Beer, birds & football

I suppose I should tell you about the weekend I just spent in Hamburg. There's a dilemma here, because it was my stag do and what happened in the Ham is supposed to stay in the Ham (this saying comes from the last stag do I went on in Amsterdam - and what happened in the 'Dam has stayed in the 'Dam. Mostly). Aside from that, I know the missus has this web address so I won't be saying too much  

For me there were a number of real highlights. For starters, there's nothing finer than getting 16 of your better friends all together in the same place and watching them get on. Since the crowd included my two brothers, various work colleagues from the past five years and a couple of university guys, most of these people were meeting for the first time. But they really hit it off, and you'd have thought my little brother Simon had known my university mates John and Tim all his life. The last time I went on a lads holiday there were six of us and we ended up properly fighting at least twice! Even managing to coordinate 17 of us meeting up in a bar or catching the same flight went OK. Thanks to my best men and the others for that.

Secondly, I managed to get tickets to go and see HSV play Hertha Berlin on the Saturday afternoon. You've just gotta love the internet for making things like this easier, as there was no way I was getting through the German answer phone message to book on the phone. As this was a stag do there was no slacking off allowed, especially as they sold beer in the stadium. They had guys with big barrels on their back and hand taps to fill up your glasses. In the UK you're not allowed to drink beer while watching the match, so this was a real treat. The game itself had lots of incident, with two Berlin players being sent off and HSV winning two nil. But there were lots of quaint little customs the team had, like cranking a band high into the air before the game to sing the home team song to the fans, or the announcer shouting out the first name of the scorer and the fans shouting back the surname. My favourite though was when the announcer read out the score - he shouted 'Hamburger' and the crowd shouted 'zwei' and then in a very low voice he said 'Berlin' and the home fans all shouted back 'nuuuuuulllllllllll'. Way to rub it in.

But the best bits were obviously the trawls around the shadier areas of Hamburg. Since our cheap-but-not-really-that-cheerful hotel was right on the Reeperbahn, we were always just seconds away from filth. I shouldn't really be talking about these bits, so here are some things that didn't happen:
* I did not dance in the window of a bar with two dancing girls
* I did not get quite a saucy private lapdance
* At no point did I dress as a fairy in bad makeup and nail polish and go around granting people's wishes
* I definately did not get stripped to my pants onstage and have to do a pole dance. I would have remembered that

Anyway, we had a brilliant time and I'm looking forward to seeing all the boys at the wedding in a couple of weeks. The only casualties of war were my innocence, a couple of lost phones, one lost wallet and a lost travel card. Before you think a few of us had bad luck, the wallet, a phone and the travel card were all lost by Stevie D. You can't take that boy anywhere.

My overiding memory will be of my mate Jim, sitting in a suit in the only armchair next to the stage in a poledancing club. He pulled a wad of notes out of his pocket, beckoned the girl on stage over and asked if he could get a private dance for me. At that moment, he was the daddy.