How the election night unfolded at East Slope bar

Few nights have felt as momentous as this, and we didn’t even think he could win.

I’ve never seen East Slope so packed, so alive or so bristling with anxiety. Red and blue bunting, CNN, Budweiser coming out of your eyeballs. America well and truly descended on campus come November 8th.

By bang on six, the bar was heaving. Getting a seat was nigh on impossible, and from every pore you could sense the wannabe pundits spewing their semi-researched gabble on worried friends. Yep, definitely election night.

So, Budweiser’s (or Seacider in my case, because, well, it’s just better) in hand, we sat down and watched a slice of American history playing out on the projector in front of us. Whenever Trump or Farage appeared grinning on our screens, huge boos rang out across the room. It was sort of like a football match, only with the fate of the free world at stake.

I won’t dwell on the result, there’s plenty of outcry elsewhere, but needless to say that as the long night drove on, the mood in East Slope grew darker and more despondent. It felt like something out of a nightmare, the rain lashing down against the windows, a man with an enormously orange face growing closer and closer to the White House. All very bizarre.

It didn’t help that, by the early hours of the morning, everyone was incredibly uncomfortable on their bar stools and becoming deliriously tired. We didn’t know what was going on: Do we watch the screens? Or the BBC Twitter feed? Was Hillary really going to lose? Nothing made sense anymore.

The solution, as it usually is in East Slope, is to get smashed. There was one group that began chanting “USA, USA, USA”, another shouting “Trump, Trump, Trump”, whilst enthusiastically banging their fists on the table.

A sad soul

Some walked around draped in the Stars and Stripes, others had t-shirts saying ‘fuck Trump’. There were signs cut out of Shreddies boxes, daubed with similarly explicit insults directed at The Donald.

Yeah…just as weird as the election itself.

By the time it became clear that Trump would win, people were drunk, sleepy and confused. Head in hands, everyone trudged back to their flats, unable to comprehend the result or how they would be awake in two hours for their 9am’s.

At least we had East Slope. East Slope always makes sense.