Lad’s weekends are the best weekends. The kind that involve leaving town and having some quality time off from the real world.
Lad’s weekends are the best weekends. The kind that involve leaving town and having some quality time off from the real world. There’s nothing like that feeling when you step off a train in one of the UK’s other major cities and know for the next one, maybe two, days you can behave like a prized idiot and no one will judge you. In fact, the further you descend into this Zen like state of idiocy the better, because if you don’t get it out your system now, when will you??
I’m sure all the men out there will agree that there’s an idiot inside of all of us, just waiting to jump out at any moment. It’s only natural then that sometimes, you to have to unleash your inner idiot, preferably in a controlled manner away from any clear and present danger.
As you may have guessed, I’m currently en route to a boy’s weekend. Well it’s not exactly a weekend, more of an overnighter really. Since turning thirty I seem to have lost my ability to tackle two nights out in quick succession. I’ve become the Ledley King of the social circuit, one big fixture then it is back to the bench to let my body recuperate. Don’t get me wrong, I put in some heroic performances when I do take the field, even if I do say so myself.
I’m sure my friends would agree. I still live by the philosophy I did five years ago, which is to go hard or go home. Pick your matches and give everything you have, then when you leave the field battered and bruised, you know you gave it all for a worthy night out. Tonight is one of those nights. At least I think it is anyway, I’ve never had a quiet night in Bournemouth. I suppose some fixtures just bring out the most in you, Bournemouth usually brings out the best in me for some reason. It’s almost the capital of idiocy for me, although I think that honour should really go to Leeds. Either way, they both are great choices for a lad’s weekend, whether you’re running down the street with a stolen foghorn (Bournemouth) or having your head trapped in a taxi door (Leeds), memories like this stay with you forever.
Even if you aren’t the one remembering them and it’s someone else who’s filled you in on your outlandish behaviour.
These weekends are few and far between now I’m neck deep into my masters and watching an alarming number of my friends succumb to the lifelong abstention from idiocy that is marriage. We still factor these weekends into our calendar though, because I think we all want to experience a night like that one in The Hangover, at least once in our lives. Especially us men, its right up there on our to-do list along with the other big life events like getting married or having kids. We also want to get so drunk that we wake up with Mike Tyson’s tiger or a smoking monkey.
This is the benchmark that all men subliminally maintain in the back of their minds, and this is why we behave like morons when we get together for our 24 or 48 hours off from the world. My decision to pick up that foghorn from behind the bar whilst my comrade performed an elaborate diversion, wasn’t premeditated. It was simply my inner idiot trying to raise the bar. It takes several combined acts of madness like this to induce what is commonly known as a state of ‘carnage.’ Now this word is used far too often nowadays, along with many others like ‘legend’ and ‘nightmare.’
Real carnage involves things being thrown, broken and stolen, all at once. A fine example of this which I have literally just remembered for the first time (!) occurred on a stag do (lad’s weekend) last year. Someone stole several items of fruit from behind a bar, threw one of them (an orange) across the room, and had a nightmare when he nearly broke a window. Rather than becoming a ‘legend’ he had a ‘nightmare’ after nearly taking a young girls head off with the aforementioned fruit. Shortly afterwards another member of our group went straight through the chair he sat on, and all of a sudden, just like that, we were in a state of carnage.
This may have been the second bar we went to, I’m not sure, but as we all know, things can escalate very quickly on a lad’s weekend. One minute you’re watching the football and chewing the fat, the next you’re watching your mate ‘go west’ and wondering why his eyes are pointing in different directions. It’s the sheer unpredictability of it all that I love. The only thing you can predict is that something ridiculous will happen.
Let’s just hope tonight that doesn’t involve having my head slammed in a taxi door. I’m getting way too old for that.
What are your memories of a lad’s weekend? Have your say in the comments section below, on Facebook or on Twitter.
