Doing the Stag Do - The Modern Way
In a time when football stars don alice bands to offset their
fresh blonde highlights and rockers turn to macrobiotics and
prune juice rather than whiskey and hookers, the stag weekend
may well be the last bastion of old school masculinity. Amalia
Illgner takes a look at the modern incarnation of this rite of
passage and discovers there's a lot more to the modern stag
weekend than just a boozy night of bonding and bristols.
Back when Michael Caine was a sex symbol, Michael Jackson still
black, and Chicken Tikka was considered the height of culinary
chic; the perfect stag night simply consisted of a case of beer,
your best mates, a fully loaded Polaroid, and an amateur
stripper named Bambi. How times have changed...
According to the office for national statistics we're now far
less likely to get married in the first place and if we do get
dragged down the aisle it's far later than ever before. In fact
for men the average age has crept up to an all time high of 30
and a half years, so there's little wonder that it's not just a
small cause for celebration when two people in this Bridget
Jones world manage to step away from their work stations,
microwave-meals-for-one and eBay auctions and actually commit to
each another.
What this means for the stag weekend
is that generally couples have more money to spend on their
respective hen and stag weekends and what that means is that the
stag weekends are getting more elaborate, adventurous and action
packed. In other words the ante is being upped along with the
expectations. Forget sitting on your rear and ordering the
seafood special at your local, the typical 21st century stag
weekend consists of action packed days filled with paintball
army combat style, canyoning, quad biking, Munich beer halls,
Estonian feasts and coasteering. For those of you who think
crossing Piccadilly Circus during peak hour is about as rugged
terrain as you've ever seen, coasteering is the fine art of
scrambling around a coastline and leaping off cliffs into wave
lapped coves below. It's about as close to becoming Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as anyone who works in an office is
going to get. Ever. And the guys are loving it. In fact,
coasteering - as well as the trusty faithfulls like paintball
and quad biking - is fast becoming the new black when it comes
to planning the ultimate stag
party. There truly is nothing like getting a bunch of lads
together adding a strong element of fear, the smell of
competition and the threat of ritual humiliation to bring out
the dormant Evil Knieval within.
And it seems this chest beating machismo and daring even
stretches into the cultural realm as scores of quintessential
British stags are downloading Google earth, thumbing through a
phrase book and heading off shore to experience far flung
destinations for their weekend of freedom. The foreign office
released a detailed survey at the end of last year and found
that a staggering 70 per cent of young Brits "now prefer to
travel abroad for hen and stag parties". That sure is a giant
leap from our parents' night out in Bournemouth. And perched at
the top of the destination pack is undeniable the cool of
Eastern Europe. Riga. Vilnius. Tallinn. Bratislava. Moscow.
They're so cool they're hot. The Iron Curtain is cool and the
Eastern Bloc is rocking. This is principally from the recent
expansion of the European Union making costly and irritating
visas at thing of the past and the fact that flights are now
cheaper than a ticket to see Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits tour at
Wembley. And let's not forget the exchange rate. Ah the sweet
exchange rate, where often one humble quid will be enough to buy
more than one pint of quality local brew. This point is often
argument enough to entice punters from expensive metro poles
like London (where one quid may buy you a copy of The Sun and
half a mars bar).
So 21st Century Stags unite! The options are as endless as your
imagination. That really is the easy part. Now it's just a
matter of convincing her to marry you...