Depressingly Refreshing: Why refreshers week is shit

Second semester is upon us, and if you’re a first year like myself, this means that you will have just been cruelly subjected to a horror of uni worse than any dirty hangover, any amount of neglected laundry and any quantity of festering takeaway boxes: the dreaded refreshers fest.

Last semester, fresher’s fair was alive and buzzing with the promise that you WOULD attend all of the 30 societies you signed up for every week (extreme mountain unicycling always was your calling in life, after all), that you WOULD meet some amazing people, that you WERE NOT a lame, oblivious, naïve fresher but rather God’s gift to university.

16 weeks on and we will not fall for this bullshit second time around. Fresher’s fair was full of overly excited and annoyingly fresh faces, all eagerly chatting and signing away their souls. Fast forward to refreshers and dregs of hung-over and broke students are dragging themselves around the stalls, making off with free pizza and making an extremely swift exit. The magic has died and we are all, it feels, older, wiser, and grumpier.

Freshers week was jam-packed with events, with local clubs fighting to win our affections with offerings of wondrously cheap entry and drinks, and guest lists which went on for days and promised to be full of hot fresh meat (with the students union trying to no avail to compete with the lush offerings of B-Town’s nightlife….sorry, guys). The campus seemed to be drenched in alcohol and promises of better things to come.

So what rich offerings did we get for refreshers? Falmer bar staying open a tiny bit later, and offering up a cringe-inducing event that was more ‘school disco’ than ‘showstopper’ as well as a sickly sweet cocktail I found myself spewing up in the small hours of the morning. You can’t fool us; refreshed is the last adjective any of us are feeling right now.