2 days Ago By Tom Nicholson
It was getting late when it happened. There were 10 of us there, in a farmhouse somewhere in the Berkshire countryside, where a beer pong game was going to the wire. Three cups left versus two.
One side had raced into an early lead, draining cups with ruthless efficiency. But their opponents had shaken it off, got their heads together, and were fighting back. Now the leading team launched another onslaught, their shots flicking the rims of the red cups, bouncing off the oak dining table, getting closer and closer.
We have you, the leaders seemed to be saying. We are not going away.The leaders threw again, and this time it was on target.
The ball lipped the rim and started to settle into the cup, whizzing round and round. Surely – surely – this was the decisive blow, the final crushing of the spirit.if(window.
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He swooped down, all six foot five of him, and blew the still-circling ping pong ball out of the cup before it touched the beer at the bottom, keeping the game alive. The room exploded. Bodies were everywhere.
I heard someone screaming. I realised it was me. It was the first night of a mate’s stag do, and that physics-defying save was as intoxicating a moment as any number of other blue WKD-powered shindigs have given me.
I’ve been on a fair few stags in the past few years, and I’ve seen things you wouldn’t believe. A man dressed as a Viking dry-heaving into a pub garden flowerpot. A stag in a panda onesie being pelted with rubber bullets in a warehouse outside Prague.
An amped-up younger brother-in-law being taken for a walk by the best man after said brother-in-law thought he heard someone slagging off his mum. (It’s always the brothers-in-law you have to watch out for.)All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in vodka Red Bull.
Barring any ill-advised second-wedding last hurrahs, that beer pong match marked probably my last stag. It’s been an exhausting, expensive, frequently stressful few years.If I never throw another axe in an industrial estate shed while shakily attempting an 11am pale ale, I will not mind.
The complex game of working out who the group lunatic is via the stag WhatsApp group is finally at an end.if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }#color-context-related-article-3578619 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square TOM NICHOLSON British comedy is one of our best exports - so why are we letting it die?Read MoreBut it’s been beautiful too. And I think I’ve learnt more about men and how they relate to each other on those intense weekenders across the country – Bristol, Newcastle, London, York, Newbury – than I could have done in years of careful research.
The big one is this: unlikely as it might sound if you’ve ever been trapped with a bunch of 20-somethings hooning warm San Miguels on a train to Liverpool, stags make men vulnerable in a way they’re not used to. It’s a particular kind of feeling that you get en route to the meet-up. You’re hyped to see your friends, obviously.
But you’re also fearful. You’re fearful about how the different groups will merge. You’re fearful of exactly how much the best man wants to humiliate the stag.
You don’t want to be a wet blanket, but you also don’t want to ruin some unsuspecting family’s trip to the go-karting track.That can mean there’s usually an undercurrent of low-level sabotage from the outset; more than one friend has confided that they’ve set up a back-channel WhatsApp group outside of the main chat so they and their mates can sneak off if things get too lairy.Sometimes it’s something deeper though.
You’ll never feel the slippage that happens to old friendships quite as intensely as you will on a stag. You go in hoping that you’ll relight some burned-down embers of the fun you had when you were in each other’s pockets, but then all these other blokes get in the way. You hear stories that involve a whole cast and scenery that you don’t recognise: student union club nights, offices where they pretend to be a productive member of society, flatshares of ill repute.
Talking about friendship isn’t something I or my mates tend to do, but stag-dos really hold your relationships up to the light. You’re basically scared that your specific bit of the stag’s life isn’t quite as important to them as you’ve always thought it was.Go to an old school friend’s do and your anecdotes feel lightweight next to the wilder early-twenties shenanigans that come out.
A stag with someone you met at work, though, makes you fret about how you two will never have those deep, deep roots they have with their home friends.if(window.adverts) { window.
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adverts.addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l2"}); }Yet it’s the stags where everyone manages to stop clinging so tightly to their version of the stag that are the really great ones. When your guard starts to drop, you get these amazing moments when bits of the stag’s personality coming ricocheting back at you from the friends they’ve picked up along the way.
Your mate – bloody good guy, actually – is all of these different pieces put together. You know his friends better, and you know him better. It’s those stags which become more than just a few days getting hammered and trying to work out when you can squeeze in a meal deal before the onslaught begins again; the ones where everyone manages to let go of the way that they specifically know the stag and the whole thing melts into a big, silly puddle of boys who want to celebrate their mate.
It’s the ones where a very tall man can blow a ping pong ball out of a red cup, and bring the house down..
