President Partypooper

Just how boring is UBU President Rob Griffiths? That’s the inevitable question you’ll be asking after reading his article about freshers’ week for the Daily Telegraph.

In his piece Griffo argues that freshers’ week needs to be about more than just partying. He says an environment of “loud music, late nights, heavy drinking” is not conducive to a comfortable welcome.

It all reads like the dismally long yawn of an old man who wants the kids to stay off his lawn.

“Has anyone,” asks Griffiths, “ever made a lasting friendship in a club?”

The answer to this turgidly posed piece of inane rhetoric is obviously, yes. Of course people make friends in clubs.

Friendship in action

Especially in freshers’ week, where the bonding process between incipient acquaintances is usually sealed in spectacular fashion when funny shit happens in a nightclub. A bond sealed further when the night out is discussed the next morning in a confused and hungover state.

El Presidente seems to have a particular beef with club promoters – alleging that the culture of clubbing during freshers’ week allows their malign influence to snare in student spending to the detriment of the settling in process.

Yet Rob also notes that new students arriving at the University of Bristol expect the first week to be one of “heavy pubbing and clubbing”. This before club promoters have got their dastardly claws into them. Students want to have a good time in their first week and the clubs are merely helping to facilitate that desire.

The Beastie Boys lived, and quite possibly died for our right to get this drunk.

What solutions does Griffths offer? With no apparent irony he explains that he would like more salsa classes, cooking lessons, sports sessions and treasure hunts.

I’m not sure my freshers’ week would have been made any less awkward if I’d been forced into a non-alcoholic traipse around The Downs looking for buried treasure with a bunch of people I’d never met before.

It’s actually quite embarrassing that our President doesn’t want to fight for what can only be described as our right to party. Bristol is rightly famed for a club scene that is more diverse than anywhere in the country save London.

Instead of adopting the bland moral tone of a petty Tory cabinet minister, Rob ought to celebrate this fact.

He should represent the students who enjoy nothing more than a cosy night at the Cori Tap, an epic quest to Motion or a trip to the hallowed (and sticky) dance floor of Lizard Lounge, not the worries their parents might have.

Maybe we should all have voted for someone else.

Kelvin “not a joke candidate” Chen