I am 30. This can mean many things to many people but for the purposes of this blog it means only this - I have been to more than my fair share of hen dos. I have been to hen dos that were just a night out in town. I have been to hen dos away. I've been to hen dos with lots of people and hen dos with just a few. I've drunk out of those horrible willy straws, I've visited most major cities in the UK and I've even been to one hen do for a marriage which lasted about as long as Kim Kardashian's did. (And no I'm not exaggerating. And yes I did think about submitting an invoice to the 'happy' couple for all the costs associated with said hen do).
There's not a lot that can surprise me when it comes to hen dos. Until August 2013 and a visit to Bath for my cousin's hen do. Along with the standard willy straws, game of Mr & Mrs and horrifyingly accurate vagina and willy cake - the hens threw the greatest curve ball of all time.
Clad in home-made/eBay bought lederhosen costumes we all piled out of our townhouse in Bath, into a minibus and set off to Lowden Garden Centre. One of my all time favourite moments of the trip was seeing my cousin's face gradually change from happiness to concern to genuine confusion as we pulled into a garden centre car park, got out of the minibus, dodged around the people buying their perennials, and made our way towards the Farm Shop. Once assembled inside our activity was revealed to the bride...
We would be sausage-making.
All stood around a table with buckets in front of us, we were introduced to the star of the show - Jon the butcher - who was to be our teacher for the evening.
And when I say we were sausage-making, I mean we were sausage-making. We were no part-timers. We were given our huge chunks of meat which we had to put through the mincer. We were given our packets and mix and instructed to get kneading and mixing. What started out as feeling a little bit gross soon became quite therapeutic and by the time the sausagemeat was mixed people were already practicing their moulding skills with their meat. I'll leave it up to your imagination - actually I won't. Penises. People made penises out of their meat. At this point I should probably tell you that most of this group are in their late-20s - early-30s and were mostly Doctors. A hen do is a hen do people, it all comes down to willies at the end of it.
After mixing the meat came the truly fun part. Putting said meat into the casing. This part of the sausage-making probably caused the biggest laugh for reasons that probably don't need explaining. I don't think anybody managed to get their sausages stuffed without breaking the casing at least once, even those of us who held back and tried to learn from other people's mistakes - let me tell you, that meat comes out fast and unexpectedly.
Whilst this was going on we were treated to a much needed buffet which went part of the way to soaking up some of the alcohol that we had in our system and we were muchly entertained by Bella the dog, who sniffed in and around our feet whilst we careered all over the farm shop.
The final stage was linking all our sausages. By this point we were beyond the point of giddy and probably beyond the point of a lot of things, thank to the steady amounts of alcohol that had been imbibed. Jon gave us a demonstration, we watched intently, got him to show us again, yelled "GOT IT! EASY!", went back to our table and prompting started twisting and turning our sausages with gay abandon and absolutely no rhyme nor reason. I tried my absolute hardest to do what Jon had told me, yelling out random instructions as I went along, "One, twist, two, twist, through the hole, pinch, twist", but it became apparent quite early on that I either hadn't quite understood the instructions or I had got them mixed up with the hip hop dance lesson we'd had earlier in the day and I was actually trying to make my sausages dance to MC Hammer, rather than turn into beautiful links. Jon came to my rescue as well as he could but I quite enjoyed freestyling and resulted in them most definitely looking "home-made".
Let me take a moment to try and explain to you what a truly amazing person Jon was - he had the unenviable task of trying to teach 14, over excitable women, dressed in lederhosen, drinking champagne/beer/cider/whatever we could get our hands on, how to make sausages. Just think about that for a moment. He took every innuendo we threw at him and never tired. He didn't lose his temper and didn't seem to tire of us, and most importantly he made sure that no-one lost any fingers. He had to cope with all of us shouting his name out at some point as we minced, mixed, stuffed and attempted to link our sausages together and he gave all of us his attention and made us feel loved. There aren't many people who could do all of that and keep a smile on their face.
We had an outrageous amount of meat to handle. Once linked together it was actually hard work to lift them all up. It was meat overload.
It was at that point that we realised that we hadn't factored in one rather important fact.
How we were getting the sausages home and where we were going to be storing them. After much pushing and shoving, we got what felt like 75 boxes of sausages loaded into the minibus around our feet and after taking out the shelves in the very tiny fridge in our rented town-house we managed to squish all the sausages in somewhere. Ever seen what a fridge full of sausages looks like? It looks pretty gross.
But oh how happy we were to have a fridge full of sausages when we woke up the next morning, feeling fuzzy headed and in need of something to line our stomachs. We had beautiful sausage butties that set me right up for my train journey back to the Midlands. As I said "They taste like real sausages!" Sadly my sausage mountain couldn't come home with me. I did contemplate taking them back home with me, but one look at the incredibly over-crowded train I had to get on at Bath station made me glad I decided to leave them behind. Just imagine how popular I would have been with my festering sack of meat on the East Coast Mainline. But never fear, they didn't go to waste - all the sausages were taken back to the bride's mother's house where they were popped in the freezer to be had at a BBQ for all the wedding guests on the afternoon after the wedding. Everyone's a winner!
It was absolutely, hand on heart, the most fun that I've ever had on a hen do. Alison, the lovely lady behind Lowden Garden Centre could not do enough for us - it's a brave person that willingly takes on a hen party and lets them come in to what is basically their livelihood. They made sure we were fed and watered and didn't blink an eye at anything we said or any nonsense that we pulled.
Should you be interested in adding sausage-making to your activity list for your hen do (and after reading this, why would you not want to?!) then please e-mail Alison Sinclair at info@lowdengardencentre.com or call 01225 702 345. It cost £40PP and there were 14 of us, but presumably the price is dependent on the number of people attending.
