Boys will be Boys

It was my good fortune and highest honour to be a groomsman for Neil Dynes back in September 2013. One of the duties I had been gifted was to organise was the stag do. The interesting thing is that now it is him and Jason the best man organising mine. It is a very stressful time when organising a stag do. You are responsible for ensuring the stag has a good time, making sure a large group of guys sign up and are taken care of.

For Dinky’s stag me and his best man sat him down and simply asked where he would like to go. Getting the location is half the battle. After a bit of convincing we settled him on Liverpool. He always talked about having a mad stag across the water.

Next we had to choose a date. For this we checked out the Easyjet app and looked at flights to Liverpool from Belfast international. The cheapest flights are what you are looking for. Keeping in mind that it should be at least a month before the wedding and most likely over a weekend. A top tip for choosing a stag in England from Ireland is to wait until the premiership is over for the summer as flights automatically get cheaper. In our situation we were able to get flights for around £80-90 return.
The next step is that we needed to set up a headquarters for when we get there. Since the stag do was spanning an entire weekend we needed to get accommodation so we could hang out as a group and not feel that we are missing out on Liverpool. Somewhere we could have a few beers and a bit of a laugh. I booked our accommodation on a website called www.staycity.com this site finds great accommodation in several different cities and at a great price. I ended up booking the penthouse apartment on Duke Street as well as another room since the party was so large. This room was amazing. It gave us our own slice of Liverpool and we all felt pretty cool out having a beer on the balcony.

The stressful bit about the organising came now. With the number of guys coming to the stag do the accommodation worked out to be £50 per person for two nights. Add that to the flights and we were looking at £140-150. It would be insane for any one of us to book everything ourselves and let the guys pay us back, since there was no idea of how many were actually able to make it. We decided that we could pay for the apartments ourselves and get everyone to book their own flights that way they could choose for come for 1 night, 2 nights, at a later time or not at all. This was great for all the guests as they had paid their flights well in advance and the only thing left to pay was the £50 for the accommodation, payable before or on arrival.

My top tip for organising a stag do, do not forgot that most hotels or apartments will charge a security deposit that you will get back. I did not remember this and ended up fronting the £250 deposit of one of the rooms. Needless to say bad idea! I was so stressed about getting my deposit back that every time I seen some roughhousing all I could think was “DONT BREAK ANYTHING”. The biggest thing is that nobody else felt responsible for it as they didn’t have to pay anything towards it.

We all had a great weekend. I had gone the extra mile and made up stag shirts, all the boys in white and the stag in yellow. They were designed like the Liverpool football jerseys with the stags picture in the crest and the sponsors logo was “Neilsstag – probably the best stag in the world” a play on the Carlsberg sponsors. On top of this all the shirts had funny names on the back personalised. To do this I checked out the sports direct website and get an eye out for cheap polo shirts, they worked out to be £4 per shirt. I also got some Iron on transfer printable paper from ebay. All that had to be done was make the designs, print them out, and iron them on the shirts.

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I had a bunch of drinking games organised, trophy’s for the last man standing and the first man down. All in all it was a good time and a good send off for any man. Now the tables have turned and I am the stag and have to take a back seat.