The stag do is a concept which probably best epitomizes masculinity in the modern age. Yet it seems for someone like me, stag weekends have the rather astonishing ability to allow the word “man” to be something that is simultaneously literal, yet oddly tenuous.
This particular stag-do begins in a car park in Manchester on a bright sunny Friday morning, and I am standing in shorts next to my parked-up Nissan Micra feeling a sense of dread and nervousness.
Perhaps you believe that irrespective of how happy and fulfilling the resulting outcome of his wedding should hopefully turn out to be, if anything, it should have been the stag’s liberty to feel any doubts, stresses and apprehensions. But this does not make my own fears any less genuine. Because he might well be approaching the life-changing transition of matrimony, but in less than an hour’s time, I will be playing football. And whilst I do not intend to sound like I am belittling whatever pressures or sense of occasion the stag may feel, I would argue that what I was about to do was definitely braver.
Let me explain why, using the following three points.
1) I have not kicked a football since school.
2) School was a very long time ago.
3) I was no good at kicking a football even when I was at school.
That last point cannot be overstated. I really was no good a kicking a football. That is not to lazily assume I was always the kid cursed with the indignity and humiliation of being picked last for the teams in P.E.; because in my defence, it was usually more 50/50 between me and this other lad, who had chronic asthma and six toes on his right foot (the latter should not be regarded as particularly exceptional, given the type of small rural West Midlands village I grew up in). Yet even if this hadn’t been the case, there wasn’t a single thing I ever enjoyed about the sport, even right down to the attire. Particularly the shorts. I have never felt more vulnerable either before or since those old P.E. days. I went to school in the eighties, when shorts really did mean shorts. I just never trusted them. The impending threat of popping out of them was all too prominent, and I’m not trying to be boastful either; this was a threat that was irrespective to the size of one’s decidedly averaged sized genitalia. It genuinely wouldn’t surprise me if the writers of the film Basic Instinct, had actually gathered some inspiration from seeing us sat on the benches in our school changing room. In fact retrospectively, the timing of the film’s release coinciding with our school days seems suspiciously impeccable.
And then there was the game itself; which for me personally, seemed to entail hovering uselessly about on a field impatiently awaiting the sound of a shrill whistle. Not a noise commonly associated with beauty, but which I became conditioned to believe sounded like a choir of heavenly angels. If the ball went into the top half of the pitch, I might, at a push, jog a few paces forward in a conceited attempt at enthusiasm. Or if the action entered our half of the pitch, I might half-heartedly trot a few paces the other way. On some rare occasions some deluded idiot would kicked the ball towards me (or “pass” it, as I believe is the correct terminology). Whenever that happened, I’d stand frozen in bewilderment, as a herd of twenty schoolboys stampeded toward this spherical thing I'd unwittingly found in my possession (not a sentence I am proud of that one, and certainly less so were it quoted out of context). My instinctive resolve was always to run round and round the ball in some sort of panicky circle for a while not knowing quite what to do, before finally opting to kick this round article (or ‘football’ as I believe is the correct terminology) toward any old random wilderness; sometimes at the feet of someone from my team, sometimes to a member of the opposition. That was ostensibly my whole game-plan in its entirety, and mostly it kept me reasonably successful in my heady aspirations of sporting underachievement.
So as you can imagine, football was only a game I would have ever played under duress. And yet here I was, about to do something I detested under my own volition; and since we were hiring 5-aside indoor soccer pitch between us, I was actually PAYING for the privilege. Furthermore, the more astute of you may have noticed that this was a FRIDAY morning, so I had even taken a day’s holiday off work to be putting myself through this! What on Earth had led me here? To this car park in Manchester? To do something that now seemed suddenly much less preferable to a day at work?
One (or more) of the following three points may be possible explanations:-
1) I am the sort of person who will generally agree to do anything. So long as it’s in the future. So long as there is a buffer of time ahead of me to provide a nice cushion, I will be pretty much amenable to most ideas.
2) Subconsciously this may possibly have something with my similarly previously documented hypochondria. Perhaps I only agree to do stuff in the future because I assume I’ll already be dead before they arrive.
3) Preceding the agreement of my participation, I may have had a particularly good gym session that charged me with endorphins and hubris. “Why not play football?” my brain might have asked. “You have put the hours in at the gym. You’re certainly a lot fitter than you used to be at school. You never know, given the benefit of age and experience, you might just get on the pitch and something might suddenly click into place and you’ll start playing like Bobby Charlton!” (Note to self, don’t listen to brain – the resulting ache alone, which followed the game would soon be enough to heavily disprove such a flimsy theory).
Co-incidentally, the Stag party comprised mainly of a lot of people who I had been to school with, and had not really seen since my salad days (ironically named, since I ate far fewer salads back then). This was quite good, because expectations of my prowess would be low. But there were also some of the stag’s more recently-made friends who I had never met before. And the one thing that seemed to unite them was that they were all men who now had families, or were in long-term relationships and successful jobs and arrived in cars whose models were called things like ‘BMW Hercules’ or ‘Rover Thor’, which is quite humbling for a man who drives a Nissan Micra at 32 and furthermore feels immense gratitude that he can afford to do so. And whilst I know that Rover Thor and BMW Hercules aren’t actually real names, the fact that my knowledge and enthusiasm towards cars is so tenuous only serves to diminish the already pitiful number of points on my ‘Top Trump card’ of masculinity even further.
I knew my old school chums would be well aware of my lacking sporting prowess, but it was the people I had not met before who I worried most about. I am socially anxious and find it difficult to get to know new people at the best of times, so the thought of having to do so through my incompetence on a football pitch seemed fraught with potential humiliation. And this was an anxiety I held before it was revealed to me that a referee had been booked especially for our game; effectively meaning I would now also be paying towards having my incompetence and humiliation professionally observed and assessed. I suspect that was the very moment my sense of maleness was so low, that I was half considering skipping the post-match shower, just in case I found that my penis suddenly became inverted.
But y’know... The game wasn’t that bad after all. Don’t get me wrong, I did not suddenly play with the ability of Bobby Charlton like my briefly deluded brain briefly suspected I might. I didn’t even play with the ability of Bobby Davro, truth be told. But it was ok. I gave it a shot. And once in a while some of the more seasoned players even gave me the odd compliment for my efforts at tacking and saving a goal (my football knowledge is so lacking that it was impossible to tell whether I was merely being patronized. But fuck it, I took the compliments anyway). And despite the fact that Dave Barnett received an excruciatingly painful ankle injury, leaving him writing in agony, allowing him to be liberated the pitch (the lucky bastard), I did get ample opportunity to play in my favorite position a fair bit. (My favourite position being substitute, obviously).
And with the much-dreaded football game all done, survived and out of the way, it was time to enjoy the rest of the stag weekend.
“So what are we doing tomorrow?” I casually asked Bruce as we left the changing room.
“Oh, there’s a home derby on nearby”, he replied, “Think we’re going to see that. Stockport vs. Macclesfield”.
But this wasn’t the only nasty surprise that would be sprung on me. Apparently the too-good-to-be-true budget price City centre apartments that had been booked for our stay had no on-site parking. And the nearest car-park I could find to our accommodation was at the Arndale Centre. The nasty surprise being that parking cost £25 per night! You can call me tight-fisted if you must, but it seemed absurd for my car to stay in accommodation that was almost as expensive as mine. £50 to park for the weekend! It’s not like the car-park even had any ensuite facilities. Thank God it was just a “stag-weekend”. For had it been a stag “fortnight”, because given the market value of my car, then technically, it would have been cheaper for me to have just driven my Micra into the nearest scrap-yard and simply just left it there.
The Stockport vs. Macclesfield game wasn’t all that bad. I have not been to a football match for about 12 years, because I always found them so mind-numbingly dull. But nowadays they can be much more enjoyable, thanks to the advent of mobile technology which at least allows you to tit around on the internet for 90 minutes. However, for any other non-football fans reading, I must pass on a small piece of cautionary advice. At one point I looked up to witness a goal being scored, and in order to show a bit of polite interest, I burst into enthusiastic applause. Obviously, being a dispassionate observer, I didn’t actually care that Stockport had attained a goal, and was pretty much faking it. A bit like an orgasm that the wives of some of those disgusting, clammy football-loving faces must also feel obliged to fake. But unfortunately, I had not done enough ground-level research, so had failed to ascertain that we were located in the Macclesfield end. Consequently, I found myself the recipient of dagger glances. And to let me tell you, these lower division football fans are not the type of people one would wish to disgruntle. Honest to God, I had seen some of them buy pies, proper pies, in a round foil pie dish, then (and this is the astonishing part) just eat them WITH THEIR OWN BARE HANDS. No word of a lie, they devoured them without using ANY CUTLERY WHATSOEVER! These football types are like savages or something!
I mentioned this to one of the stag party, who seemed genuinely nonplussed by my observation, as if going to see football and eating a pie with your fingers, is the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it is. I wouldn’t know. As I have mentioned several times before, I am not really much of an authority on maleness. In fact at times throughout this weekend, I started to suspect I was simply just not made of the sufficient “man”-stuff required for stag do’s, like I was in some way unqualified. I even began thinking I’d possibly be more suited to hen dos. I’ve seen them hen parties round the town – squealing in equal measures of excitement and despair, and drinking blue drinks. That doesn’t seem as hard. I reckoned I could easily do that.
Or could I? On both Friday and Saturday night I would be the first to retire to the apartment. Yet I did so with a degree of self-justifying nonchalance, convincing myself that my restraint was borne of some situational upper-hand. I reasoned that 1am was a perfectly acceptable time to head home. As I mentioned earlier, most of the party are in settled relationships. It is probably rare they get such an opportunity nowadays, and having obtained a “free pass” from their respective partners to engage In this debauchery, it is natural they would wish to take full advantage of it and stay out as late as possible, and live like they were over-excited teenagers once more. Bless ‘em. But this is not such a novelty for me. I am a single man. I don’t have the responsibility of compromise with other people like my friends do. I could be out late indulging in this sort of debauchery EVERY SINGLE NIGHT if I so choose. That’s right, EVERY NIGHT! Admittedly I spend most nights alone, lying face down in my pillow crying myself to sleep because of the aching loneliness of my existence. But that’s irrelevant: at least I’ve got the option.
Perversely this trip actually allowed me a rare opportunity to spend the night in a shared bed. Actually, perhaps “perversely” is not a particularly great word to use in this context, as I was sharing a bed with Ben; the best-man who’d been a close friend of mine at school. He has lived in the North-West since moving there at university age. I have not seen much of him in the intervening years, but he has changed very little. Although I think there may have been a degradation in his bowels if I’m to be honest, as I seemed to spend the night in a dense cloud of his perpetual, never-ending supply of flatulence. Still – it was nice that we could still feel comfortable enough to share such an intimacy after all this time, because surely you can’t get much more intimate than having particles of someone else’s fecal matter wafting up your nose for the duration of a night.
So that just about sums it all up. It wasn’t until returning to the multistory car park on the Sunday morning that I was able to reflect on the weekend. And despite what this blog may have led you to believe, in all seriousness I really had actually enjoyed this stag-do. Any initial reticence about seeing old school friends would turn out to be completely unfounded. I feared the last 14 years and their acquisition of posher cars, more lucrative careers and kids might leave a social void between us; but it was just like the old days again, as if we were all back at school in the science labs or something. So much so, that when I got into the drivers’ seat, I even found a crocodile clip that someone had surreptitiously attached to the back of my shirt.
Ah how the old memories came flooding back…
