Have a Shitty Freshers Week!

Well well well, look who came crawling back. Been having some good weekends have you, hmm? Been enjoying the mundane monotony of your gratuitously, phenomenally tedious existence? Good. I’m happy for you.

But things change, dickwad. You can’t be happy forever, and some people who are about to have that truth crush them like a falling piano are students. Oh sure, they’ll party, they’ll drink and fuck, and have banter about their professor who’s a nonce or is fit or both, but at some point the inevitability of their reality will strike them like a frozen cow shit bullet straight through the heart.

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It’s Freshers Week, it’s time to make friends, chat about your similarities with your new course mates, maybe even get your first STI (if you’re lucky!). For a lot of the fresh faced young bucks Freshers Week is the inaugural adventure, the non-tentative baby steps into the rest of your life. All the excessive drinking and smoking and fucking begins here. That being said, it also sounds like a total nightmare. If Dante Alighieri was alive today he would have created a tenth circle of hell called ‘Binge Drinking’. Your desiccated abdomen would be submerged in semi chilled vodka jelly mix while an assortment of gremlins and ghouls pour rainbow shots in your toothless gob hole. Calvin Harris plays eternally. Welcome to the Inferno’s Oceana.

So here we go, what’s the worst of the worst, the most inexcusable functions being shamelessly flyered to unsuspecting lambs, meandering their way leglessly to the slaughter? Time to go hard. Have a shitty freshers week, you stupid little bastards.

THE FRESHERS WILD ZOO RAVE

Location: Bliss Bar & Clubrooms, Medway

There’s something disconcerting about fancy dress. At least with your classic masquerade party there was a kind of salacious undertone to it. The decorative masks, often somewhat sinister, would add a raunchy yet luxurious danger to proceedings. Fancy dress on the other hand serves only to have people say ‘Ha, I get it, you’re {that guy}!’ and then ignore the effort you’ve put into it for the rest of the night. There’s nothing sexy about being covered in fake blood and silly string cobwebs. And I’ll tell you what’s even less sexy than wanting to fuck a Frankenstein’s monster: wanting to fuck an animal. This is where The Freshers Wild Zoo Rave looms into focus, like a terrible, rotting, lumbering, horny wildebeest. Animal themed fancy dress is split into two categories: sexy animal outfits for the girls, (your cats, your tigers, any felines) and your lads in dinosaur and horse onesies. That’s about the long and short of it. Also it’s in Medway. If you’ve had a massive hypodermic needle full of bad luck injected into your veins and have found yourself in Medway, cut your losses and just do something low key, like getting blasted in a bar that doesn’t look like some dadaist petting zoo. Here’s some advice, freshers: start as you mean to go on. I told my cousin when he was a fresher to never smile in photos, cuz smiling in photos is for dweebs, and he’s still doing it to this day. I promised him a savaloy for his efforts. He’s earned it.

UAL FRESHERS CLOTHES SWAP PARTY

Location: Chelsea College of Arts

If there’s one thing students know how to do uniformly it’s dress badly. Thousands of people searching desperately for an identity is never going yield particularly cohesively fashionable results. So it is a terrible idea, then, to gather these lost souls of academia, plonk them in a room with some nibbles and wine, and get them to give their clothes to each other. A room full of knock off HUF weed socks, of unwanted Odd Future merch, of t shirts that have a crease on the arm where they’ve been rolled up. And snapbacks. So many snapbacks. It’s time to carve out your own niche, little ones, not nick someone else’s tired, tawdry one. Maybe try and be a health goth or something? You know what’s in right now? Monochrome sports wear. Get yourself some black and white adidas trackies, some back Air Max 95s and a black Nike windbreaker and boom, your internship at Vice Media awaits, along with a throng of hangers on. Because you’re the cool guy now. Don’t go to this fucking thing and get a German Moleskin Military Jacket with a fucking Scottish independence ‘YES’ badge on. You’re better than that.

THE BIG FRESHERS ICE BREAKER

Location: Tiger Tiger, London

And here we are. The end of the line. The last stop. Wake up, you hang-dog booze hound, it’s time to get off. We’re here. We’ve arrived. Welcome to the pit of despair.

It wouldn’t be unfair to say that Tiger Tiger bar and club in London is the worst place in the western world. I would rather sip on a loud, garish pina colada at ground zero on September 12, 2001 than even let the case on one of my laces enter this total shithole. The Big Freshers Ice Breaker takes place in this alcohol imbued Guantanamo cell, and is a touring event which claims to entertain ’40, 000 freshers across the UK’. It also claims to not be an event, but a tradition, like Morris Dancing or Zwarte Piet.

Alex Mytton of Made In Chelsea says of The Big Freshers Ice Breaker, “Ever walked into a club with an alien and a priest and left with a nurse and a cowboy? Welcome to the Icebreaker.” What he fails to say here is that these people are dressed like aliens, priests, cowboys and nurses, and are not actually qualified in any of these respective fields. It is false advertising through and through. It claims it’s an ice breaker, but breaking the ice implies a gentle lulling into a social situation, providing a catalyst for further intimacy. Tiger Tiger doesn’t know what the word gentle means, and only sees it on the doors of their toilets with ‘men’ tacked on the end. This isn’t how the future’s best and brightest should be ingratiating themselves into legal social life. This isn’t what we should be feeding out young, a putrescent teat filled with sambuca and ketamine. They deserve better.

A Final Bit of Advice

Let me whisper you some things. Don’t do what you think you should be doing, do what you want. Spend freshers week finding pubs and stuff, or normal clubs that have adults in. Sure, it won’t be as easy to bang a bunch of people who’ve literally just rid themselves of acne a week ago, but maybe that’s not for you. Go for the older men and women. They have a lot to offer and the novelty of your existence may entertain them somewhat. You don’t have to be who you’re told to be my young friends. The point of this coming of age adventure is you work that out yourself. Your journey isn’t going to begin at a clothes swap with a bunch of other muggy cunts, or the London branch of a godawful nightclub where someone dressed as a clown vomits on your trainers. That being said, you’re going to become incredibly despondent with it anyway, so do what you want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Follow Joe on Twitter: @Joe_Bish