Keeping up with Kyle: Thank God Paddy’s Day is over

Welcome to another instalment of our weekly column Keeping Up With Kyle, where Kyle, the most miserable of all Tab writers, delivers to you weekly short rants about the state of our campus and its surroundings.

Was it really worth all that money and all that Guinness?

Why don’t your friends  just let you stay in on St Patrick’s in Liverpool? It’s another one of those nightmare, overrated nights akin to Halloween and New Year’s Eve.

Please get out my personal space

Does anyone really have a good night out? You make these elaborate plans with your friends: this time it’ll be different, this time it’s going to be the best St Patrick’s Day ever (because the last three you’ve celebrated have been a total flop).

All the clubs hike up their entries – God damn Bongo’s Bingo was £17.50 entry all for the pleasure of seeing special guests B*witched from that one song they had like eighteen years ago. C’est la vie, I’m afraid.

Everybody is out seeking the perfect night, but there’s no such thing when every society, every sports team and every middle-aged scouser has had the same idea of ‘well if we don’t get into Level maybe we’ll head down to Mathew Street’.

Level is hellish at the best of times, never mind on such infamous a night as St Patrick’s.

How many more can you fit in?

All the Irish pubs and bars are heaving with heavily intoxicated cretins, crowned with novelty hats, who shatter glasses and scream at passers by. You spend twenty minutes waiting at the bar only to have some idiot knock you as you turn around, meaning you spill your drink all down yourself. You’re just resigned to standing in the corner – because there’s no seats left – with the few friends who’ve made it this far sipping what’s left of that Guinness you just had to buy because, y’know…it’s Paddy’s Day.  And, by the way, Guinness is disgusting.

But you stick at it, you tour all the pubs and bars and then head to whatever shitty club has enough room for you and your mates. You get on the shots, you keep drinking because surely if you drink more you can ignore that niggling voice in your head that says “maybe we should have just stayed in”.

This is what I’ve been waiting for

Eventually you have to throw in the towel and proceed to the best part of the night – grabbing a Maccies and hailing a cab to take you home so you can sleep off all that Sambuca.

My issue with St Patrick’s Day is that having plans and expectations of a night always ruins it. When you go out on a whim you have such a better time because you didn’t expect it. The fun of a Liverpool night out is you never know where it can take you, a notion completely ruined by the rules and expectations that everyone has for Paddy’s Day. It can never live up to what you hoped it would be.

That said, I will of course be doing it all over again next year. Sigh.