Name: The Great Stag Ban.
Age: Recent.
Appearance: An abandoned, vomit-stained mankini fluttering uselessly in the breeze.
Woy-oy. Shh, keep your voice down! They’ll hear you!
Who? The good people of Ghent, that’s who. They don’t take too kindly to your sort.
My sort? Are you profiling me? No. But, that said, I can see that you are visibly drunk, hoarse from shouting and wearing a T-shirt reading “LADZ BOOZE BONANZA 23.” You’re on your way to a stag weekend, aren’t you?
Maybe. Well, just stay away from Ghent, OK? You’re banned.
Banned? Well, almost. The city has long been blighted by beer bikes – huge vehicles where up to 20 people drink 50 litres of beer while pedalling around listening to deafening music. The council is considering a ban, due to the growing number of complaints.
Beer bikes sound like a laugh though! Not for everyone else. “The added value of beer bicycles for Ghent is limited and bystanders more often experience nuisance than pleasure,” said Bram Van Braeckevelt, the city’s councillor in charge of tourism.
Whatever! We were going to Galway anyway. Some say it’s the new Vegas for stag weekends. They’ll love us there! I’m not so sure they will if popular pub Tigh Neachtain is anything to go by. Management announced this week it was banning stag and hen parties “due to complete lack of space (and our locals)”.
Doesn’t matter. We’ll go to Amsterdam instead. WEYYYY AMSTERDAM! They don’t want you, either. In March the city launched an online advertising campaign designed to keep rowdy packs of British stags away. If you’ve recently Googled “Stag weekend Amsterdam” and found yourself overwhelmed by lots of unfriendly ads, that’s why.
Weyyyy Edinburgh? Nope. Members of the Edinburgh Old Town Association have proposed a similar ban to Amsterdam’s, saying that “Some types of tourist are better for the city.”
This is extremely sexist of all these places. No it isn’t. A lot of these places also want to ban hen nights, presumably because they’re fed up with trying to recycle thousands of flammable sashes and inflatable penises.
But this is my right as a stag! I guarantee you it isn’t. As soon as you suggested a weekend abroad for your stag, 75% of your friends didn’t want to go. It’s an imposition. It’s expensive. It’s one thing to follow the worst impulses of their fifth-best friend for three hours and then go back to your house, but to spend an entire weekend trying to claw back a semblance of your lost youth? Awful.
You’re boring. OK, fine. There’s a city I know where you can get hammered and unload a Kalashnikov inside a disused warehouse for about €50. LADZ LADZ LADZ!
Do say: “The foreign stag weekend is dying.”
Don’t say: “I guess we’ll all just have to get obnoxiously drunk at home instead.”
