Bouncers are ruining Park End

Having spent Tuesday night holed up in the library trawling through humiliating Facebook photos from 2009, come Wednesday we are looking forward to Oxford’s plethora of irresistible clubbing options.

Then someone mentions Park End.

Those that suffer acutely from FOMO now realise they’re doomed.

Finding unfortunate photos showing striking resemblance to BoJo during the build-up to Parkers

Everyone thinks Park End is shit, unless they’re on a sports team or drink VKs unironically, but being creatures of little social sustenance we embrace the queues with valour and exuberance.

Your night will now take one of two directions: either you’ll be trampled on the Cheesefloor and bail before midnight, leaving your drunker friends happily screeching along to ‘Let it Go’ or you’ll be so drunk  that you begin to have cravings for round two of McCoy’s kebabs.

Serving up styrofoam boxes of regret

The worst part, however, is not the shit drinks, the grim crowd or the abomination of a smoking area but the bouncers.

It’s standard practice for them to bark at students to ‘get off the pavement’, before wrenching them by the collar to the back of the queue. The queue itself is so long that no matter how hard you pre-drank, the cold, weariness and dicky bouncers have rendered you as sober as you would have been indulging in some Homeric verses in the Library.

These gestures of aggression have been experienced by most students, but many more have endured far worse.

Still more fun than park End

Some people rate the ‘Cheese Floor’ more than others

Having only experienced 4 weeks of Oxford’s glorious nightlife, I’m aware that not all bouncers are bad. At Bridge last Thursday, a friend who had been crying following a humiliating fall on the treacherous cobbles, was comforted by a compassionate bouncer who, jumping to conclusions, volunteered to “take the asshole to the back of the queue”.

In the line for Camera, a boy who slapped a girl’s bottom got taken aside by a bouncer to be subjected to a rather stern discourse on ‘How To Treat A Woman’.

Bouncers don’t always have to be the power-crazed Park End heavies, and encounters with these friendly faces of authority have dramatically improved students’ experience of a club and their overall night out.

Things could be changed if people were brave enough to resist the siren call of the Cheese Floor in favour of a better, calmer and warmer night in the local comforts of Warehouse, Camera or Carbon. If the queues shortened and the profits reduced, it might hit home that Park End need to change their treatment of students who are really there just to mingle sweat whilst being serenaded with S Club 7’s euphonious melodies.