Staggering stags and superhero roadkill

By Mark Perkins, 26 May 2011

And lo, Mr Incredible, watched by an assembled, cheering crowd, muscles rippling, stood before the blacked out windscreen of a gleaming new Range Rover. With a raised hand he commanded it to stop and, summoning all his powers, placed his hands on the bonnet to push it backwards.

"Given the reputation for organised crime, guns and gang violence in Puerto Banus," I said to the person next to me, "this is probably not a very wise move."

Sure enough as my friend, from a day of drinking on his stag do and now condemned to don fancy dress - demanded the 4x4 moved back, the driver clearly wasn't in on the joke and thought otherwise. He lurched forward and ran him over. Winding down his window, to reveal more than a passing resemblance to Niko Belic from Grand Theft Auto, he waited with cold, dead piercing East-European eyes for my friend to stand up and get his bearings, "Next time I finish you."

Imagine all of us returning home, hungover and full of remorse at Gatwick, presenting the bride-to-be with a coffin containing one dead stag. Dressed as a beaten up Mr Incredible. It certainly would've put a dampener on the wedding.

It all begs the question who the hell invented the British stag weekend? My money might be on Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and it was an even bigger regret for him than the atom bomb. It was one thing when it was just a night, but doing it once and then repeating all over again, invariably on foreign shores, is asking for trouble.

The notion of a few ales down the local, a sing song and maybe a peck on the cheek from a tassle-swinging saucy stripper called Stacey has long gone. The previous stag do I went on was in Kuala Lumpar of all places, and included a performance in a strip club that has put me off table-tennis for life. Even now when I hear Boris Johnson talking up the origins of what he calls "wiff-waff' as a British gentleman's after-dinner parlour game I shudder. Do you know what they do with ping-pong balls in the Far East?

In your 20s there is the "activity stag do'. This is when the best-man, usually someone with military aspersions whom you've never met and no one else but the groom knows, thinks it a terrific idea for you and a bunch of other poor sods to pay a fortune pursuing a worthy "masculine' outdoors activity. An activity you'd never in your wildest nightmares pay to do.

The one and only time anyone ever charged me with organising a stag do I had it drummed into me by other attendees "We have to have an activity". So I booked kart racing, against my better judgement. The groom and I knew better and spent a night on the town taking in an exceptional evening of Chas and Dave at the 100 Club, thus rendering us both incapable of taking the wheel the next morning.

It doesn't get any easier as you get older, stag dos are few and far between. Almost everyone is married and only allowed off the leash in a pack, some possibly for the first time in many years. Cue the incessant contact from their wife.

Puerto Banus - looks likes Cannes and smells like St Tropez, but it's neither. Image: _DODO

I surveyed my companions at the poolside and they looked like The Dirty Dozen, but with disposable income. Clearly this was not going to be a weekend in Spain spent sipping sherry and admiring old churches.

We should all be relieved to have made it through two successive nights without being taken out in a drive-by. Even the golf trip that I missed for obvious reasons [I don't like golf], in favour of Anadin and iced water down at the beach, proved to have a near death experience. One chap and Mr Incredible managed to flip the golf buggy at the 18th hole.

The worst scars we bore at Malaga airport on Sunday night were purely psychological. By my count, there's only me and a friend, currently working in the wine trade in Sydney, left to have stag nights. Unless we get lapped by someone getting divorced and rapidly hitched, which given my own lax circumstances and that said friend is going out with a stripper, there's every possibility of that.

Are we alone in our oddity? Recently, Newsnight sent a crew all the way to Beijing to highlight how hard it is for urban Chinese men to find a suitable partner. They could've saved the time and a fortune in our license fees by coming to meet me in Surrey - and I've got my own home and a QPR season ticket over my Beijing brethren.

In Chechnya, however, they have a traditional route to dealing with this whole issue. If a man sees an unmarried woman he would like to be with he has two options. The first is to introduce himself and ask if she is available for courtship. The second is much more straightforward: he kidnaps her with the aid of his mates and takes her back to his village where she is held by his family. The latter often follows as a result as a failure of the former. The more direct, insecure Chechen man just goes straight for number two.
It begs the question - what is it that gun-toting Chechens do for a stag weekend? Presumably, if Saturday night is anything to go by, they go to Marbella and run down Englishmen in Mr Incredible costumes for fun.