Trying to live like a rock star - Dan Gent memorial 7 aside football tour - a.k.a stag do...

---

After Dan Gent made the big decision of asking Em to marry him, he then made a crazy request in asking me to be his best man. It was a request I was honoured to accept, and of course along with a host of surely important things that I'd have to do there was one task that stood head and shoulders above all the others – organising the stag do!!

After a few early ideas were rejected (apparently a motorcycle trip through Vietnam is just TOO dangerous 6 weeks before a wedding!!), we settled on living life as rock stars for 3 and a half days by hiring a rock band tour bus to take us on a road trip to Amsterdam and Brugges!! The only slight snag was that we were pretending to be a 7 a side indoor football team as none of the companies I got in touch with would even consider taking a group of “young professionals” that were looking to do a “holiday” that was a little bit different!!

The bus was meeting us at Tesco, Basingstoke to allow us to stock up on the necessary supplies (i.e. beer!) beforehand. Here, Usher Moss disgraced himself with the poor amount of beer he wanted to buy for the trip. He seemed to have budgeted for 3 beers per person per night – we were here for a rock star party not a tea party!! Bad Moss!! After Gent and I threw some money at the situation we ended up with a suitable amount of beer – our driver Lee even commented that we had a better rider than most of the rock bands he takes on tour!!

To help time pass, Moss, Randy and I had also worked to produce a team “tour brochure” to commemorate the trip. It included a hugely accurate photo and detailed player profile – which turned out to be non too complimentary in each case. Moss made the mistake of writing mine before I wrote his, so I knew that I could unleash the full spectrum of abuse on him – which I duly did!

We were taking the last ferry of the night to Calais before driving through the night to Amsterdam. This gave us plenty of time to get acquainted with the bus, its two lounges, multiple fridges, DVD player and massive widescreen TV. It also allowed us to get acquainted with Gent's friends that some of us hadn't met before – especially Owen – who soon established his new nickname as Toucan as he always seemed to have two cans of beer in his hands!!

The first “hurdle” to overcome was the ferry journey, and here Toucan loaded up on pink vodka and Jagermeister – some of which he was offering to the very scared looking German exchange students (aged about 13) that were sitting at the next table. The phrase “grooming” was mentioned but Toucan survived without being arrested!

From landing in France it was a straight evening of beer and jagermeister for the stag, with plenty of tunes blasting out and plenty of banter being had. The survivors made it through till dawn when we arrived in Amsterdam – the stag wasn't one of them having passed out in a traditional gent neck breaking position earlier in the night!!

When organising the trip part of me had worried about sorting some sort of activity each day to ensure that the group of us weren't bored (a beer museum or brewery tour was the type of thing we were thinking!), but given we'd been up till dawn, by the time all 10 of us were awake, showered changed and ready to go (big shout out to Lee for finding us a campsite just on the outskirts of Amsterdam with power and showers – we had not thought of the fact that we needed to be hooked up to a power source to keep the DVD player and fridges going!!) it was late afternoon.

At this point we had confessed to Lee that we weren't actually a football team, we were just a bunch of lads out to party, and he took it well. I think it actually made it easier for him as he didn't have to do any driving to sports grounds to pick up / drop off! We got ready to head into town and it seemed the right time to give our kind gift to the stag.... We didn't want him to risk damaging any of his own clothes on the trip so we had supplied him with a selection of outfits – the only issue being that they were mainly luminous, and entirely women's!! Basingstoke's charity shops had done me proud!!

We found a bar in Amsterdam that supported our needs with a €5 beer and burger deal and €1 shots of Jagermeister. Jamie went off and secured the necessary Amsterdam culture, and we were all set. We then threw into the mix a pool table and a game of killer pool where wherever you lost a life you had to do a shot, with the added bonus of whenever the white ball was potted, the stag had to do a shot “just for luck”. Who said life was fair!!

Dan kept disappearing off to the bathroom and I thought that it was just his notoriously weak bladder that meant he had to do so many trips. In fact all of the shots had given him a bit of an upset tummy – but he carried on regardless – what a trooper!!

After several more bars and pubs, the time had come round to 4 a.m. and nowhere seemed to be open (or willing to let us in!!). A top first night out on the town!!

Onwards to Brugges, and again it was a suitably late start to the day as we bar-hopped around one of Europe's most cultural cities – bringing the level down everywhere we went – especially when Moss and Paul gave us their worryingly competent displays of upside pole dancing in one of the bars we visited, and when Shaun fed Toucan chilli sauce in the restaurant we ate at and “accidentally” threw it down his shirt – about four times in a row!!

We ended up in a rock bar that did incredibly cheap shots. Being the kind best man that I am, having nursed Gent to the final bar which cunningly happened to be only a short stumble back to the tour bus, I made sure I allowed Dan to sample these, and I think that Joe had similar ideas too. Unbelievably, it led to Gent bypassing the inevitable removal of clothes and just stripping down to his boxer shorts himself!! At that time it seemed appropriate to leave the bar and head back to the coach. It may have been a short stumble, but it was plenty long enough for Gent's boxers to be lost, and for his incredibly fetching gilet to be cast into the canal and go merrily floating away!!

There was still time for things to happen that cannot be reprinted in this blog, and photos that cannot be uploaded to happen. But in this case what goes on tour will stay on tour!! We got back to the bus and partied hard through the night – so hard that Lee had to come up at one point and give us the immortal telling off “not even Kasabian got up to this – sort yourselves out!”.

Gent, hopefully what you can remember of it was an absolute blast – it was a pleasure being your best man and being part of the stag do!!

---

Photos

"Rock Star" Tour bus
A motley crew assemble before heading into Amsterdam to try and emulate the likes of Blur and Mumford & Sons who had used that exact bus previously...

Stag feeling a little worse for wear...
...the traditional neck breaking position that Gent assumes after a night out!

Moss shows us his skills...
...and he's worryingly good!!