We transformed our bedrooms into Lancs campus bars, and went on a ‘house crawl’

With Covid robbing us of basically all of the fun parts of university life, my housemates and I were feeling hard done by as we sulked together the first Thursday evening of term. ‘It just isn’t the same!’ we lamented, nursing Wednesday night hangovers without the benefit of regretful Sugar debriefs to help us through waves of nausea.

The 10 pm curfew made us feel 17 Again, but we were about as far from the partying lifestyle of Zac Efron as Pope Francis. Dripping with Gen Z privilege, we exclaimed:

‘I just want to taste another cocktail from Grizedale at 10:01 pm’, ‘I would kill for a proper night out’ ‘Feels like we will never have a pub night again.’

It was then that I leapt from my seat and announced vehemently that the campus bar crawl we had always promised we would do (but never got around to) was still going to happen. Of course, I was met with hungover eye-rolls and tuts of non-enthusiasm, but if Covid was going to rob me of everything I expected from uni, it was going to have to try harder to quell my ambition to make this year the best it could be.  So, I ushered my housemates to bed, telling them to gather in the living room the following Friday feeling refreshed and ready for, quite possibly, the best pub-crawl Lancaster has to offer.

When Friday rolled around, I could tell they were intrigued as I exclaimed excitedly that we all had to transform our bedrooms into different campus bars. Although most were not necessarily eager to put the effort in at first, peer pressure won them over, and we spent the afternoon decking out our rooms the best we could. As the sun began to set on Lancaster, the brand new Grizedale, Pendle, Lonsdale, Grad and Fylde bars started to come alive like Frankenstein’s monster.

The Mill

The first step was Fylde. The big bottom floor bedroom seemed like a logical place to put the dining table and Beer pong seemed like the only bar ‘sport’ we could accommodate, but we took it seriously. Ping pong balls shot across the room violently in two-person competitions, the rest of us watching entranced like drunken Miis at a Wii sport tennis match. With compilations of football fails playing on a loop on a laptop in the corner, we could easily have been downing manly pints at Fylde bar, pretending that any of us have any idea about sport. The LED strip lights which seem to adorn the skirting board of every single 20-year-old male’s bedroom, glowed and fluctuated between neon hues, almost tricking us that we hadn’t just walked the two steps from our own kitchen to get here. Plus, the excessive amount of pints we downed probably helped us with that too.

Pendle Rooms

Secondly, we climbed the stairs of our creaky house and stumbled into Pendle Bar. Known for its music scene, it only made sense that the guy with the instruments took the wheel. We were used to hearing classical melodies travelling down the corridors during the afternoon, but this time his room was throbbing with the volume of his speaker. We struggled to chat to each other in Pendle, having to shout over our drinks in order to continue conversations, but it completely added to the feeling of a bar. Nostalgic, we left and travelled down the corridor to my room, Grad bar.

Grad Bar

I am ashamed to admit that none of us had actually been to Grad bar, so we were going in blind with this one. But, we presumed post-grad students develop a sort of ‘je ne sais quoi’ which undergrads lack. Therefore it seemed like a natural progression for our drunken selves to don my longline coats and drink cheap red wine from Aldi (because that’s what we presume ‘real’ adults do.) We swayed to music from the mid-90s to celebrate the birth years of the people we were mimicking, before realising that being born in the late 90s still means we are legitimate adults and we need to just grow up.

The Red Lion

After triggering a quarter-life crisis, we wandered upstairs to Lonsdale, but it was closed. As per.

Grizedale Bar

So, we finished our pub crawl at Grizedale. Luckily one of our housemates works at the ‘real’ bar, so we were getting the authentic experience. He set up his desk like a cocktail bar (which I am sure is the main reason for a desk at uni) and served us fresh mojitos and porn-star martinis. Once again, LED strip lights lit up the room like a year 6 disco, but through my hazy drunken vision, I could easily convince myself it was a messy Friday night on campus.

I guess the most authentic part of it all is that I basically blacked out after Grizedale, so I had to piece the whole night back together in the morning after downing about a litre of water. But in the sober light of day, I can confirm that you can successfully taunt the bad vibes of Covid with a ‘night-out night-in.’ And I thoroughly suggest you give it a go.

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