Things guaranteed to provoke stomach-knotting fury in the British include rail-replacement buses, telephone automatons chanting, “Your call is important to us . . .” and settling down for a quiet train journey or flight only for the tranquillity to be shattered by a group of caterwauling stags or hens armed with Jägerbombs and flashing sex toys.
Nothing unites us more than hatred of the stag do, or — in the more descriptive French phrase — l’enterrement de vie de garçon (“the burial of a boy’s life”). In olden days, we moan, people were happy with a couple of pints in their local. Today the expense is so crippling, it could almost be thought responsible for the Generation Rent phenomenon. (The average stag do costs almost £160 per person, and during one’s peak wedding years one can expect invitations to half a dozen annually.)
We gripe about the increasingly exotic locations — Cancun and Las Vegas are the destinations du jour, according to the market analyst Mintel — which oblige us no longer to dedicate a Saturday but an entire week of precious holiday entitlement to humouring an old schoolfriend in his desire to drive JCBs by day and watch lesbian shows by night.
Indeed, such is our national hostility to the stag do that there is a dark comedy on BBC2 at the moment, Stag, that features a group of obnoxious, fun-seeking lads encountering Deliverance-style horrors in Scotland.
The British aren’t the only ones to like stag dos about as much as norovirus. From Vilnius to Tossa de Mar, mayors have issued pointless pleas to those contributing to the £500m industry to stop urinating on their war memorials and perhaps visit their art galleries instead.
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Last weekend all our prejudices were confirmed when a Ryanair flight from Luton to Bratislava — purveyor of the cheapest stag weekends in Europe — was diverted to Berlin after a drunken punch-up between two stags. The men also reportedly reacted with fury when the cabin crew refused to serve them more alcohol. Six of them were arrested on landing.
Until cut-price booze and budget airlines introduced the concept to the masses, stag parties were generally upper-class affairs. In the 5th century BC, Spartans marked their friends’ last nights as single men with toasts; Henry “Six Stags” VIII is thought to have popularised such events among the English nobility.
Four years ago, in his role as best man to his banker friend Alex Tulloch, Ben Goldsmith — brother of Zac — had the groom “arrested” in Los Angeles as part of a stag-do prank. Tulloch and two friends were picked up by genuine police officers, who were off duty but in uniform, taken to a police station that was actually a TV set, held in a cell alongside other “criminals” — actors handpicked by Goldsmith to be “as scary as possible” — and subjected to hours of questioning.
One acquaintance of mine recently attended a stag weekend in Hong Kong. One of the stags, a banker, annoyed at having to fly economy to pacify less pecunious stags, became so drunk on the inbound flight that he needed to vomit. The lavatories were all occupied, so he ran down the plane to spew all over the first-class toilet. Emerging from this pit, he bumped straight into Princess Anne, waiting patiently for the vacant sign.
As well as provoking a determined effort to develop liver failure, laddish one-upmanship means stags — jaded with paintballing and rifle shooting — find themselves in increasingly terrifying situations. My husband once found himself in a sun-baked field near Barcelona, running frantically from an underfed and furious bull. The best man had signed them up to play toreadors. The farmer who’d taken their euros laughed himself silly at these home counties boys cowering behind haystacks while the beast pawed the ground menacingly.
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Supposed to represent a final fling, a stag or hen do turns out to be the final nail in the coffin for some previously beautiful relationships. After another stag do my husband attended, the bride-to-be threatened to call the wedding off, having learnt that the party had ended up at an Ibizan strip club. I was shocked she was shocked; after all, virtually every week some statistic appears such as the recent one from the stag and hen party company Last Night of Freedom that reveals a quarter of men are unfaithful during a stag do, the philosophy being: “What happens in Tossa . . .”
Perhaps it’s hardly surprising that invitations to such events are met with eye-rolls and cries of: “Why can’t we just go for a quiet meal and be home by 10?” My hen night, nine years ago, fulfilled this brief: five girlfriends met at 7.30pm at a private members’ club and consumed just one bottle of champagne. Phalluses weren’t even mentioned, let alone worn as headgear, and we were all in bed by Newsnight.
The reason it was so tasteful was that I was seven months pregnant at the time and had a two-year-old at home, so had little desire to down jugs of Slow Comfortable Screw. Yet rather than feeling smug at the decorum, I have an L-plate-sized hole in my heart at missing out on the bacchanalia.
Because, despite the whining at the time, we all adore reminiscing about the time the hen or stag was abandoned naked up a mountainside. For better or worse, it is a rite of passage. Should I marry again (not expected to happen), we’re talking cow-tipping in Krakow followed by a Dreamboys show. Ryanair, brace yourself.