry? He just bought you a drink! He bought everyone a drink! All he’s being is nice, and friendly, and generous, and confident, and well dressed. Prick.

You Will Hear Mele – “Ambience”

A Terrified and Completely Silent Geography Student Who Has Never Been in a Club Before Will Spend Their Evening Stood Completely Still, Swallowing Tears, Staring at the Fire Exit

On a number of occasions you will think, I should go over and check they are alright. But before you get the chance, they will have evaporated into thin air — sailing back to halls on the last bus of the night.

You Will Stand in a Toilet Cubicle, R&B Hits Thudding Through the Ceiling Above You, Drafting a Text to Your Best Mate From Home. You Will Go To Send it, But Then Think “No, I Have to do This Alone”

LOL at your best mate from home currently doing the exact same thing 150 miles away.

You Will Order Craft Lagers and Impressive Sounding Drinks You’ve Never Drunk Before

I’ll have a pint of Kronenschaüsberger please because I love it and I always drink it at home.

You Will Adopt a Completely New Dancing That Involves Pursing Your Lips and Piously Nodding Your Head

What better way to show everyone you are well versed in tech-house than sternly nodding? The words “please accept me” rolling around in your head like a warped, reverberating sample everyone can hear but nobody will admit to.

You Will Adopt Another Completely New Dancing Style That Involves Putting Your Hands in the Air Like an Evangelical Preacher Even Though the Song Playing is “Jump Around”

What better way to show you are an absolute laugh than pretending “Jump Around” is a sick tune? The sickest tune, yeah?

You’ll Have a Big Music Chat With Someone

Featuring 7,364 producers and bands you’ve never heard of!!!!!

Someone Will Try and Do the Worm

Evolution has got us this far, but it still hasn’t taught us that the worm is neither funny or impressive. Instead, the ‘wormer’ will push himself back to standing upright, a wash of cold sweat flooding under their freckly skin. They’ll look around briefly for approval, be met with the opposite, recede to the edge of their circle, before shortly leaving the club to vomit into a plant pot full of sand and cigarette butts.

You Will Dress Up as a Pirate

These decisions are not reflective of you in a fundamental sense. Hold on to that.

You’ll Make a Really Good Joke

Well done mate, that was a really good joke.

You Will Have Your Photo Taken With a Massive Squad and be Tagged in it the Next Morning

Again, expect never to speak to any of these people ever again.

Dappy From N-Dubz Will Perform His New Single “Beautiful Me”

Genuinely. This is happening in Worcester.

Outside the Club, a Foppish Third Year In Corduroy Trousers Will Hand You a Flyer to his Improv Comedy Night

You won’t go.

You Will Probably Dress Up as a Fucking Minion

Actually maybe these decisions are reflective of you in a fundamental sense.

A Second Year Student Will Shout “Down it Fresher!” At You

You’ll want to swing round and tell them to fuck off. You’ll want them to know you’re not just a “fresher”. Not some number on a halls registration list. In fact, you’re nothing like the rest of these cackling, teenagers in their identikit t-shirts, squawking about being “so fucked”. Back home, your nuances are understood, you are a member of a friendship group with specific contributions to make, with opinions worth hearing, and jokes worth laughing at. But you won’t say any of that. You’ll just turn and laugh back, raising a limp thumbs up. Then you’ll turn back to your pint. And you’ll down it. Fresher.

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