The Tab Tries: A Sober LCR

So it’s a Saturday night, I am half way through a 60 day course of anti-biotics and 30 days without so much of a whiff of the pungent aroma of my best mate Jack Daniels. Anyway this night I have a group of friends coming over for a quaint gathering and a few drinks, non-alcoholic for myself as I am sticking to the doctors orders. But little did I know, I was not going to spend the night in, but was about to be taken on an adventure no man should venture on without a stiff drink in his hand… A sober night at the LCR.

Upon arriving on Campus at 10.30pm a time I would normally consider far too early for the LCR, I am suddenly hit with a wave of nausea, similar to that experienced by first time marathon runners who have just realized the gravity of the task at hand.

Suppressing such ill feelings, I soldier on ahead to the trusty NatWest cashpoint and withdraw my fiver (the smallest amount of money I have ever taken for a night out) to get my ticket.

Heading to the bar, I am greeted by my ever increasingly drunk friends with the news that the LCR is not yet open as they have not yet cleared out whatever event was going on beforehhand. It is at this point I make my second error in judgment that night and decide to pay a visit to the men’s loos to relieve my alcohol-less bladder.

Upon entry, a CSI style play through of the scene around me occurs as I spy, vomit, fecal matter and the empty wrapper of a condom decorating the cubicle and whilst I am sure that I have been in worse places, the lack of alcoholic goodness coursing through my veins numbing my mind to the atrocity that was before my eyes, made me long for the comfort and cleanliness (well within reason) of my bedroom.

However, I am a journalist and as such out of my duty of lavishing you good readers with a fine story above my own personal happiness, I once again soldiered on, dismayed but resolutely determined to see this night through.

Fast forward a little and by about 11.30pm the LCR is finally fully opened and I watch with sweet amusement as the crowd begins shuffling their way to the dance floor. My amusement is short lived as my friend grabs me by the hand and rushes me onto the still sparsely populated dance floor to dance to one of her favourite songs.

Despite the initial awkwardness of being more sober than a rock and the lack of bodies on the dance floor, I actually find myself having a surprisingly enjoyable time and  begin to relax more as the floor fills up and my dance moves feel less like a public spectacle and more like the norm. As the night properly gets going, the lack of alcohol in my system seems to matter less and less to me and it begins to feel like any other night.

There are however, a few notable exceptions to this, my awareness levels undimmed allow me to notice things that normally would be outside of the tunnel vision of my beer goggles, such as the attractiveness of the bartender and the look she gave me when at the start of the night I asked for a glass of water, the number of times my bum would get grabbed and squeezed every time I tried to move through the crowd, and how after the first few it became less flattering and more annoying as I felt more and more like a piece of meat.

Perhaps the thing that struck me most of all about my experience, was of how little importance alcohol really is to having a good time. I eventually left the LCR with my friends at around 02.00am, having had a surprisingly uneventful but nevertheless enjoyable evening. So my verdict on a Sober LCR? Not bad at all once you get pass the vomit and bum pinches.