In hindsight, I’d have done the ‘weekend’ a bit differently; Taken the train in the morning to have more time to hang out with folks.
Friday
The event was Alex’s stag/bachelor weekend, which he organised himself, so there was a lot of cricket involved, starting with day three of a match at a stadium in Southampton. Well, near Southampton.
I’d been intending to take the train there, going through London, but it was suggested that I get a lift with someone who was heading there a bit later, so I did that. Didn’t realise quite how much later, as it turned out, because he was working the morning, so we didn’t set off until after midday, and by the time we got to the grounds they weren’t bothering to check tickets or parking. The train trip would have taken around 4 hours, so over twice the travel time, but would have given more “hanging out with people while not really caring about the cricket” time, so … In hindsight, it would have been a better idea for me.
We arrived during the second break, and play was called off due to bad light after the third bit of play started, so everyone went to the nearest in-stadium bar. Yes, there were floodlights. Yes, they were turned on. No, I don’t know why the light was still bad.
After the cricket was definitely over, and after a quick trip to our respective hotels to check in & drop off bags, there was dinner at The Cricketers Arms, cricket being something of a theme of the weekend.
Saturday
After a questionable breakfast¹ ( by which I mean we were all questioning why anybody would consider that to be worth the price ) the hotel crew headed into the local town of Eastleigh in order to get a coffee and then a train into Southampton. There was another group, the Airbnb crew, who were meeting us there, plus one person who lived nearby.
¹ We’d assumed it would be some kind of buffet breakfast situation, but it was much more complicated than that. The continental breakfast bit was a buffet, the cooked bits you ordered from a waiter, the coffee you got from a machine with a long-ass line, and the Stag’s “poached eggs and vegan bacon” was two eggs and a strip of ‘bacon’ the size & shape of a stick of gum.
People gathered for early-ish morning beer in a German pub. Or maybe a German adjacent pub, I’m not sure. Nobody was brave or foolish enough to attempt their yard long hot dog challenge, though a lot of people did seem to want to. Or perhaps they wanted somebody else to.
After the pub was a football match. This didn’t go so well for me, to be honest. I didn’t entirely expect it to but figured I’d give it a try, because that’s what everyone else was doing and what the Stag wanted to do.
The football match was not a comfortable environment for me, unfortunately. Far too loud, packed in like the cheapest of budget airline seats, and what I found to be a fairly aggressive vibe.
- The section we were in had signs at the entrance stating that it was a home stand and that anyone found to be supporting the visiting team would be ejected
- The section for supporters of the visiting team had multiple security people sitting staring straight at the crowd with their backs to the field; No other section had that that I could see
- Someone sitting in front of me was periodically making obscene gestures at the aforementioned visitor supporters section
- Multiple people using the windows or screens at the top of the seating as drums. I know I wasn’t the only one who found that particular thing really annoying; we had a few conversations about the subject
I lasted until half time, partially because I wanted to give it a fair go, and partially because there really wasn’t a good way of getting out without attracting a lot of attention to myself. Maybe things would have gone better if I’d brought my ear plugs, but I kind of doubt it.
My original plan was to hang out in the fan zone just outside the stadium for the second half, but then they closed the fan zone down and moved those of us still in it into the concourse area under the seats, where there was no seating and all the food and coffee places were closed. For a while I was genuinely wondering whether I was even allowed to leave, but then I spotted somebody being wheeled out in their chair so I tagged along after them and was let out.
If you’re wondering, yes I did let the Stag know that I’d left at half time comma and arranged to meet him and the rest at the next stop on the weekend plans. We’d already discussed the possibility that I might have to bail on some of the activities, so he was not particularly surprised by this, nor did it disrupt everybody else’s fun.
The next event was the cricket equivalent of one of those indoor electronic golf range things. As near as I can remember, the last time I did anything even vaguely cricket adjacent was at primary school in 1981, so I leave it to your imagination as to just how badly I did at this activity. In hindsight I regret giving the electronic system my email address when I gave it my name for the scoreboard, because I really didn’t need an email telling me my total score and my rank in the squad; One number was was very low, and the other, while higher than the first, was not the one that you would want to be the high number of those two options.
In fairness, most of the people there either play or had played cricket at least at the village level. I expected to come dead last in the rankings, I just didn’t realize I was going to get a notification of this in my email.
The next location was a pool and electronic darts bar attached to the same mall as the cricket place; This is where I quietly made my departure, at around 8 pm. Again, made sure the stag knew that I was going, and that he was okay with it, which he was.
It was very loud, not in the “this is distracting and aggressive” way that the football had been, but in the “I literally cannot understand what the person standing immediately in front of me is saying” sort of way. Turns out everybody else had much the same problem, because they ended up sitting in the outside area of the bar. Also, they didn’t get to play pool or darts because all of the available slots were booked up for the next hour or so. And it apparently took them 45 minutes to get a pizza out, so … Maybe not the best location?
The group did continue on to a different and much more enjoyable bar after that, where they watched golf on TV while sitting in bean bag chairs or on swings, and from the look of the pictures had a really lovely time of it.
For some reason the idea of just taking a taxi or uber back to the hotel simply didn’t occur to me, so I wandered back to the train station, waited around for the next train back to Eastleigh, and then trudged back to the hotel.
It wasn’t the day I had hoped to have, but it wasn’t a bad day, and I think that I made damn sure that I didn’t disrupt anyone else’s fun due to the bits that I couldn’t do².
² Nobody seemed to mind, and they seemed to understand, which was nice.
Sunday
Despite the rain, there was no way in Hell we were going back to the hotel breakfast again, so the Hotel Crew got a taxi into Eastleigh, met up with one of the AirBnB crew, and went to a place in the mall there; It was really good. Unlike the hotel one.
This was pretty much the end of the weekend, or at least that was the plan. Said plan did not include the flight back to Guernsey for three of Team Hotel getting delayed multiple times, which naturally meant that they had to do a pub crawl out to the airport; Those are just the rules in these situations, and based on the pictures, they had a great time.
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