I’m sure by now you’ve heard all about how Carnage UK is going up and down our country, taking our otherwise well-behaved, cerebral university students and turning them into a feral mass of cheap drink-swigging, Policemen’s hat-stealing, suicide-committing, poppy-pissing monsters. Just in case you don’t know, the basic premise is this: you buy a t-shirt for £10, which gets you free entry into a bunch of pubs and nightclubs, most of which have cheap drink deals. The Sun is OUTRAGED.
The t-shirt has a list of tasks you’re meant to tick off over the course of the night.
I don’t mean to split hairs, but, in terms of innuendo, isn’t a “NAUGHTY NURSE CHECK UP” and a “DOCTOR/NURSE CONSULTATION” more or less the same thing?
Last Thursday, I decided to go along on a Carnage pub crawl in Oxford to see what all the fuss is about. I should probably warn you that things get pretty heavy, pretty fast. So if you’re sensitive or boring, it’s probably best you don’t scroll down to read the rest of this.
The evening had a fancy dress theme of “doctors and nurses”. Most of the girls seemed to have interpreted that as “fishnets and hot pants”. I’m not sure where nurses wear that. It’s definitely not in London though. The last time I was in hospital, the nurses were wearing Crocs and bandanas with SpongeBob on them.
This was the first guy I met. I asked him if he’d been able to tick off any of the things from the t-shirt task list and he told me that he’d already snogged TWO girls. When I asked him what was the most INSANE thing he’d seen all night, he told me that a friend of his had drawn a penis on his shirt in marker, and the police had made him scribble it out. NUTS!!
See that guy in the background leaning out of the kebab van? He’s yelling at these two for not paying for their kebab. BONKERS!!!
I found this guy asleep in the doorway of an LK Bennett with people taking pictures of him on their camera phones. Unfortunately he woke up before I could get one. I asked him if he was having a good night and he told me “I can’t find my friends. I think I was sick.” MENTAL!!
There were free buses taking people from venue to venue. With it being a Carnage UK event, any kind of formal queuing rules went straight out of the window. WILD!!
These girls were walking between venues in the rain without coats OR umbrellas! WHAT WOULD THEIR MOTHERS THINK!??!?
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring (read: don’t own) a student ID, so I wasn’t allowed into the final venue. I did loiter outside for a while taking pictures of people in the smoking area though. If those guys on the right are anything to go by, I’d imagine it was pretty epic.
So with that, I went back home to sleep. But not before I saw one last bit of bedlam. This guy was getting into a cab, BUT HE WASN’T WEARING A SHIRT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
JAMIE TAETE
