The UCD Bar has closed!

or

Students, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves!

 
Apparently the UCD Bar has closed.  I say apparently because although it was noticeably not open two weeks ago at 11am (ish) when I walked past it and even though it's been reported in the news, I still can't get my head around it.

Hanging out in the Science block

What is college without the dark, dingy, sticky-floored, graffiti-covered home-from-home that was the UCD Bar.  Students in my day didn't have much spare cash.  Then, as now, part-time jobs were like gold dust, but that never stopped anyone hanging out in the bar and there were always enough foolish cluchies there to spend their grant or rent money and keep the coffers going.

Where we used to play football (& pose!)

The Sports Bar (currently also closed) opened when I was in college but it was for a different breed.  People who went there had new-ish, clean-ish closes, drank Heineken, and probably went to private schools (and play sports possibly, I didn't mix with that type of person in college).  Compare this to the torn, stone-washed jeans, ragged t-shirts and docs that was the uniform de rigeur for the majority of the student population in those days.  We drank (if we could scrounge the cash, often saved by walking the 4+ miles to college and saving the £1 bus fair - yes my friends, this was back in the days of the punt!) Guinnes and Black, a Snakebite, or the ever-popular, why I have no idea, hot port.

Typical student attire, 90s-style

he bar was a place you could relax, play pool or meet new people, "oh you do Law!  What's that all about then?".  Law was about as exotic as it got in the UCD bar.  The newly formed Actuary class never seemed to find their way there.  On Fridays, at 1pm there was a film.  Not for us a specially built cinema.  There was a projector and a large screen on the wall.  They always seemed to show either Grease or The Blues Brothers and we'd all dance on the tables and shout out the dialogue, word-perfect the lot of us.  Most of us weren't even drunk!

The Trap has also disappeared from UCD.  I found it alright, in the basement of the Arts block but the pool tables have gone, the paint on the walls in crumbling and the space itself is filled with cleaning materials.  Where are students supposed to relax, wind-down and learn about life?  The only things that seem to remain are the Blob and the lake.  Even the grass where we used to kick around a football on lazy warm days has been built over.

Do they still have leg wrestling in college?

There's also a distinct lack of graffiti around campus.  UCD has lost its soul.  The graffiti brightened up the place and while some of it was dull and predictable, there was a lot of poetry, wit a philosophy sprinkled in.

I discussed the bar closing in work and one colleague postulated the theory that the Celtic Tiger Cubs won't stand for dirt and dinge and sticky floors.  A quick look at a discussion forum on Boards seems to confirm this.  They've been too pampered and spoiled and the UCD bar isn't good enough for them.  They don't want their designer gear in such a dump.


I, however, have my own theory.  One of the reasons that the UCD bar always had such a high turnover was because of its toilet paper.  In the early 1990s, the toilet paper in UCD was that waxed, grease-proof stuff that, to put it as politely as is possible, basically smeared, but failed utterly in the wiping department.  The only place to go for a bit of bum comfort was the Bar and Sports Centre.  In those days of grunge and Nirvana, the Sports Centre wasn't an option for most students who would probably not made it past its doors, so the UCD Bar it was.  And while you were there, sure you'd always find someone to talk to or catch up with, and if you really lucky you might have the makings of a cup of tea, or may even alcohol buried deep in your tattered jeans pocket.  That's what made the UCD Bar, once with the highest beer turn-over in the country,  the instiution we thought would never end, but has somehow, inexplicably done so in 2012.  A sad day for the students of Ireland.

Science-heads

Chemistry lecture in Theatre C

* Disclaimer - None of these pictures are actually of the UCD bar.  Back in the day, if you wanted to take a picture, you needed a dedicated camera and you had to buy film for it and pay for the film to be developed.  Hence the lack of photographs I have from my student days.  While I'd love to claim we drank every day in the science block, all these photos are from Science Day - an annual fundraising day where we bunked off lectures to raise money for Cancer research.  I think we raised over £30,000 most years I was there.  We did, however, smoke in the science block - the smoking ban was not to come in for over a decade,  Cigarette burns complemented the colourful graffiti on the benches, tables, chairs, walls,.....