I have only ever been to handful of weddings. First, I don’t have that many friends. Second, the friends I do have, are mostly single. Third, a clutch of my closest friends got married in Scotland in the 6 weeks after I’d had either Sam or Kitty. So I couldn’t go.
And now I am 35 and the weddings have really dried up. I have always listened with envy and wonder and mystification to anyone complaining about “all the weddings”.
“Every weekend!” They screech. “I’ve got a wedding every weekend between now and September!” They throw their hands in the air thinking of the logistics, the cost, what they’re going to wear.
I turn away and feel a bit sad and lost.
But! I managed to get married anyway and I didn’t meet him at a wedding. And if I was somehow very involved in someone’s wedding and had to do a hen party I would go directly to this company I just found, called Glam Hatters, which will throw a tea party (with booze) where everyone gets to make a hat. (It’s not just for hen parties, obviously.)
This would be especially excellent, I think, if that someone getting married was in the 33-40 bracket, where just going out for a big screechy dinner wearing L-Plates doesn’t really wash.
I understand from regular wedding guests that weddings mostly happen from May-September, so be sure to look into booking Glam Hatters now, as they will be getting busy.
If you have a brilliant recommendation for a hen party, do please leave a comment about it in the handy box below.
I did my best friends hen at Choccywoccydodahs in Brighton – we had a chocolate tea party in their “Secret Garden” room. It was great, we could take a couple of bottles of fizz and eat as much as we wanted from the table or ordered fresh from the cafe. It’s perfect if you want something day time & low alcohol.
We’re going for a Martini and Macaron experience (!) for my best friend’s hen http://www.ohlala.co/phone/index.html Two kids down the line I think I’m looking forward to this wedding more than my own….
My proudest ever achievement was organising my best friend’s hen. She wanted the party to be in her flat so there was no faffing about trying to get home at 2am, drunk with no shoes. So while she got ready at another friend’s nearby we installed a full sized, real cocktail bar, complete with neon lights and friendly barman who proceeded to serve us all night from the massive stash of booze we had bought. I think he might have taught us how to make cocktails too. It’s all a bit blurry. But the best bit was the look on the bride-to-be’s face when she walked in and saw it.
I recently went to a perfume mixing afternoon at 4160tuesdays in West London. A group of us smelled many things, chose ingredients for “our group perfume” and also did a little bit of individual mixing.
I’ve come away with two handbag sized 9ml sprays – one of the perfume we mixed together and one of my own personal favourite smell.
A warning – lots of the guests bought more perfume and may have ended up spending a lot of money.
I am trying to sort out my own hen do but am too busy (read: lazy) to do any research so this is all very helpful, thanks.
This would be quite ££££ and part of me violently objects to how OTT and seemingly obligatory hen parties have become. But a really lovely riad in Marrkech would be great for a hen party. Rooftop dinners, massages in the hammam and wandering around the markets.
As a veteran of around five billion weddings and hen weekends, I’ve done that slightly smug, exasperated run of “we’ve got twenty-two weddings this summer” (subtext: Aren’t we so popular and aren’t all my girlfriends massively eligible and marry-able), which afterwards makes you want to smash your own face in and tear up ‘Mr and Mrs’ quizzes whilst foaming at the mouth at the notion of a fun weekend in a country house.
I’ve also organised my fair share of hen weekends as Most Dependable Friend i.e. best at screwing £370 out of everybody for the fun weekend and dealing with the inevitable insanity of the bride as she thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to ask everyone to cough up an extra pony of cash because wouldn’t it be a hoot to have a private pod on the London Eye?
This dynamite combination makes me the best and worst person to offer advice on hen weekends. Because however lovely the notion is in normal, real life, the idea of making hats with people I went to school with makes me want to fucking kill myself and any best friend who suggests it, but also because the best hen experience you can have in my veteran, scorched experience is a low-key one, and that’s a free fact. I know we’re all supposed to be pulling a four-dayer handgliding in Cuba to show we’re all grown ups beyond the L-plate nastiness and impress the stags with our globetrotting daring, but there’s something better about keeping it small and cool: Late morning drinks at the friend with nicest house; photographer (friend of a friend’s random shag) to take a good photo of us all together; lunch in a great restaurant that none of us had ever been to that went on until dawn. Throw in a dead cat and an irate cab driver and you’ve got some memories. That was my hen day. Good because it didn’t feel like a hen weekend. Plus we all got a great black and white photo of us all together looking our finest, youthful selves and that’s blown up on my kitchen wall.
On the other hand, I’m a total misery and you should do what the hell you all want for your hen day.
Thanks Tess, this ranks in my top five all-time favourite comments on The Spike x
Why thank you. We don’t get invited to weddings any more as everyone is ‘done’ and no one is over so we haven’t hit second marriages yet. If we do, I’m hoping sense will prevail and no one will wear a white dress or suggest “a long weekend skiing for the girls”. Second time around though perhaps you’re allowed to stage an intervention and bitch slap your friends back to sanity?
Then again there’s something lovely about the rite of passage that is an over-the-top hen night/weekend. Watching a bunch of hens getting shitfaced in a pub in Cornwall or in a private London Eye pod is an odd mix of nostalgia, well-wishing and embarrassment. It’s a bit like the wedding. Afterwards you realise it was all very nice but really it’s just a pointless piece of bollocks. Fretting over a seating plan and the ‘line of your train’ (I mean, I ask ya….It’s just mortifying in retrospect that I uttered this shit!) has nothing to do with a marriage. Or as my Grandmother wisely said, whilst puffing her illicit Dunhill, ” A wedding is not a marriage”. She was born in Southern Ireland a hundred years ago so there was none of that cupcake-decorating shit. It was making your own wedding dress on the kitchen table and hoping the honeymoon went well.