It is hard to remember it sometimes, on a grim Tuesday evening in the depths of winter, when you’re first added to that WhatsApp group – all those unsaved +44 numbers! All those uni mates you’ve heard of but never met! All those damn GIFs! – and get told you’re either doing Latvia or Love International Festival, so keep those weekends free. It’s hard to remember it, too, when you’re Monzoing £200 into the ether to deposit an Airbnb and the excuses start rolling in (“sorry lads, the missus is due that weekend. have fun without me”), and someone asks, “Should we do fancy dress?” only to be met with silence. The partybus hire, the insipid “I dunno… paintball?” suggestion from someone’s dull brother, the day when you all have to send scans of your passports in and everyone takes the piss out of your middle name. All of the months, weeks, and days leading up – it is hard to remember it. But, but, but but but: stag dos are mint.
I’ve been on every configuration of stag do. There was the back-home-mates stag where we ambled around Amsterdam cluelessly ahead of the Netherlands winning Eurovision, with 20% of the group dropping out on the day and the best man texting me the Tuesday before we travelled asking, “Oh, by the way – do I need to plan anything for this?” There was the mansion in Durham in the height of summer, where we all got drunk for hours and then went down to what appeared to be basically a sex dungeon to play pool and yell karaoke, and the groom had such a good time he had an anxiety attack right at the end and took himself home three hours before anyone woke up with the simple text, “thank you for the best weekend of my life”. There was the fun-and-games stag in my early twenties where my main memory is when the groom – in a chicken outfit with a captain’s hat on, worn down by days of endless banter and you-can’t-marry-your-wife-unless-you-do-it! challenges – finally snapped and said, “RIGHT: I’M NOT HAVING FUN!”, and we all had to sit downstairs with the football on a low volume while he was gently talked out of the bathroom. And another where we all got turned away from a club because there were 20 of us so we all just stood around in t-shirts not really knowing what to do.
There are recurring themes to these – meeting a man with an inexplicable nickname (“Why’s he called ‘The Colonel?’” “Because he looks like a giraffe” “What?”); being offered mortgage advice from someone with one eye open while you both bob around at chest-height in a swimming pool; someone arrives early or leaves late and you never see them again in your life and it’s like they never existed in the first place – but what always happens is this. At some point during the second night, my arms stretched out around five or six men I’ve barely ever met before handshakes at the train station 16 hours ago, I yell, “I LOVE YOU BOYS!” up at the moon and everyone cheers and says it back.
I don’t mind wellness. Listen, we’re all at the age where we have to stretch and take supplements for gut health and want mushroom drops instead of cocaine. In recent years, there has been a movement for the wholesome, holistic stag – 10K runs and a cold plunge and a talk-about-your-emotions circle held around a woodland fire – and that’s nice, sure. But I think the classic stag, a slightly mucky, slightly debauched, slightly obvious blow-the-cobwebs-away boozefest has a cherished place in our culture that is in danger of going extinct.
For me, a stag has two primary functions: to give the groom a weekend-in-his-honour to remember, a send-off for a deserved soldier; and, crucially, to help a slightly disparate group of friends, assembled over a lifetime, meet and get to know each other so they actually talk to each other at the wedding. Which is a better way for me to get to know a guy you went to sixth form with – a cold plunge with a kombucha, or wearing novelty sunglasses at 2am, about to butcher the Kanye verse from American Boy, more cans of beer in my body than most zoo animals could handle? I already know the answer.
