Excuse me if this doesn’t read too well, I’ve had around 5 hours sleep since I woke up on Friday at 8am. It’s not like I didn’t expect it but it’s really on just catching up on me sitting here on the train. The past two days I’ve the pleasure of watching the sun make it’s early morning crawl across the sky over rural north Wales.
Judging by the posts on Facebook Scott’s stag weekend seems to have been a success. In all honesty I thought that perhaps this little review would be a little less positive after the first night but in my opinion things got better the second night even if I did end up falling into my (not uncommon) “responsible adult” role at three in the morning.
The weekend started off when the advanced party, Ben the best man, Neil Ben’s father, Alyx who we met in Chester because he lives there, and myself arrived at the Bunkhouse to the news that the other building had been let for the weekend to a Hen party.
Our plan on arriving was to unpack the car and head into the local village to stock up on some provisions for the weekend. As we passed through the village on the way we had passed the local pub which looked to have closed down, a Butchers which had also closed down, and the local Londis convenience store so we headed down towards that. The four of us piled into the shop and had a quick look around. It was a little disappointing. The plan had been to buy something like pizza for the evening when the others arrived and something for the morning, and at some stage we also knew we needed to buy something for the next evening’s barbecue. A decision was taken based on the selection and quality of the frozen pizzas to go and look for another shop. The assumption was that there must be a larger shop not too far away. It turned out this assumption was simply wrong. Rural north Wales, it seems, is just that: rural. Ten miles down the road, in Bets-y-coed, we ended our search at Spar, the selection of pizza apparently being sufficient. We bought all they had in stock. (Further research found the nearest Tesco to be 25 miles from where we were staying.)
With food sorted we headed back to the bunkhouse to chill out until the rest of the party got there. By the time we arrived three of the girls from the hen party had arrived: the bride, her twin sister who had organised the whole thing, and a friend. We had just been sitting chatting in our kitchen when the friend came and knocked on our door to introduce herself. We were shortly joined at the door by the bride and her sister and we had a little chat. We didn’t talk much and soon they had headed back to their house and us back to our kitchen. It wasn’t very long, however, before there was another knock at the door. It was the friend again and this time Neil invited her in and offered her a beer expecting her to say she didn’t want one; she accepted and hung about talking to him.
For some reason the thought of making friends with the girls seemed to be totally unacceptable for Ben and when they invited us around to their house to have a beer with them a little later on he instructed his dad to go and tell them we were having something to eat and therefore too busy to go and see them. This resistance to interacting with them seemed to be a recurring theme over the weekend although, admittedly, not always just on our behalf.
When everyone else arrived we had the pizzas ready fresh out of the oven, they seemed grateful. A number of them had been drinking since early in the afternoon while they waited for the car they had hired to become available. I was glad I had been picked up by the advanced party — the thought of being stuck in a 7 seater car with people who had been drinking quite a bit already wasn’t a very appealing one. There were hugs and dramatic greetings aplenty from the two groups. It was nice to see some people I had known from school but hadn’t seen for a while.
After pizza people moved outside to carry on drinking. The weather was nice but there was a problem with small flies in the area between the bunkhouses. In an attempt to keep them away it was decided that we should light a fire in a makeshift barbecue stand a previous group had made. Neil was the self appointed head of the fire and made a reasonable job but it wasn’t exactly impressive. As the evening wore on more of the girls from the hen party arrived, each one was watched, and assessed, by the members of our group. I got the impression that the overall opinion was less than favorable. (While this was born out the next night by people’s comments, it wasn’t totally proven through their actions.)
At one point in the evening the owner of the bunkhouse came out to talk to both our group and the girls’ group. When she came to us she was obviously concerned that we didn’t have anything planned for the next day. She told us that the girls were planning an early night and had obviously hoped that we were too, but on discovering we didn’t she tried to appeal to our good side by saying she thought we should respect their early night with a curfew of 10.30pm. This didn’t go down well. From our chat earlier we already knew the girls had lots of things planned for the next day, but the thought of them ruining our first night of drinking was just unacceptable for some people in our group. I tried to compromise: “as long as they are still up, I think it’s fair game.” I could see in from both points of view — for our group the point of the weekend was to stay up late and drink lots. That’s why they had chosen a bunk house in the middle of nowhere; so they didn’t have to worry about disturbing anyone. In the end it actually worked out OK. The girls stayed up quite late — well midnight — and by the time they finally did all go to bed our group had moved most of the noise inside. We did stay out pretty late but apparently we weren’t too noisy to disturb many people. At least not enough for anyone to complain.
I was one of the last to bed, as I kind of expected, and the first to get up next morning. I don’t sleep well in different places (although I’m considerably better with that than I used to be), and especially not when there are no curtains. The night was no less eventful than the day, however. Not long after I came to bed I heard sounds coming from Prav’s bed. I pretended to be asleep and hid under the covers so he didn’t try to talk to me, and I just listened. It sounded like running water. I peeped from under the covers, in the gloom I could see Prav kneeling up on his bed. It soon dawned on me — Prav was urinating on his bed. Apparently in his very drunk state he hadn’t even tried to get to the toilet, he had (sort of) consciously chosen to use his bed instead. I hid again. When the noise stopped there was a short pause and then a kind of rustling noise. I looked back. He had apparently tried to go back to sleep but noticed the bed was wet for some reason — he was trying to pull the covers off but wasn’t getting very far. After a few minutes he gave up and just tried to sleep at the other end of the bed. I hid again and tried to get to sleep but it wasn’t long before Prav started snoring.
I wasn’t the only person who was disturbed by this, both Neil and Ben were woken up by it. It’s always the same in these situations — everyone who is woken up says a few words to each other about it, and then someone shouts across to the person who’s snoring to shut up. Invariably they don’t wake up. There is then another few moments more before someone finally gets up and tries to move the snorer so they stop. In this case Ben got up to use the toilet, and on his way back he gave Prav a very hard smack on the head. It worked for a moment, but not long. Next to try was Neil. He went and tried to roll Prav over and in the process noticed he was wet. “It’s probably sweat” said Ben. I kept quiet. After a few minutes of prodding and poking they managed to get him into some kind of position which seemed to shut him up. Everyone went to sleep for a while. I was vaguely away of one more thing when Prav moved from his bed on the floor to the bed above Neil. The next morning it turned out that he’d moved up there, found Neil’s bag and, finding his own clothes wet, changed into Neil’s t-shirt. Neil decided to wash that before putting it on again.
And so came Saturday. But that’s for another entry.
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