Monopoly Mondays are tragic and amazing

Every Monday there’s only one place anyone wants to go: Monkeys. Here, you can get nicely pissed, socialise, and tear up the little bit of a dancefloor they have, if that’s what you’re into. It’s great.

For some reason, people love it – even when you’re forced to freeze your tits off outside because of the lack of space indoors. Medicine, however, decided to try and rival this night, and what did they offer us? Monopoly Mondays.

The premise of the night is simple, even if the name is so confusing it’s left all my friends asking: “Do I have to play Monopoly? Cos I hate Monopoly”.

I’ll tell you now, there’s no Monopoly. A night in playing board games would be infinitely less tragic than this. No, what really happens is you walk into Medicine, pay £2, and get given a raffle ticket. At half one in the morning, a raffle is drawn, and someone at the venue wins £200.

You’d think this would be a winner of a night. You’d think students would gather from far and wide to be in with the chance of receiving what equates to half a month’s rent in a damp, mouldy house for most people. But that’s not the case.

Instead, it’s completely and utterly dead. The whole night just looks like a really unpopular thirteen year old’s birthday disco. You remember the one – that kid in Year Eight nobody really liked hired out a village hall anticipating the whole year group, and only ten people showed? That’s Monopoly Monday.

This is about as busy as it gets

And yet, somehow, I find myself going almost every week. Monday night has become the night when my boyfriend will come at visit, purely because he wants to go and try to win £200.

So, we get all our mates together, and get royally smashed.

The limbo contest is always a highlight

The tactic is simple: have the standard pre-drinks before you go out (I don’t even need to tell you that). Then pre-drink MORE downstairs at Stumble Inn, where it may be empty, but it’s OK to be empty: it just looks like a pub in the middle of the day, and that’s acceptable. There’s no sad DJ playing to an empty space in Stumble Inn, just a bar with no queues.

Once you’ve had a bunch of drinks in Stumble, chatted to just about everyone in the smoking area, and made six new BFFs, you hit the dancefloor. By now, you can guarantee there will be a group of about ten people giving it their all because they have absolutely no shame.

You’re smashed, so you just boogie away like nobody’s watching, with your new smoking-area mates that you’re going to regret giving your number to in the morning. If you can, steal as much alcohol from these new people as you can.

You’ve got to give them credit for being self-aware

Soon after that the night always takes an even more embarrassing turn. Usually around midnight or so, when people are starting to come in for the highly anticipated raffle results, the DJ will drop what he clearly thinks are “club bangers” but are actually the most cringe-inducing chart toppers from your childhood, completing the school disco vibe. Every week I spend about twenty minutes terrified someone is going to whip out a knee slide.

I’ve been a few times now, and every time it goes down the same. It starts off safe – he slips in the Macarena. Alright, we’ll do it for nostalgia’s sake. Then comes the Cha Cha Slide. Slightly more cringey, but it doesn’t last too long. Then it gets bad. Everyone is told to form a line, and he starts playing the conga. And people do it. They conga around the bar in Medicine. I will be the first to hold my hand up and say – yeah, I joined in. I was smashed. But when we regrouped on the dancefloor and everyone formed a circle and he started playing the Hokey Cokey, I drew the line and peaced on out.

The macarena in action

So why do I keep on going? What I’ve described so far sounds like something someone would pay you to endure, not something you voluntarily go to. As mentioned before – the money’s a great motive and the fact there’s nobody there just makes winning more likely. But is it worth it? Hell yes! Even after everyone in the group loses, you walk home feeling great.

The fact it’s so empty means we actually get the chance to talk. We can laugh at the whole tragic event, and revel in it together. We can go out to the smoking area and meet people we would never normally talk to, without losing each other and without getting pissed off at some rowdy bloke shoving you in the queue for the bar.

There’s no wait on drinks or queues for the toilets, the drunk conversations are the greatest, and there will always be recognisable songs playing. In a way, I kind of hope Monopoly Mondays doesn’t become a big event, because it would ruin the intimacy. They just really need to send the DJ back to Cherrywood Juniors.