Welsh prefer Euro-style hen and stag parties

THE Welsh will spend an astounding £551 each travelling abroad on stag and hen parties in 2005.
Rather than host just another night out at a local club, couples are now jetting off on their separate ways to celebrate singledom's end - European style.
One in three invited on a pre-wedding bash will head overseas this year bringing the total British spending to £430m, a new report found.
Spain is the favourite destination for a quarter of all stags and hens. Then comes the Netherlands (23%) and France (15%).
Cheap flights are fuelling the trend, as is the promise of cheaper alcohol and all-night partying.

Airlines such BMIbaby, EasyJet and Ryanair now travel to destinations across Europe and flights cost as little as £10 each way.
On offer in the continent's capital cities is a varied menu from laid-back cosmopolitan cool to hedonistic partying.
Hotels are relatively cheap and there's plenty to see and do. Bars stay open late, as do Budapest's thermal springs, if you fancy a midnight swim.
Visit Parisian flea markets for some retail therapy. Helsinki's Arctic Ice Bar boasts walls built with 20cm-thick ice cubes and plenty of Finnish vodka to keep you warm.
Beer festivals like Germany's Oktoberfest draw crowds from across the world, and Amsterdam's vibrant nightlife is a popular choice for roaming stags and their friends.
But while celebrating, one in five will lose valuables, 10% will have items stolen and 17% will require medical attention after sports or drunken accidents, warns the survey for online bank Egg"

Stag and hen play hits Chester this month

WITH lots of beauties in the same ladies' toilet, what else could it be but a rehearsal for Stags and Hens by Willy Russell - the latest production to be staged by the Chester Theatre Club.

Creating the roles of the 'hens' in Chester are Sophie Lund, Valerie Maguire, Fiona Vickery, Louise Gornall and Helen Williams.

The play is sponsored by Chester solicitors, Walker Smith Way.

Director Anthony Wheatcroft said: 'It's set in the gents' and ladies' toilets of a tacky Liverpool night-club because, by a fluke, the bride and groom-to-be have both chosen the same venue for their respective stag and hen nights.

'The toilets are the only places where the girls can escape from the boys and vice versa.

'It's an extremely funny play, as you might expect from the author of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, but like those two plays, it also has its thoughtful moments.

'Linda, the bride, meets up with an old boyfriend and wonders whether marriage is the right thing or whether she'll end up trapped and disappointed, with nothing more to look forward to than buying a new vacuum cleaner.

'And when we consider that Dave, the groom, spends his entire stag night with his head down the toilet bowl as a result of too much curry and Guinness earlier, the same thought enters the audience's head.'

Location: The Little Theatre, Gloucester Street, Newtown, Chester

Dates: Monday, March 14-Saturday, March 19

Times: 7.30pm

Box office: 01244 322674

Accident Prone

According to this article from the BBC men are the most accident prone with four times as many stags losing personal items as hens, and twice as many falling victim to theft.
Stags are also fourteen times more likely than hens to end up visiting the local hospital, usually nursing broken bones and bruises. "

430 million on Stag and Hen parties

For some, marriage is not a word but a sentence. For others it has become a sentence that they find impossible to pronounce without slurring.
Today’s survey by the world’s largest online insurance company calculates that Britons are going to spend £430 million on stag and hen parties abroad this year — an average of £551 per aching head. One in ten will have something stolen. One in five will need medical attention after sports or drunken accidents. One in 20 is likely to be arrested. The statistics are as fascinating as the destinations are diverse. Did Eastern European nations acceding to the EU realise that being a buck’s party paradise was in the deal?

Stag parties for young bucks on the razzle, and (in these days of equal opportunities to binge) hen parties, were originally American terminology. But the practice of bachelors and merry maidens seeing their friends off for their great leap in the dark on a tide of alcohol is older than Sir Toby Belch.

Nor is there anything new in the prudence of insuring for these jaunts. Leave aside Actaeon’s rather unfortunate stag night. The joint stag and hen party for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis ended in discord, when a golden paintball was fired into the party. Out of that celebration came most of Western mythology and literature.

Like marriage itself, stag and hen nights may be nature’s way of keeping people from fighting with strangers. Britons have always had a beastly reputation for drunkenness. Perhaps cynical modern hens and stags can claim that their gaudy nights are merely a preparation for the hurly-burly of modern marriage. More likely, they are just another excuse to drink too much.

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IF I WERE Japanese, where left-handedness in a wife is a suitable reason for divorce, I think I might have taken a somewhat more cavalier attitude to marriage.
As a southpaw, I could have hurled myself into any mismatched union with abandon, hanging around just long enough to host the party, open the gifts and cut the cake, before merrily left-footing it on to the next matrimonial path, and the next big Champagne reception.
As it is, though, my life has been untouched by married bliss. I have never tried on a dress shaped like a dessert, nor danced a spotlit waltz in front of everyone I’ve ever met. The last time a man fell to his knees in my presence it was to search for the jaw he dropped when I told him how much I spent in Harvey Nichols last weekend.

Now I’m not trawling for sympathy here, for this is in no way a mournful state of affairs. None of my friends are married, plenty are still single and, apart from my friend Kate, who has been engaged roughly since the time the motor car was introduced to this country and still hasn’t got round to organising a wedding yet, none of them show any imminent signs of defecting.
I’m quite relieved about this. For years I’ve been listening to colleagues moan about the amount of money they’ve had to shell out in order to attend an old friend’s marital union, but now I see the whole shebang has been taken up a notch. According to a new report, we Brits are planning on spending a whopping £430 million this year on stag and hen parties.

That’s £551 per person which, while admittedly close to the aforementioned figure spent in Harvey Nichols last weekend, seems really rather frivolous for what is - when all is said and done - just one night. Even more amusing to note is that 20 per cent of those attending will apparently lose valuables, and 10 per cent will have their stuff stolen. Possibly by other stag and hen attendees who couldn’t scrape up the cash in time.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for a big bash, and the chance to celebrate your happiness with your nearest and dearest. But the amount of days, nights and weekends attached to a simple hitching nowadays seems somewhat preposterous.
Who on earth needs a wedding breakfast, for example? Or a pre-ceremony dinner? What can you possibly do there that you can’t do on the day, apart from eat too much smoked salmon?
Anyway, why should a wedding be celebrated so much more than a new job, for example, or significant weight loss?
Both are guaranteed to put a smile on your face, and if the statistics are to be believed, will probably last longer too.

My wedding, if I have one, will not be a quiet affair, but it will be a "one day only" affair. I will solemnly promise not to take valuables from my guests, nor demand they shell out £600 for a weekend in Prague where everyone will get so drunk they will board the wrong plane home and end up in Wokingham.
In fact, all I ask is that they turn up, preferably having combed their hair first. And - unless they’re planning a similar do - that they leave me off their own wedding guest list. That’s not too much to ask, now is it?

Hen nights '£551 a head', says Egg

THE trend for holding stag and hen nights abroad has pushed the average cost of going to one to £551 per person, according to a new report.

And the vogue for heading to destinations such as Barcelona, Prague, Dublin and Amsterdam has resulted in the British spending more than £400 million a year on celebrations.

The research, commissioned by Egg insurance, involved 2,300 adults. It reveals that the top foreign destination for the past five years for Britons celebrating before a friend’s wedding is Spain, which hosted one in four parties abroad.

Holly Lowe, the marketing manager for Red Seven, which specialises in organising stag and hen parties, said: "I think that as people are getting married later in life, they have more disposable income and therefore can push the boat out a bit more.

"Also, the fact they are a bit older, means that they’ve been to more stag or hen parties, and so they’ve a better idea about what sort of fun that can be had.

"Of course, there is also the fact that short-haul flights are so much cheaper now, it means that people can satisfy their desire to do something a bit different. They can go to Barcelona, have a good time and catch some sun."

Neil Hamblen, 29, from Glasgow, who went to Las Vegas with a group of friends for his stag party, said that it was worth the cost: "It’s something that you’re only really going do once in your life, so it’s worth doing properly. I think we spent a grand each, but it was absolutely brilliant.

"It’s a great excuse to have your friends gather together to celebrate such an important event. It also beats going to the Grassmarket in Edinburgh."

However, the research also reveals the flip-side to the fun and partying, showing that the events can be dangerous, ending for some in hospital visits, arrest or searches for lost valuables as a result of drunken behaviour.

The report says that about one in four Britons will lose valuable items while partying abroad, 10 per cent will have items such as purses, wallets and mobile phones stolen, 9 per cent will need medical attention, 4 per cent will suffer food poisoning and a similar number will end up in police cells.