The Stag Party

Last Saturday was the weekend of my stag party (it seems every country has a different name for, but it is the night you go out as your last time unmarried).

We had decided to go to Swansea (somewhere not that big, but not small either), get a couple of cottages, go clay pigeon shooting (no real pigeons involved) and get drunk.

Joe picked up me and Neil. It is the first time we've been together in quite a while! On the way there it seemed like Wales was closed. We couldn't get on the motorway at all and had to do a huge detour. We stopped by Sunny's on the way. It turns out he pretty much lives in a mansion, so we played some snooker, and he made me a far-too-strong drink.

When we finally got to the cottage it was nearing 11pm. We sat around having drinks, which quickly progressed into too much drinks when we started playing the drinking game I made up, The Two Towers. This was regurally interupted by getting hit in the face by Nerf guns that Neil bought, and by wrestling.

It was a really good night, but it didn't end well for me or Liam. Everytime I closed my eyes I'd have to get up to be sick. Liam was the same, but didn't bother getting up.

I was woke up at 7am, by Neil throwing things at me. It was horrible. I could only have slept for a few hours, and we didn't even need to leave the cottage until about 10:30. This set the theme for the day... me feeling tired and rough.

We went to the clay pigeon shooting, something I've wanted to do for a long time, but hadn't thought to put it on my 100+ Things To Do List.

I wasn't too bad. I managed to hit my first and last ones, and another 8 inbetween (10 out of 30). The shotguns had a kick, which made some people bruised. They let me pose with the shotgun for a picture.

When we got back I still felt rough. We stopped for food on the way back, thinking it could help. I had a really big rack of ribs. It didn't help at all.

Tom and Sunny turned up at about 5, and drinking and Fifa started shortly after. I could barely stomach any alcohol, and a few others were still feeling the effects of the night before.

My friends had provided my clothing for the night... it was a horrible long pink jumper-tshirt thing. It looked pretty tragic. I needed to withdraw money, so I had to go to Tesco wearing it. I got lots of looks.

Tom and Sunny had planned some games where we split into two teams. The losers in each would have to drink a shot each. The games were as follows:

- Boat Race (all 4 people on each time stand in a line, after the first person downs a can of beer, the next starts, until everybody has). When you finish you put the drink on your head. I couldn't finish. I could barely start. So I ended up with it all over my head.

- Wheelbarrow Race

- 4 Man Long Jump

- Javlin (throwing a stick at a certain part of a tree)

- Piggy Back Race (Leigh lost balance, landing straight on top of me... but we still won)

- Head on a mop and spinning after having 2 shots

- The worst game... somebody stands on a wall and each team member runs forward, catches as much alcohol in their mouth as they can, and spits it into a bowl. When all the alchol is gone the team wins. The losing team drinks the bowls of both teams. Luckily we won that. Below you can see Lee not looking too eager, and Joe feeling the effects of his part.

I felt even worse after the games. Because of the night before, I felt so rough, tired and dehydrated that I was struggling to get drunk. Each shot seemed to just make me feel sicker, as opposed to get me drunker. This meant I felt very self-concious when I had to put on the next costume...

I didn't want to go out wearing it, as I thought nobody would let us in, but I agreed to put it on under my normal clothes.

We decided to play the "Tell Them" rule for the holiday. The rule is that if somebody says something about someone, and somebody says "tell them", they have to go and tell them. The only way to avoid it is by saying "stop" immediately after they make the comment. The funniest time someboy was 'got' was when Liam said "this DJ is shit". Watching him walk over to the DJ, and watching the most painful conversation that seemed to go on far longer than it needed too was so funny.

Later on we went to another place, where we were dancing. I was still finding it hard to stomach shots. The cocktails I could handle, though they made me look gay. Later on during the dancing my friends all took their tops off, revealing an army of Captain Vestmen!! At this point Sunny ripped off my shirt (literally) and I was having to wear the extremely tight latex suit. Nothing was left to the imagination.

Afterwards we went to a different club. It was free to get in, but was incredibly shit, but not in a too tragic way. It was pretty dead, but it didn't matter much. I was a little drunker by this point, but still really tired. If it was a normal night I would have wanted to leave hours before, but I soldiered on.

By the end of the night we had lost Neil, Joe, Sunny and Tom. Liam was busy walking around telling people how muscley they were, and I was like a zombie.

Regardless of how rough I felt, it was a really good night (made up by having really good people going). I didn't get to wear a vest, but I was still able to pose.

My Cactus, Rarey.

I have a cactus. It is about the only botanical thing I am capable of caring of. When I was 21 I decided I would love to have a Bonsai tree, one that was as old as I was (similar to the Whiskey, which is kind of what I did as an alternative). I once tried growing a Bonsai, but it failed miserably.

Anyway, I am going off track. When I was in primary school we went to the botanical gardens in Birmingham. It was a nice place, with loads of plants, and some really, really big cactuses. I was smaller, and the cactuses looked huge. I thought they would just keep growing until they were killed by something (which wouldn't be lack of water, at least for a while). This scared me a little bit. Even though it scared me, I still wanted to buy two. I bought a traditional long thin one, and one that looked different, I can't properly describe it. I had seen both at the botanical gardens, and both were really big.

I was instantly worried. I now owned these cacti, and had to care for them. I just had vision of them becoming huge, and taking over my house, and then having no garden because they took it all up, and my family been really angry. I don't remember telling anyone these fears, but I must have since the teacher followed me out of school to tell my mom that I was really worried, and that I shouldn't be since there won't be a problem.

It sounds quite irrational that I was so worried, but there is a reason.

When I was younger my mom used to tell me a story. The story goes as follows (this is completely from memory, and I am sure there are similar versions):

While out walking in the mountains a man found an egg. It was all alone so the man decided to take it home and care for it. Eventually the egg hatched, but he couldn't recognise the creature inside. It was hairy, a bit like a bear but with aspects of all different animals in it. As it got bigger he knew that this wasn't like any creature seen in the world. Because of this he decided to call it a "Rarey".

The rarey continued to grow, and grow, and grow. It didn't stop. The man was getting worried. It was becoming hard to keep it in his house. It had gotten so big, and was so unusual that he knew if anybody noticed it they would take it away from him, and probably experiment. The man was worried for the rarey's life.

One day the rarey had gotten so big, bigger than the man, that he decided he had to do the most humane thing he could think of, and kill it quickly before anybody managed to get it. He took the rarey to the place where he found it, in the mountains. He grabbed a stick and threw it off the side off the side of a really high cliff. The rarey ran at it, but stopped just before the cliff. He tried this a couple of times, to no avail. The man had to change his plan. He told the rarey to look over the edge of the cliff, and as he walked forward the man followed. The rarey looked down, and the man was just about to push it, when the rarey turned around, with a big tear in his eye, and said...

"It's a long way to tip a rarey".

The end line has to be sang, to the really popular 1914 song, "It's long, long way to Tipperary".

I had always thought of this, and I pictured the cactus as my Rarey. It isn't entirely untrue though, the cactus started off being about 3" tall, and now look at it!

Sadly, the plant-like cactus didn't survive due to being knocked over and destroyed by something.