The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Dear Diary. Today was my brother's stag party. As best man, I was responsible for organising it.

We all met in Wetherspoons. In hindsight, any party that starts with Wetherspoons is doomed from the start.

There were seven of us: me, my dad, my brother, my brother-in-law Phil, and three of my brother's friends: John, Jamie, and Alex.

I hadn't seen Alex for over ten years. When I last saw him, he was a weird teenager. Now he's a weird man instead. Today he was all dressed in black, looked dishevelled, and had unkempt hair. He looked like Bernard Black from Black Books.

"The last time I saw you, you were being sick out the door of my car," I said to Alex. "It was your graduation party? I drove you home then I drove Adam home. When we got home, Adam sat on the table in the living room and started throwing oranges at me and laughing. I had to put Buffy the Vampire Slayer on TV to make him stop throwing oranges."

Alex muttered a few words. I couldn't hear him.

Sitting next to me was Adam's friend John. All John wanted to talk about was Game of Thrones.

"I've been to Ireland three times. That's where they shot Winterfell. I've been to Croatia to see King's Landing. And last year I went to Girona. But it was during the city's annual flower festival and it was the worst time to go because there were too many people."

He was probably the only person in Girona who wasn't there for the flower festival.

"So this summer I'm going to Iceland to see where they filmed Beyond the Wall," said John.

"Iceland?" said my dad, laughing. "I didn't know they filmed there. What was that, with the frozen peas?" He laughed at his own joke. Then he started telling us a story about when he and a friend were in the Iceland shop together. I stopped listening. That is, until I heard my dad say, "And then I picked him up by the legs and put him in the freezer!"

"You what, dad?" I said.

"I put him in the freezer."

I wondered if Iceland had to throw away all their stock after that.

"And then the best thing was," said my dad, "there were these shoplifters who were there too, and they ran out of the shop with armfuls of jaffa cakes."

"Have you ever read the Game of Thrones books?" I asked John.

"No," he said.

"Does anyone remember Gladiators?" said my dad.

"Of course we remember Gladiators," I said. What, does he think we're all ten years old?

"Well, there was this one called Nightshade. I met her husband, he came to my school. It was part of a sports event. He's a sports ambassador."

"Was Nightshade there?"

"Yeah, but she was in a wheelchair. She has health problems now."

"A gladiator came to open a furniture shop in Erdington once," I said. "I think it was Wolf."

After the Wetherspoons, we go to the first stag activity of the day: virtual reality. But Alex couldn't do it because he's poor and doesn't have a job. He's never had a job in all his life, in fact. He still lives at home with his mom and dad.

John didn't do it either. He's poor too.

A man led the rest of us into the equipment room. There were all these guns on shelves: pistols, rifles, shotguns. It was like the corridor of guns in The Matrix.

"What if we're smacking each other in the heads with our plastic guns, and going, 'It's okay, none of this is real,' but really we're beating each other to death?" I asked.

I don't think he'd been asked that question before.

We put on our helmets and the game started. Soon hordes of zombies were running towards us. There was one on my head. I had to turn my gun around to shoot it off.

The virtual reality was a success. Everyone had a good time. Everyone except John and Alex, who couldn't afford it.

We went to the next activity: go-karting.

Alex said he'd been preparing by playing a video game about Formula 1.

"You do know this is real life now, Alex?" said Adam. "This isn't a video game anymore. This is real."

"Alex'll be crashing into us, trying to drive us off the road like in GTA," said Jamie.

John joined in as well: "Alex, you'd better not drag me out of my car and try to headstomp me."

In the end, Alex didn't try to headstomp us, and we all had a reasonably good time racing each other around the track.

Next it was time for dinner. John recommended a restaurant called Cluck n Burger. So we all went there. It turned out the restaurant didn't exist anymore. It had shut down.

So we went to a different burger restaurant instead. As we were eating, my gum started hurting. I've had this on-and-off gum pain since December. The only thing that makes it go away is cleaning the back of my tooth out with an interdental brush. But I didn't have an interdental brush on me. I considered running to the Bullring to buy an interdental brush before Boots closed. Then I decided that after drinking three pints of beer, I was too drunk to get up and do that.

Earlier I had bought Adam a pink wig from the rag market but now I noticed he wasn't wearing it anymore.

"Adam, where's your wig?"

"Oh, I uh... accidentally left it at the go-karting."

Yeah right. More like left it there on purpose.

"So are you gonna get married, Paul?" asked Jamie.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Marriages end in divorce, don't they? So if you never get married, you can never get divorced."

Jamie laughed. "That's romantic."

"Neither me nor my girlfriend are romantic," I said. "Not anymore, not after having two kids. Now when we go to bed, we just say 'Good night' and turn off the light. In fact, I don't think we even say goodnight anymore."

"I've been married three years," said Jamie. "My wife's pregnant now. We're expecting a boy."

"That's when people get divorced: when the baby comes," I said. "That's when marriages break down, because of the stress of having a baby."

My brother Adam's getting married and having a baby in the next three months. I don't think he realises what lies in store for him.

After dinner, we didn't know what to do next. My itinerary had run out. We were now free-wheeling. Our group of stags were now directionless.

We found ourselves in a pub called The Spotted Dog. It was one of those traditional British pubs that looks like someone's living room: faded carpet, mahogany fittings. Random stuff displayed on the walls: creepy dolls, a pair of farmer's shears, sporting trophies. It was like being in your grandparents' house. It was about as far as you could get from an ideal stag party location as you could get.

After a pint in there, we trekked a mile to the city centre and went inside a bar called Bacchus. Each room was themed around a different era. There was an Egyptian room, an Edwardian room, a Roman room. We found a table in the Medieval room.

I was happy. I'd had four pints and I was feeling really good. I'd forgotten how good alcohol feels. I was ready to go to a club and dance with some 20-year-olds.

But when I looked around our stag party group, they were all standing around the table in silence. Everyone was staring at their drink or into space. Fuck. This was a disaster.

As Adam's best man, it was my job to get the stag party back on track.

"I think we should go to a club," I said.

Everyone looked at me as if I was mad. Tired, ashen faces. It was like looking at the faces of prisoners in Auschwitz.

I knew I had to do something to get the energy back up. So I went to the bar and bought a round of shots. Six Jeigermeisters plus a shot of tequila for Adam. The shot of tequila came with a slice of lemon and a packet of salt.

I took the shots to the table. Everyone's faces lit up. We drank the shots.

"Well, I'm going home," said Phil. He left.

"Well let's call it a night?" said Dad.

We caught a taxi home. My dad went to bed.

Adam started ranting to me about the stag party: "Sitting in a pub in silence," he said, disgusted. "This is what happens when you have a stag do in your thirties. If I was 25, it would have been a Great Gatsby experience. But at the age we're at now. we're all geriatric. Sitting there in silence and feeling Death's cold hand. Looking around me in the pub, these are the same people who would come to my funeral. This is what I've got after 31 years. Fuck me. What have I done with my life."

Adam tried to fall asleep on the sofa, complained it was cold, and then took a taxi home to Stafford. The taxi cost him 40 pounds.

The front door camera saw Adam leaving and sent a notification to my dad's phone. Dad came out his bedroom.

"Where's Adam gone?"

"He left in a taxi."

He tutted. "Bloody hell, he should have told me, he could have had my bed."

I went to bed too. But all the alcohol in my system meant I couldn't fall asleep so I went downstairs and read Doctor Who comic books instead.

I later found out Phil fell asleep on the train and missed his stop. He had to walk home. He couldn't call my sister for help because his phone had run out of battery.