Tales From a Hen Weekend by Olivia Ryan Page A

this dressing up they go in for nowadays, and certainly none of these naughty games with dares and forfeits and things. Girls used to be a lot more civilised , if you know what I mean. We used to leave the excessive behaviour to the blokes. That was considered normal; we didn’t expect any better of them.
    Well, anyway, we went to Southend on the train and had a couple of drinks in a pub on the seafront. I’m not saying we didn’t get a bit silly and giggly, but that was just excitement. I remember Angela – a nice, quiet girl, younger than me, who’d only left home a few months before – admitting she was still a virgin and the rest of us all teasing her and suggesting how she should go about finding somebody to change that for her. We might have got a bit rude, I suppose, but we weren’t loud with it. We didn’t get complaints from other people in the pub. We were just enjoying ourselves.
    We went on to the Chinese restaurant. It was a bit of a treat in those days, not like now, with people having a takeaway any time they don’t feel like cooking. We used to have proper old-fashioned dinners every night of the week – steak and kidney pudding, shepherd’s pie, toad in the hole. Our mums taught us to cook – there weren’t any of these ready-made microwave meals in the shops then, you know. So none of us were very good at choosing what to have from the menu in the Chinese, and we ended up ordering a bit of almost everything, and sharing it around. For some reason we found s weet and sour pork balls absolutely hilarious and kept passing them from plate to plate, getting more and more hysterical the more glasses of white wine we had. But I still maintain it was all perfectly innocent fun, nothing rowdy, nothing spilt on the tablecloth – you understand?
    By the time we came out of the restaurant we couldn’t be bothered to go tenpin bowling. We were probably a little bit too tipsy for it, to be honest, or at least, I certainly was. Not that I was incapable of walking straight, or anything like that. It was June – a lovely summer evening – and we strolled along the seafront arm in arm, just chatting and laughing, and ended up at the Kursaal.
    You wouldn’t know about The Kursaal as it was then: it was an amusement park – probably the biggest and best in the country, in its day. Our parents used to take us there when we were kids, as a big treat on a day out at the seaside. You youngsters don’t know you’re born, what with your foreign holidays and day trips to France at the drop of a hat, just to go shopping for wine and cheese. We thought we were in heaven when we had a day out at Southend. We used to go swimming in the sea, too – never mind that it was mud right up to our knees, never mind all the warnings nowadays about dirty beaches, turning everyone into namby-pambies if you ask me. A candyfloss and a few pennies to spend on the rides in The Kursaal kept us kids more than happy back in the 1950s, even if we were wearing hand-me-down clothes and our school plimsolls.
    Anyway, as I was saying – the Kursaal, by this time, 1972 - was past its best and in fact it closed down, I think, a year or so later. But we had a ball, there, that night. We only left, in the end, because we’d run out of money. We went on all the rides, had a go at all the hooplas, shooting galleries, coconut shies, you name it; and we laughed until we cried – not about anything in particular, just out of the sheer fun and excitement of being out together, the four of us, the night before my wedding.
    We saved the Big Dipper till last. You must have heard of the Big Dipper. It was the biggest thrill in the park: the original roller coaster ride. Oh, I suppose it would be tame by today’s standards – nowadays something’s only a thrill if it’s so dangerous you have to have a medical before you go on it – but it made us scream ourselves hoarse, I can tell you. Going up that first long steep climb to the top of the ride,