Getting Thrown Out Of... No.4 The Purple Turtle
Woody Allen once said that you should try everything once except for incest and folkdancing. However, wandering around the Purple Turtle the other day, I was struck by the thought that there were people out there whose parents had not only ignored this advice, but had somehow mastered the difficult trick of doing both evils at the same time. To get thrown out of here, it seemed, I would have to do something really outrageous. Before I could get thrown out, however, I had to try and get in. And this, I can assure you, is certainly not all that easy. The queuing system seems to have been specially designed for the Union by some of the leading theorists of experimental queue control at the Soviet School of Queue Management.
Before my first visit I had been warned that the Turtle is much bigger than it first appears. This, I'm sure, is very true. But, whilst its size may be deceptive, its crapness certainly isn't. You have to hand it to the designers - once you enter the very first room, you might be forgiven for thinking that the they had achieved the absolute zenith of crapness and bad taste. However, so consumate was their skill, that the Purple Turtle actually manages to get more crap, more dingy, more tasteless, and more tacky with every successive room you enter. The result by the time you get to the end looks like the sort of thing Changing Rooms' Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen might produce if he were tripping it big-up stylee on acid and his colour consultants were a bunch of blind orang-utans.
Even blind orang-utans would, however, have a more appropriate sense of what to wear when going to a club than some of the people who turn up to the Turtle in full evening dress. I used to wonder why people kept on returning to the Turtle, when just the one visit seemed enough to put most people off. However, on reflection, it is patently obvious why women insist on going to the Purple Turtle. For here, more than anywhere else in Oxford, a girl must feel like a delicate rosebud - surrounded, as she is, by lots of fancy-looking pricks.
There is something rather dubious about the Turtle in the Purple Turtle logo. Apart from the fact that it is quite clearly smoking a joint, it does look rather suspiciously like a tortoise. Without getting all David Attenborough on your asses, a turtle, when it is on dry land, is technically known as a tortoise. It is perhaps not all that surprising that no one has noticed this before. When it comes to the Oxford Union it is very hard, I'll admit, to tell one slow-moving, cold-blooded, slimy reptile from another. But, for reasons of zoological integrity, I decided to point out this scientific anomaly to one of the bouncers. The bouncer, needless to say, did not agree with my neo-relativistic approach to philogeny, being, as he was, a phylogenetic minimalist of the old school. So, to illustrate my point, I decided to take one of the 'turtles' that had been very loosely attached to the wall and make my point slightly clearer. No sooner had I done this when I was greeted by an onslaught of shouts to the effect of 'Oi! You can't take that Turtle off the wall!' 'That's my point,' I protested, 'it's not a turtle, it's a tortoise.' 'Who cares what it is?' shouted one of the numerous bouncers who had now surrounded me. 'Well the tortoise certainly does.' I replied. 'It's bad enough that it's been painted purple and hung upside down on the wall of a dingy bar, but the least you could do is classify it correctly.' My protests, however, fell on deaf ears. 'The exit is over there,' said one of the bouncers, unwittingly highlighting the Purple Turtle's best feature. So, whilst it seems perfectly acceptable for people in the Purple Turtle to dance like pregnant giraffes whilst dressed like an extra from Brideshead Revisited, I was thrown out for merely suggesting that their turtle might conceivably, on reflection, be a tortoise. The Oxford Union - 'one of the last bastions of freedom of speech in the Western World'? Hmm, not for the first time the Oxford Union authorities are guilty not just of hypocrisy, but also of turtle ignorance.
18th May 2000