It was my first hen weekend. Though I’d witnessed a few at close range before; most memorably a woman in L-plates grabbing the bottom of a passing male in Covent Garden, egged on by the shrieking, cava-fuelled encouragement of her friends. The frightened man ran away, red-faced and swearing under his breath, while the bride-to-be turned and took a bow on the cobbles in the direction of her caterwauling gang.

My northerner mother tut-tuts when people mention hen weekends, not because she disapproves of bottom-grabbing, but because she thinks they’re a modern extravagance:

‘In my day, we didn’t ‘ave an hen night. And if we did it were a cup ‘o tea wit’ friends ‘ont day before wedding. Eee by gum.’

Though having recently learned about the mire of admin involved in organising a nuptials, I think a weekend away with The Girls is just the ticket for a stressed out Bride, as well as – I should add – a nice little getaway for those of The Girls who are poor as church mice and have no summer holiday plans (cue the violins.)

The weekend was so well organised it made G20 look like a last minute get-together.  All I had to do was turn up at the time and place typed up on the itinerary thoughtfully dispatched two weeks earlier, and be sociable, which was easy because (bride to be) Sam’s friends are a sociable bunch. I was also silently thankful that it hadn’t been planned out like many other hens in the manner of some sort of oestrogen showcase, involving group beauty treatments or pink limos.

On Friday night we met at Circus in Covent Garden for dinner. If you haven’t been you must, even if it’s just for a cocktail. We sat at a huge white marble table and nibbled on platters of different bite-sized dishes: calamari, spring rolls, fillet of beef, stuffed vegetables, tartlets – just the sort of decadent spread you crave when you’re feeling a bit tipsy. Between each course, the waiters swooped in and removed all the plates from the table to make way for ‘the act’, which was by turns a nipple-tasselled burlesque stripper, an acrobat suspended in a hoop, a strange clown-man who made a glass ball look like it was floating, and another stripper, whose perfect bottom we gazed up at in wonder from our desserts of creamed-filled chocolate pots.

On Saturday morning we caught a train to Crewe, where we hired cars and drove to one of the organiser’s Dad’s house, who had obligingly moved out for the weekend. It was one of those lovely roomy houses on the fringes of a sweet village called Bunbury, with enough space for the 20 of us who had travelled there to bed down for the night. 80s aerobics outfits – as detailed in the pre-emailed kit list – were dutifully donned and a group photo taken, where we resembled a human montage of neon, before a ten minute drive to a field in the middle of nowhere.

The Crocky Trail was set up some years ago by a benevolent farmer who presumably wanted to give local kids something to do at the weekend. It expanded from there, and is now a sort of eco, no-frills miniature Chessington. You give 8 pounds to a person stationed at a trestle table in the car park, then head into a farmyard full of repurposed agricultural equipment, or ‘rides’, the like of which would cause a Health and Safety inspector to break down and weep.

Everywhere we looked, small mud-covered children were throwing themselves off near-vertical slides, or else screaming and crashing from the top of a 30 foot platform gradually tilting upwards to a 45 degree angle. This was an introduction to the trail itself, a muddy network of rickety bridges, tunnels and rope swings built around a water-filled ditch looping a field. In short, the best 8 pounds I’ve ever spent. It was pure, silly, laugh-till-you-cry non-alcoholic fun, from which we emerged two hours later grazed, bruised and in varying states of muddiness. The only moment I forgot we weren’t a bunch of 8 year olds was when we played British bulldog across a flimsy water-covered bridge. A couple of passing teenage boys paused to casually observe the scene of 20 mud-wrestling 25 year olds in leotards, possibly having some fairly muddy thoughts of their own.

We travelled back the house wearing bin bag skirts to keep from transferring half the contents of a field into the hire cars. Sam, who had just recovered from being caked in mud – ‘if you think about it Sam, it’s just like a spa treatment’ – had an hour of recovery time before she was put into an ugly wedding dress and Marie Antoinette wig. We joined her at dinner in a variety of headgear, which rotated around the table with each course. The games which followed got progressively sillier as the evening wore on, typically themed around phallus-shaped foodstuffs (incidentally, I won the hands free willy cake eating challenge) and Sam, who loves cooking, was presented with a book of recipes and photos compiled by one of the girls, and was so overwhelmed by it she started to cry.

When things began to wind down at 2 I went to crawl into bed and passed the living room, where she was sitting on the sofa, still in her wig and dress, whipped cream on her forehead and a lipstick penis drawn on her cheek, turning the pages of her recipe book, tears rolling down her cheeks:

‘Oh you guuuuys, I’ve had the best weekend ever’

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