What Is Wrong With Our Night Life?

JAMES EVANS on looking for fun in Cambridge clubs – and failing.

Cindies Clubbing Drinking Drunk Fez fun Life

“I can safely say that Dystopia has been my best night out in Cambridge.”

And then it hit me: I wasn’t sure whether I actually did have a good time at Dystopia, or whether an evening in some sort of self-parodying, drug-fuelled episode of Skins made me feel the need to go away thinking I had had fun.

In Cambridge we’re spoiled with a choice of about three nightclubs. One boasts the local miracle of the sweating walls, another has a nickname that makes it sounds like a sticky, down-market ladies’ hair salon from 1987, and another looks like the ‘Arabian Nights suite’ at a couples’ retreat off the A470 on the way to Llandudno.

My personal favourite?  The latter of these, but even then, when the first words you say when you leave are: “Yeah it was great! There were beds and everything!” you know something’s wrong with Cambridge night life.

In the bubble of work, work, more work and the occasional nervous breakdown, those fleeting and precious hours devoted purely to socializing importantly remind us we are sane.  We can pretend we are on board the non-stop party bus like every other normal student at every other normal university.

Sure this is Cambridge we’re talking about, so it inevitably has to be different, but it’s by no means inevitable that ‘different’ should mean ‘crap’.

It’s the standard thing to get so drunk off Sainsbury’s basics vodka beforehand that you’re so drunk you can’t actually remember the whole experience. Are clubs so bad that we have to numb the pain by getting absolutely hooned at the earliest possible chance?

It would seem so.  The words: “Oh I had a great night, I got so drunk” are uttered all too often as if the two feats go hand-in-hand, which says something about the standard of night we expect.

Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I just don’t ‘get it’? After all, you could say that the very core of Cambridge nightlife is the ‘beloved cheese’ and to contemplate anything other than that would be tantamount to blasphemy. But having said that, there’s good cheese and there’s bad cheese, and I’m sorry, but drunkenly jigging away to ‘Hakuna Matata’ on repeat strays well into bad cheese.

I have been to Cindies only once. I queued up for an hour and a half and paid a collective £11.50 for the privilege of staying there for about ten minutes. Just enough time to walk in, attempt to order a drink, retch, and walk out again. All the while, I had to contend with a girl repeatedly threatening to urinate on me. Whether she thought it was funny, erotic, or was simply marking her territory I will never know.

James Evans on a night out with the lads…

The truth is, I think the best nights out I ever had were when I was sixteen and borrowed my older brother’s ID just praying that the bouncer didn’t look at it for too long. The wait to get in before the club was the thrill. After that, you didn’t really care what was behind those doors. I blindly went along and enjoyed the ride because everyone else was.

Now we’re older, but nothing has changed. We still go out, we still get drunk, we still gloat about how bad our hangovers are in the morning and laugh at all the stupid drunken antics the night before. I don’t see the point.

If anyone wants to prove me wrong and take me for a great night out in Cambridge, you’ll find me in the corner of Life downing vodka shots and contemplating trying them in my eye.