Cigarettes and Alcohol: Confessions of a Stag Weekend (10 page)

Chapter
Fifteen: A Short History of Stagging

The first recorded example of the traditional stag do was seen in Sparta in the fifth century. Those who have seen the movie
300
will know that the men of Sparta were load of double hard bastards with a mega short life expectancy.

Before
a lad was sent off to his almost certain death with the Spartan army his comrades threw him a huge party. This was a big night out of drinking hard with all of your mates before you were sent off to the front line, probably never to return.

So
there was no need to worry about chronic liver disease from the boozing, heart problems from the smokes or even some nasty rash that appears on your ‘little soldier’ after a ride on the local bike (don’t forget those STD’s hunt in packs!) because all those parts of your body were very soon to be hacked into tiny pieces on the battlefield.

Go
on, have a top night out with the posse. No responsibility tonight and the odds of you actually seeing another night are so remote anyhow, that you may as well party hard Spartan dude.

Celebrate
your last night of freedom before you take a massive plunge into an early grave. So the tradition of giving your compatriot a superb sending off with a sore head is probably where the tradition of a lad’s night out before the wedding came from.

Over
in pre Christian England, people worshipped a god known as The Horned One, whose antlers made him be seen as a virile male form. This possibly is where the ‘stag’ bit comes from.

The
change from an immature child entering into matrimony and becoming a man with great responsibility (well that’s the theory anyway) is a perfect excuse to celebrate by having your eyebrows shaved off and having to wear a gorilla costume for the entire weekend.

Ladies
and Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the modern stag do!

In
France this rite of passage is known as the ‘
enterrement
de
vie
de
garcon’
which translates as ‘
the
burial
of
the
life
of
a
boy
.’

The
wedding cynic among you may say that the real meaning is ‘the end of your life, mate!’ Game Over. Do not pass go and do not collect £200. I do not want to live a life full of compromises and curtail my activities of excess gambling, drinking, shagging & smoking, they say.

Mr
Cynical may not be happy selling his soul for a three bed semi in the suburbs and a load of sauce pan lids (kids).

However
I am not a cynic at all. Marriage may well be the end of certain things (well most things) that your new bread knife will not approve of, but just think of all the new hobbies you can then take up instead.

Like
decorating or hanging about in your new potting shed (everyone knows this is where your porn was stashed in pre-lap top days) and changing nappies full of runny green shite after nights without any sleep. But hey-ho, marriage makes a man of you they say.

The
stag do has been around for centuries so it is your duty, as a man, to carry on this tradition if you are daft enough to get wed. There is nothing like getting totally shit faced and walking around with a traffic cone on your head to compensate for a wedding you will still be paying off for at least the next decade. Single gentlemen out there in the real world, please feel free to join this exclusive party whenever you want.

Here
are a few historical highlights of stag nights throughout the ages:

1]
Henry VIII suffered from a very rare condition that was known as ‘I-love-a-stag-do-i-tis.’ He was totally nuts for a big night out with the knights and hence his marrying of six wives. He could ‘take or leave’ the actual wedding day, he proposed simply to have royal permission to have the six stag parties. These events were legendary with a 15 course meal followed by as much jousting, sword fighting and public executions as you could shake a shitty stick at. All the Lords from across England were expected to attend, bringing with them untouched maidens for the post banquet entertainment and some local peasants who had various bits of them removed, just for laughs. Henry just loved some eye gouging or finger breaking before indulging in a bit of ‘in & out’ with a bit of Tudor grumble. Old Henry was in the midst of getting rid of wife number six and preparing for stag do number seven when the gout finally got him, the poor randy old soak.

2]
In Victorian times, the wearing of real antlers while on a stag night became the very height of fashion. The more ornate and sharp they were, the more respect you would receive from your drinking chums. I have a theory that the murders of prostitutes in the East End of London back in 1888 that have always been blamed on Jack the Ripper were in fact caused by gentlemen out for a beery night on the tiles. Stag parties would descend on Whitechapel after pub closing time, for a quick knee trembler down some fog strewn alleyway with a cut price brass. Unfortunately as the stag approached our ‘tart with a heart’ he tripped and fell on the cobblestones and accidently sliced the unfortunate woman of the night to pieces with the razor sharp antlers on his head. The stag party had to be on their toes quickly to avoid certain arrest after leaving a sliced up lady lying bleeding in the street. There was no Peeler in London who would believe this was an accident and the fact that this sad mishap happened five times in the same area in quick succession would never be believed. The murders all ceased on the very day that a law to stop antlers being worn on stag do’s was passed. That was no coincidence, believe me. It’s my conspiracy theory and I am sticking to it. Five terrible stag do disasters and the deaths of five young women were all blamed on the one shadowy figure, our Jack, who never got caught. The fact that in modern cockney rhyming slang ‘Jack the Ripper’ means ‘stripper’, is further proof that this is all true and was covered up for over a hundred and twenty years, until now. (This is all utter toss I’m afraid. Or is it?)

3]
During the 1960’s - a time of hippies and free love – weddings, and therefore the stag do, fell out of favour. Everyone was too busy shagging at orgies and throwing their car keys in at wife swapping parties. Why bother getting married or going out on the lash, while a ‘wall to wall shag-a-thon’ was taking place everywhere. Get taters deep and forget all that heavy commitment stuff man. Insert a peace sign here and go drop a couple of tabs of acid while watching
Easy Rider
on DVD to get the full 60’s space kid effect.

4]
The seventies were a dark dull time with three day weeks, power cuts and white dogs muck. The stag do did come briefly back into vogue with groups of badly dressed men wobbling about town, dressed from head to foot in man-made fibres, desperately searching for a public house that would do a ‘lock in’ beyond the depressingly early closing time of just 11 o’clock at night! Many were found in a local park necking Watneys Party Sevens early in the morning just to carry on the festivities after hours. That was about it for the seventies stag, depressing really.

5]
With the huge popularity of the home video machine in the early eighties, the interest in ‘stag do’s’ again took a bit of a nose dive. Why go out when you could sit indoors and watch the latest Chuck Norris action flick in the privacy of your own home? Porn was freely available for just three quid a night rental, with the classic Electric Blue soft porn range (remember the theme tune? Of course you do you sex addicted, skin flick watching, over forty year old). Horror films were ten a penny, providing excellent levels of sex and violence that you just did not see on the three channels of terrestrial TV. What was great about renting a VHS tape from the local video shop was that you knew when something exciting was going to happen in the film as the picture would start to go all fuzzy and grainy just before a decent scene. You could bet that a flash of tit (even bush if you were really lucky) or a cool explosion and/or beheading was coming your way as soon as the screen went all moody. This was caused by people pausing then rewinding the film over and over again to re-watch their favourite bits of the movie. That was all part of the charm of home video in the eighties, as a rule the grainier the picture, the better the movie. The fact that the top loading video player machines were the size of a fridge and the tapes were as big as a house brick was totally immaterial, you could watch what you liked, when you liked. Well that was until the whole ‘Video Nasties’ episode which took a lot of the decent hard core violent horror films off the shelves of your local video emporium. What a bunch of bloody killjoys. What on earth is wrong with wanting to watch ‘Skull Fucking Acid Dropping Killer Nazi Zombies from Cheam’ anyway? What a man chooses to view in the privacy of his own house with a box of tissues is his own affair.

Later
in the decade of ‘day-glo’ the stag do finally returned to its rightful place in the spotlight, with the rise of the YUPPIES (Young Upwardly-mobile Professional PIE-eaters) and the DINKY’s (Dual Income No Kids Yet) brigade who had tons of DI (Disposable Income) in their sky rockets (pockets). If they were not earning huge amounts of ‘cash to splash’ by working up in the City, dealing stocks or other dodgy stuff then that was not a problem. Just get a credit card and run up vast sums of debt you will never repay just to enable you to ‘live the dream.’ Thatcher’s Britain was full of money grabbing tossers downing huge bottles of Champagne and snorting half of Colombia’s finest illegal export up their beaks. With the advent of big gaudy ostentatious weddings, the stag event finally came of age. Paintballing and days at race circuits, bombing round in flash jam jars, were then followed by reservoirs of over-priced booze being drunk. The more expensive something was in the 80’s the better. Designer labels took off and excessive excess was applauded everywhere. ‘Stagging’ as it is now known was born and just one day was not enough, it had to be a full weekend of debauchery. Major city centres across the UK were suddenly awash with big groups of lads wearing ‘Frankie Says..’ tee shirts and trendy jeans, getting right on it. They had ‘Loads-a-money!’ and were spending it on birds, booze and bugle. Dripping with designer clothes, sovereign rings and gold chains, carrying a big wedge of fifty pound notes, you could tell the YUPPIE stag as he acted like a massive cock, full of his own self-importance. However they did raise the bar for a decent stag do, so I say ‘good work fella’. Without the dinosaurs of the 1980’s the stag weekend would not have been re-invented and this book would now be full of blank pages (some might argue this would be the better option!) The gloves were off and during the weekend anything went. By the way, the first recorded ‘stag handcuffed to a lap post with no trousers on’ incident happened in 1985 in Newcastle.

BIG
DISCLAIMER
: This whole chapter has no historical accuracy or truth in it whatsoever, especially the ‘Jack the Ripper’ part, which really is a load of steaming horse dung. Apologies but if you wanted a factual history book you should have bought one. They’re in your local book store under B for Boredom.

Chapter Sixteen: The Cursed Saturday Night in Edinburgh

We’ve made a schoolboy error. We’ve all dropped a massive bollock and returned to the guest house to freshen up for the big Saturday night in Edinburgh.

On
a stag weekend, stopping your alcohol intake is the very worst thing you can do. You’ve got to maintain a steady drinking pace the whole time. Drink through the peaks and troughs that a booze infused day throws at your body, almost like being put on a drip at the hospital.

If
you cease the beer, smokes and illegals being taken on board even for a few minutes, you are going to drop like an aeroplane when one of the engines blows. Sooner or later my friend you are coming down hard!

But
stop we do and find our way back to base camp. The guest house is a three storey terrace in a quiet street. The top floor is where the family live and the lower two floors are where the five guest rooms are. Four lads are in the biggest room then there are two rooms of three and another two rooms of two. Well there were fourteen of us this morning all looking bright and breezy but we’ve lost two so far in the great pyramid disaster.

Along
the corridors in the guest house are big potted plants and pictures of Edinburgh through the ages line the walls. We all disappear into our rooms to get ready and agree to hook up in an hour to hit the town.

However
some fall for the old ‘just a few minutes of power nap will sort me right out’ theory. Bad move as they end up deep asleep never to awake until the next morning and miss all the fun.

Amnesty
Boy is sharing a room with Mule who has had a lie down and is now totally out for the count. There is no waking him up so Amnesty does the only sane thing you can do in that situation and stitches him up like a right kipper.

He
goes down to reception to see if they have any shoe polish that he can borrow as he wants his boots to shine to catch the eyes of the ladies. The owner of the guest house is only too pleased to lend him some, but that polish is ending up nowhere near any shoe leather, that’s for sure.

Amnesty
goes back up to the room where Mule is snoring away like a good ‘un. He smears a load of polish all over his fingers while he sleeps on. Then Amnesty starts tickling Mules nose who then wipes his polish smothered hands all over his own boat race. Within seconds his whole face is covered in the stuff and he now looks like a crap camouflaged Rambo.

Amnesty
rushes across to our room to show us his handiwork. It is a work of art. The polish is even all up his nose now, as he must have been having a cheeky pick while he’s been fast a kip. We try not to laugh too much and wake the sad bloke up. Let him be, he can’t take the pace of ‘the in crowd’.

That’s
one more casualty added to the two guys in casualty so the posse is down to eleven men now. We start knocking on the other rooms so we can make tracks into the city. Lads start to appear, ready for action but in various states of health. Some look well sorted after a quick splash slash and dash.

Others
still look a bit pasty with the beer sweats and red veiny eyes that suggest that they may well be struggling to keep up the drinking pace. Then there are the ones chemically enhanced by ‘Class A’ substances who have pupils the size of pin heads while talking utter tosh at one hundred miles an hour, but they are definitely ready to go back into battle.

We
knock on one room but the two guys (Kid K & Kid N) inside refuse to answer. They just cannot face chucking any more ale down their sheep and goats (throats) today. We know that they can hear us shouting abuse about them being wimpy let downs and they know that we know they can hear us, but they will not be intimidated into coming back out on the piss again.

They
instantly gain the new nick names of Light and Weight. We never could tell which one was which, so we ended up calling them Lightweight 1 and Lightweight 2. In fairness the pair of them had recently had babies with their wives and only came on the stag do to get a decent couple of nights sleep away from the nagging Mrs and the endless supply of milky baby sick that would end up all over their designer threads.

So
that is just nine of us heading out for a night of hard stagging without an acting stag because he is still up at the hospital with a cattle trucked gob.

With
his wired up jaw he will be only able to open his mouth a few centimetres and it will look like a letter being shoved into a post box when eating his new all flat diet consisting of poppadum’s, crisps and pizza’s.

We
leave the guest house saying a fond goodnight to the owner who is on reception. He has on the moodiest Irish jig (wig]) I have ever seen in my entire life. The colour of his rug does not even match the small remaining wisps of his natural hair poking out from underneath his very crap Syrup of Figs (wig).

What
the fuck is the point of wearing ‘an oil rig’ (wig)? Just shave the lot off and man up!

Apart
from his love of wearing half a dead cat on his head, he’s a good bloke and tells us about a cheap boozer up the road that he assures us will be full of top quality women. Hopefully his eye for the ladies is not as poor as his selection of fake hair pieces.

We
decide to pop our head around the pub’s door as it’s on our way into town anyway. However not one hundred yards further down the road, Burke somehow manages to walk straight into a lamp post. Believe me this took some doing as he was reeling about from side to side and was finding it hard to walk in anything even remotely resembling a straight line at the time.

With
a massive CLANG! noise, he goes down like a ton of elephant shit being dropped. Village rushes over to pick him up and already a huge bump the size of an over-sized egg has come up on his forehead. This does not look good for Burke. If he manages to avoid a minor concussion we are all going to be amazed.

We
escort him back to his room and all know that he is out of the game as well. Another one bites the dust.

It’s
like our night has a major Tutankhamen type curse on it or some such. There are just eight of us left now but we will make every pint count and compensate for the short fall in our ranks.

We
find the drinking establishment that our follically challenged, Farmers Pig (wig) wearing, new best mate has recommended and horror of horrors there’s a Karaoke Night on.

I
am not sure exactly what Karaoke actually means but I am convinced that it must be ‘shit singers singing shit songs shitly.’ My advice to anyone is not to enter any premises that hold these truly ear torturing tedious nights. No good will come of it, believe me.

As
we walk up to the door someone is murdering the tune of some already agonisingly awful song so we decide to avoid the place and go find somewhere else to knock back our quota of grog.

We
need to get some solids on board. Generally ‘eating is cheating’ on a staggie but it was now nine at night, after heavy hours on the beer we needed a gut full of nosh or we would be in all sorts of bother later on.

Luckily
we spot an Indian restaurant up ahead so we dart in for some top curried food.

The
owner of the place did not exactly welcome us eight noisy English tossers with open arms, but he led us to a big table out back, well away from his other punters where we couldn’t offend anyone.

We
ordered up some scran and yet more booze and inevitably the chat pretty soon turned nonsensical:

“
PISSED
UP
CONVERSATION
#
3
:

Kid
M
:
Are
we
ever
going
to
get
THE
SUN
TATT
on
the
market
and
make
our
fortune
?

Kid
L
:
Remind
me
of
this
sure
fire
money
winner
again
.
We
always
chat
about
this
when
I
am
out
of
my
box
and
can’t
remember
the
P
of
A
(
Plan
of
Action
)

Kid
M
:
THE
SUN
TATT
.
It’s
a
piece
of
plastic
cut
into
cool
shapes
,
like
a
beer
bottle
shape
for
instance
.
You
then
stick
the
plastic
on
your
arm
when
you
sun
bathe
.
Let
the
currant
bun
[
sun
]
give
you
the
perfect
peter
pan
[
tan
]
and
you
then
remove
THE
SUN
TATT
leaving
that
part
of
your
skin
un
-
tanned
but
in
the
shape
of
a
beer
bottle
.

Kid
L
:
Genius
bro
.
You
could
have
anything
you
wanted
tattooed
on
your
arms
,
legs
or
chest
,
without
all
the
pain
and
aggro
of
a
real
tatt
.
Amazing
!

Kid
M
:
You
could
cut
names
into
the
designs
,
so
your
SUN
TATT
could
read
Mum
or
whatever
.
You
could
sell
swallows
or
little
heart
shaped
bits
of
plastic
.
They
would
look
right
classy
unlike
real
tattoos
.

Kid
L
:
Obviously
,
there’s
no
need
for
laser
treatment
when
you
want
to
get
rid
of
your
SUN
TATT
either
.
You
just
go
back
out
in
the
sunshine
and
you
are
sorted
.
A
winner
,
let’s
do
it
.

Kid
M
:
I’ve
even
got
the
advertising
jingle
all
worked
out
.
SUN
TATT
,
SUN
TATT
,
STICK
IT
UP
YOUR
BUM
TATT
.
It
will
be
great
.
Anyone
on
holiday
is
going
to
buy
hundreds
of
these
things
for
sure
.