The daily schedule went something like this: wake up, wander 20 feet to the nearest café for coffee, spend an hour reliving the previous night’s adventures. From there, we’d find somewhere to have lunch; a process that largely involved following our noses until we stumbled across a restaurant capable of producing a decent croquette, before sitting for hours, drinking and talking absolute shite.
Eventually, someone would mysteriously pay the bill. Men seem unconcerned with who owes what, believing: “It’ll all balance out in the end.” A brief discussion would ensue about the evening’s plans before we returned to the hotel for what became known as the “poo reset”; we headed to the festival and staggered home sometime between 4am and 6.30am. Rinse and repeat.
Having now been on roughly a thousand hens and this one stag, I couldn’t help comparing the two, despite the unfair sample size.
Hen dos, particularly with large groups, come with a staggering amount of work. It’s not just booking a weekend away – it’s creating WhatsApp groups, maintaining spreadsheets, researching restaurants, organising games, coordinating outfits and (crucially) making sure nobody feels left out. Bridesmaids would make excellent UN negotiators.
