Boating enthusiasts on the Norfolk Broads — or Ukip, as they’re known these days — have taken to the internet to express their dismay about how the peace and tranquillity of this enormous bog is being ruined by the rowdy behaviour of visitors.“Some of them may even be foreign,” no one has said specifically. But you can bet it’s what many were thinking.
Stag weekends seem to be the main cause for concern, and when I read that, my eyes started to roll with despair. Yes. No one likes to share so much as a postcode with a bunch of boorish drunks celebrating the forthcoming nuptials of a mate. But these things are a part of the fabric of society, so we just have to accept that from time to time a night out in the pub is going to be spoilt by some sick and a bit of broken furniture. ’Twas ever thus.
However, if you actually examine the complaints from Captain Farage and his mates, it looks as though they may have a point. One says he recently witnessed a stag do where all the participants got drunk and then started throwing one another into the water. So far, so normal — back in your box, Boaty McBoatface. But then he goes on to say they stripped the groom naked, in front of everyone, waxed him — that’s weird — and, after throwing him into the water too, took out their penises and urinated on him.
I’m sorry, but that’s disgusting. I thought a stag night was something that involved a group of friends. Which raises a question. What sort of friends would decide to urinate on their host? I once urinated on someone who tried to get a selfie while I was standing at a motorway service station’s urinals. But I’ve never peed on a friend and never would.
It turns out, however, that this is far from an isolated incident. Recently a plane had to make an unscheduled landing at Gatwick after someone on a stag party thought it would be hilarious to set fire to the groom. So he did. He looked at his mate, someone he’d presumably known for years, and he thought: “I think it would be for the best if he were to be married while sporting some third-degree burns.” So he set fire to his hair.
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It gets worse. Several years ago, various people on a stag party on a blazing hot day in Bournemouth decided that the bridegroom and his best man should be cooked. So they staked them out in the sun using handcuffs, stripped them naked, and covered them in flour, eggs and tomato sauce. I find that odd. Because I’ve been drunk many times, but I’ve never looked at Jimmy Carr, who’s a friend, and thought: “You know what? He’d be lovely on a bed of fresh pasta.”
I’ll be honest. I’m not really a fan of stag nights. I find the whole idea of all-male company extremely distressing. All that cigar-infused nonsense about snooker cues, speedboats, business deals and hookers that men feel compelled to talk about when left to their own devices makes me nauseous.
Things are even worse when you sprinkle a bit of forced jollity into the mix. Taking off a man’s clothes and chaining him to a set of traffic lights could possibly, if you are 20, be mildly amusing if it’s spontaneous. But feeling obliged to do it? Nah. That’s just rubbish.
That said, there was one occasion I was on a stag night and was hauled out of my dining chair to hold down the groom while other chaps shaved off his pubic hair. It seemed to me to be a terrible thing to do and I was very unamused about being forced to join in. Until they got his boxers down and we noticed the poor man had quite the smallest penis we’d ever seen. The embarrassed silence was eventually broken by someone saying: “You can’t get married with that.”
Mostly, though, the stag nights I went on in the Eighties and Nineties were reasonably calm affairs. I think I once played football with a bin bag on the Fulham Road. And I seem to recall that in an Indian restaurant someone once threw a nan into the ceiling fan. I fear it may have been me. But that’s it. No one ever got driven to London Zoo and fed to the lions or strapped to the live fire targets on Salisbury Plain.
“I blame The Hangover. For a whole generation the film was a new minimum standard
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Today, things are very different. Now, a stag night is as often as not a stag weekend. You get to the airport, drink a hundred pints, get on the plane, drink a hundred more pints, say something offensive to the stewardess, get off the plane, say something racist to the immigration officer and then spend a thousand pounds drinking more pints until it’s time to experiment with some drugs your mate’s bought. And then, when you wake up from the coma, you find Instagram is rammed full of pictures of your naked and freshly tattooed arse with a chicken sticking out of it.
Strippers are now compulsory. And give me strength on that one because what face exactly are you supposed to pull while some enormous Romanian woman pushes her pudendum into your mate’s sunburned forehead?
I blame The Hangover. It was a brilliant film. I laughed a lot at nearly all of it. Unfortunately, for a whole generation, it was more than that. It was a new minimum standard. Anything less than an angry Chinese person in the boot, some amateur dentistry and a stolen police car and you haven’t given the groom the send-off he deserves.
Hmmm. I’m not sure. I think — and I’m going to have the backing of the Norfolk Broads boating community on this one — that more than anything else in modern society, someone needs to press the stag night reset button and go back to the days when you drank a bit too much port on the night before the wedding. And then went to bed.