The title possibly says it all: “Cloakrooms should be free to stop young women freezing to death.”
Got that? That’s somehow the only choice female Oxford students have when going out to party during the winter months: If club cloakrooms aren’t gratis, then girls won’t wear coats. And so they’ll freeze.
As I wiggled into my tights in preparation for an end-of-term night out, I was faced with the perennial clubbing question: should I take a coat?
Logic, and my mum, would say the answer was obvious. My outfit was hardly cosy, and a tipsy walk home at2am in December is an adventure best braved from within my wardrobe’s most wind-proof, water-proof and fur-lined offering.
But the question wasn’t just one of insulation – I had a financial decision to make. The cloakrooms at most Oxford clubs cost between one and two pounds: what did I want more, healthy circulation or a Jägerbomb?
A few years ago, the Daily Mail explained some pictures of scantily-clad girls heading off on a night out in Newcastle on aesthetic grounds: ‘the possibility of a coat ruining their revealing outfits was more frightening than freezing to death.’ But the Mail was wrong — Newcastle’s partygoers probably just didn’t want to pay the cloakroom charge.
Coats are especially essential on nights out, because alcohol, although it makes you feel warmer, makes you more vulnerable to hypothermia. When you drink, the blood vessels near the surface of the skin dilate. As well as taking blood away from the centre of the body and so decreasing core body temperature, the increased volume of blood flowing on the periphery of your body means that heat is lost more quickly than usual once you go out in the cold.
Indeed, coats are “especially essential on nights out,” but supposedly well-educated Oxford types won’t wear them because area club cloakroom charges are an exorbitant — wait for it! — $1.50 to $3? (That’s roughly what one to two British pounds equals.)
You’re already going to pay three, four, possibly five times that amount for drinks, yet you’d risk hypothermia to avoid that “prodigious” coat room fee?
How do such people even get accepted to Oxford?
h/t David Thompson.
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