Flying high on four hours sleep, I offer my reflections on Brasenose Ball. Dispense with the yardstick of Brasenose’s 2009 efforts—including a headliner from Calvin Harris—and discard half the sugar content of some of the ‘cocktails’, and you’re onto a solid performance for a Second Week event. Feeling slightly flustered from a make-up nightmare, we arrived in time for some obligatory Rad Cam shots. Unlike other balls, where you pick the square as a useful accessory to show off to your home friends, the Radcliffe Camera is actually right next to Brasenose, so it’s a convenient backdrop.The haunting memory of the 2016 Magdalen queue still fresh in my mind, we experienced a quick and painless entry, greeted with champagne and hog roast. Making use of the cloakroom—I’d soon be changing into trainers—we did a quick recon, using the questionable ‘map’ as a guide. Given that Brasenose is two quadrangles, how they arrived at the pictorial representation of six circles is completely beyond me. Clearly, I was transcending the earth’s limits already, just as the programme had promised I would.
Stuffing my face full of Turkish toasties, vibing to the DJ in the chapel, and trying my hand at the escape room (and failing miserably) were a couple of highlights. The alcoholic milkshakes were out in full force, always a crowd pleaser, with the well-received addition of a candyfloss machine: if your teeth hadn’t fallen out of your head already from the drinks, they were about to. The ‘disco dome’, AKA bouncy castle, was good fun if you didn’t mind flashing your bits to the heavily overcrowded jumping arena, and seemed to be a hotspot for canoodling couples, who I managed to take out with a mistimed bounce on more than one occasion.The ‘planetarium and space time continuum installation’, or cluster of large papier-mâché balls, was slightly dubious and looked like a vulnerable target for rain but luckily, none came. The rewarding 3am staple of a silent disco, however, did come, with The Jackson 5 and The Killers playing us out until five, after a great performance from Shakka (and resident BNC DJ, Gautam).
The added bonus of a smaller ball is that, if you lose your friends, you’ll always find them—either asleep in the cinema room, or gravitating towards the tray bakes down at the bar. In other evidence of how the good night was, my knee has now swollen up to resemble one of the papier-mâché planets, suggesting wild dancing and dangerous merriment. Bring on Brasenose 2019!
