Yesterday was my stag day. I’m getting married in a couple of weeks. It’s a tradition.
Friend’s stag dos have varied from a quiet Guinness with the groom’s father and uncle to a week-long orgy of debauchery in a major East European capital city. Different strokes.
I’m not going to go into much detail about what I did, to protect my own privacy and that of my friends, and because if you don’t know me and you’re reading this then it’s none of your business. Suffice it to say my friends are magnificent and I had a wonderful time.
That said, writing this is the nearest I’ll get to a diary, so I might as well put down some notes to jog future memories. Mainly, the beginning of the day, which began with laser tag at the London Paintball Centre. We had to dress up like Kwik-Fit-Fitters in burqas – or like Balazar in The Mysterious Planet, should your terms of reference extend to Colin Baker Doctor Who stories. We were rather nervous that we’d accidentally signed on for paintball, having expected to shoot out in lots of dark corridors filled with dry-ice, in the manner of the SAS storming a provincial night club. Instead there was mud, wooden houses, a tank, and lots of chippings. It looked distinctly paintballistic. I was pre-emptively nursing where my bruises would be.
But fortunately it was laser tag, and it turned out to be much more fun than I’d imagined, and within minutes we had all transformed from mild-mannered writers and magazine editors into homicidal Vietnam vets whose battle strategies included ‘Try not to be killed straight away this time’ and ‘Everyone get the speccy one, he’s a bit scary.’ And, although we were outnumbered and lost, we had the moral victory.
Except at half-time, where we stopped for a cup of tea.
