Neil's Stag

As usual, it takes the imminent arrival of the actual wedding for me to find time to post about the stag do, which was a couple of weeks back over the weekend of the 28th May.

The proceedings started like this…
And the weekend ended like this…
But fear not! All is not what it seems.

The build-up to the weekend started on the Friday evening - Neil, Dixon and I headed into Rusholme for a curry, and then wound up in Withington for a few drinks, but not too many - the big day was to come.

First thing Saturday, we headed over to Knutsford to Delta Force Paintball. Upon arrival, our convoy of Integrale and Nissan 350Z caused a bit of a stir with the guys at the gate, but I’m sure that was overshadowed moments later by the guy arriving in his Ferrari.

We then proceeded to spend far too much on paintballs, as we seemed to get through them at a rate of knots. Excellent fun, as usual, although Neil found that he seemed to attract more fire once the marshalls had discovered he was on his stag do and so kitted him out in a fluorescent jacket.

Once we’d finished trying to get Neil as many bruises as possible, we headed back to Manchester to our hotel on Piccadilly. Showered and changed, we then headed over to the Frog and Bucket comedy club, via a few bars, and met up with the guys who hadn’t made it to the paintballing.

The only comedian I’d heard of, Richard Herring, unfortunately had a terrible night, as you can read here. We weren’t the stag do that he incorrectly picked on, as there was another one there too - but that gave headline act Alex Boardman plenty of victims as he delivered a hilarious set that was a better fit with the audience.

We didn’t stay at the comedy club for their “legendary classic disco” but headed to The Printworks and spent the rest of the night partying in the Norwegian Blue bar till it closed.

On Sunday, we took a detour on our route home to call into St. Helens so we could visit the notable absentee from the weekend and owner of the broken leg pictured above. Stocky has done a pretty good job of smashing his leg playing rugby just a few weeks before the stag do, so had to miss out on that, and the wedding. At least we could give him a taste of the evening with some poor quality footage of some poor quality dancing that I’d captured on my phone the night before…