Stick Around and Laugh Awhile.

When I was 17, I started work in a bank, my first month in the bank included 3 weddings.

This was a huge thing - three of the brides worked beside me, and as part of the marriage ritual the "Hen Night" included the making of the coat. Although the Hen Night was planned, the Bride was never invited to the night of the "Coat Making". At the coat making, we would sit around and fold Tissues to make flowers, drink wine, get very drunk, and then the next day count and see if we had sufficient flowers to sew onto the coat.

On the night of the Hen, we would descend upon the home of the Bride. dress her in her "Beautifully decorated" coat and hat, present her with a potty, also bedecked in flowers, and head off for a night of drunken debauchery.

The crawl would start at one end of the town, and every pub would be visited, with the Bride being passed around collecting pennies for kisses. The drunker we got, the worse we behaved. We realised that most of the men in the pubs were totally trashed, and it wasn't unheard of for us to leave the pub, someone else put the coat on, and go back in for a second round.

Very grand way to make money and there were enough of us, that if anyone tried anything further than a discreet peck, a slap would be handed out, or someone else's lips slipped in place of the "virginal" bride.

Most of these evenings ended in a local night club, with very few arrests, but lots of vomiting; and the bride was normally better off by £100 quid or more -- with no horrific memory of what she had to endure to earn the dosh!