Every get-ready video ends when the person leaves the house, which is precisely where the actually difficult part starts. This is the unglamorous half, written down because I have had enough messages from people who had a bad night for reasons that were entirely preventable.
The phone problem
Your phone is your money, your map, your way of finding people and your way of getting home, and it will be at eleven per cent by midnight because you have been using it as a camera all evening. Everything else in this post follows from that single fact.
So: leave the house at a hundred, carry a small battery pack, and put it on low power mode before you think you need to rather than after. The version of you at 1am with four per cent left makes worse decisions than the version at 9pm, and the whole aim is to not hand anything important to that person.
Have a way home that does not need a phone at all. Cash in a pocket, or a route you know, or a friend's address you have actually memorised. It is a small amount of paranoia and it has got me home twice.
People, and the leaving rule
Leave with the people you arrived with. That is the one rule I do not bend and it is the one that matters more than every other thing here combined. Groups split at the end of a night when everyone is tired and nobody is thinking, and that is exactly when a plan agreed at nine o'clock in a bright kitchen becomes useful.
Agree the plan before you go out, while everyone is sober and can be bothered. Where you are going, roughly when you are leaving, and what happens if the group splits. It takes ninety seconds and it means nobody is negotiating anything at 2am.
Tell one person not on the night out where you are going. Not as a dramatic gesture, just as a matter of course. Location sharing with a friend for the evening costs nothing and is the single most useful thing your phone does after being a torch.
The bag, and what actually needs to be in it
Small, across the body, and closed. Not because anyone is necessarily going to take anything, but because an open bag on your shoulder is one dance away from being on the floor with everything out of it, and looking for a bank card under a table in the dark is a poor use of an evening.
In it: card, some cash, phone, battery pack, key, lip liner, a hair clip. That is the whole list. Everything you are considering adding will be a nuisance for four hours in exchange for possibly being useful once.
Not in it: anything you would be genuinely upset to lose. I do not wear jewellery out that means anything, for exactly the reason you would expect, and I have never regretted that decision.
Knowing when the night is over
There is a moment, usually somewhere around the point where you are considering going on somewhere else, where the night has actually finished and everyone is just extending it out of momentum. Learning to notice that moment is the difference between a good night and a night with a bad hour bolted onto the end.
Nothing good has ever happened to me in the fourth venue. Genuinely nothing. The good part was the second one, and the third was fine, and the fourth exists purely because nobody wanted to be the one to say it.
Be the one to say it. Everybody is relieved, and the chips on the way home are, in my sincere opinion, the actual best part of the entire evening and the thing I would defend hardest out of everything on this page.
Battery pack, a way home that does not need a phone, leave with who you came with, tell somebody where you are, small closed bag, nothing you would miss, and go home one venue earlier than the group wants to. None of it has ever cost me a good night.
Everything else, in one place ✦
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