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Stag Dos In Your 30s

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Stag Dos In Your 30s

The Andy Bush Column: How To Survive A Stag Do

I write this as a broken man.

My shaky bandaged hand frantically scribbling with pen and quill on crumpled parchment. The ghoulish silhouette of my hunched visage cast against the wall of the room by flickering candlelight, my clothes ripped and dishevelled. My friend if you were to walk in upon me in this state right now you’d think I had succumbed to madness, like the final desperate messages of a magician who’d opened a portal he could not shut. But I am not a victim of dark magic nor insanity. No no, the cause of my malaise is this — I have been on a ‘Stag Do’.

I’ve just come back from a three day Stag Weekend in Exeter to celebrate the impending marriage of one of my best friends and I’ve never ached so much in my life. There were ten of us, all the same age and all unleashed for a hotly anticipated 72 hours away from the pressures of wives, partners, kids and work. The secluded cottage we’d hired was amazing, if Ollie Reed had made preparations to try and survive a nuclear apocalypse, his bunker would have looked like this. We had cigars, cheese, and whiskies, with optics and a fridge that was like a ‘Boozy’ Hal from 2001, humming with ciders, lagers and menacing intent.

What followed was the drinking equivalent of that game show Wipe Out, where over the course of the weekend my friends and I tried our best to stay upright whilst being metaphorically hosed down with powerful jets of lager. Anyone reading this who’s been on a modern stag knows the drill — we did a pub crawl, went clay pigeon shooting and dressed the stag up as a complete idiot. We even had high drama when my mate Tom screamed like a girl and dived into a fast flowing river to save his ‘cider thermos’ which had fallen overboard during a kayaking expedition.

The car trip back up the M5 on Sunday was like a scene from a Vietnam War movie where a group of bloodied injured soldiers are sprawled out in the back of an American chopper as they’re ferried to safety from the combat zone. Unrecognisable from the ‘party boys’ of the previous few days, no one spoke on the way home. The scotch egg I bought from Leigh Delamere Services was treated like a hand grenade when I pulled it out of its packaging. I’ve never seen such a broken group of men. It begs the question — what has happened to us?

It only seemed like yesterday that we went on our legendary lads holiday to Majorca in the early 90s. Everyone has a memory of a time of youthful invincibility, a halcyon age where you could just keep on going and going. Set to a soundtrack of Blur, Pulp, Gene, and The Happy Mondays we drunk and danced our way through a fortnight, shrugging off fatigue and laughing in the face of hangovers. But as our twenties disappeared into the distance something happened — our powers began to inexplicably diminish as our hairlines receded and waist lines expanded (a bit like Wayne Rooney).

Despite the seven million years of evolutionary trial and error that has forged the genetic makeup of the modern man we see today, there are still some critical design flaws that have yet to be ironed out. Most of these kick in when us fellas get past the age of thirty five. Firstly for some reason our noses, earlobes and ball sacks continue to grow well into old age. They literally don’t stop. That’s why lots of the old fellas you see knocking about in town look like semi-melted plastic Troll toys.

Secondly — and most crucially, our ability to handle alcohol diminishes at an alarming rate as you careen towards forty. Its frustrating because surely if you’ve been practicing drinking for that long you should only get better at it. Like snooker. When I think back to when I was a kid, all the warning signs were there but I never made the connection. When my Dad and uncle used to go out for a few beers, my brother and I would regularly hear one of them ‘talking to God on the porcelain telephone’ during the night. In the morning it would be explained to us that they’d had a ‘bad pint’ and subsequently I spent years thinking that drinking Real Ale was like playing Russian Roulette.

In my opinion, the only way to fight back is to get on the meds. I now turn up at drinking weekends carrying more balms, bandages and disolvable tablets than an army field medic. If Mother Nature has dealt the over-thirty male a genetic bum hand — then its time to even out the odds in your favour; have strategic pints of water, sneak a paracetamol before bed and always pray at the altar of the Mayan God of drinking, ‘Alka Seltzer’, when you wake up. This is no guarantee of success: I’m sure despite all of this you’ll end up sweaty and scared on public transport some time soon. But have faith my brothers, in the not too distant future, along with hover cars, laser pistols and automated goalkeepers scientists will invent implants that will finally eradicate hangovers forever, and when this happens homo sapiens shall be the true masters of the galaxy.


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