Gossip Boi: ‘Stag Nights’

More from the Gossip Boi archives. We’ve left some of his most popular published items on the site for your pleasure. This edition is from the 28th of August 2008 and was simply entitled “Stag Don’t”.

Gossip Boi delivers another eight inches of pleasure in the form of his column as he ponders on things not to do while on a stag night.

Things no man should really have to do on a stag night in this day and age.

• Fly to a former Soviet Republic at great general expense and discomfort for anything more than one night in a cheap B&B motel or dump
• Do White water rafting, Cage fighting, paintballing, assisted lobotomy or anything else that supposedly certifies you as a man.
•  Consume more drink and/ or drugs than you actually want to, continually.
• Leer at, proposition or sleep with a Latvian prostitute Russian lap dancer whom no one actually fancies
• Encourage gratuitous humiliation of the groom involving nudity, deep water, clingfilm, shaving foam, eyebrows, tattoos, plastic balls and chains, Trains to Inverness and crudely improvised signage.
• Get into fights
• Do any of the above merely because it’s a stag night
• Nearly Die

I included the last one because I as much as anyone has got as good as reason as any to despise what the stag night has become, and what it makes you become the moment your enough of a fool to say yes to it.

On a typical stag night, participants adhere to the ‘what goes on tour stays on tour’ mentality so cherished by rock and roll halfwits. Unfortunately, on a stag night I attended not so long ago, it didn’t.

It ended up on the slab at University College Hospital, Awaiting a general anaesthetic after one of the members of the party almost killed himself slicing his wrist open on a glass severing veins arteries tendons, flexors and nerves.  More unfortunate the man in question was my best friend.

One minute we were moshing to Bohemian Rhapsody in a Soho karaoke bar; the next we were crashing towards a table covered with sake tumblers.

Staggering to my feet I discovered blood squirting from my friend’s wrist like Spiderman style from a two-inch suicide gash. The fun shuddered to an immediate halt. On one hand, the event was a suitably dramatic crux to a night of male bonding. On the other hand, it was unfortunate and gruesome.

But even then, it seemed positively heroic compared with every other stag night I’ve been on.  Although with luck enough movement has been returned to my injured friend’s hand to give him just enough movement to raise his middle finger to the Stag himself.

You see, there’s a virus in the modern stag machine, and it’s making a mockery of us all. The tradition may have endured for centuries as a cheery farewell to a friend’s bachelorhood but recently it’s become something else; a dismal weekend of minimum obligation characterised by needless machismo, forced bonhomie, and exorbitant planned spontaneity that all in all seems like the best possible reason to abolish the thing it’s supposed to precede; marriage.

After a recent trip to Stansted airport, it’s become only too apparent how common it’s become for overly drunk looking groups of men in matching T-shirts printed Malaga, Magaluf or Dublin on it to walk about commanding respect from each other for their overly pathetic attempts to chat up flight staff or any other passing woman who comes within hands reach of the parade.

So what has Gossip Boi learned from this Stag party which maimed my friend? Well it’s don’t be stupidly competitive trying to outspend in every aspect from flights to hotels to whores.

And what’s more, is when a stag night becomes a stag weekend or week is run to the nearest cave where mobile phone signals won’t allow your friends to call you and entice you to that all so promising Tequila with your name on it.

Gossip Boi

xxx