Hen House

Possibly the most important job as Maid-of-Honour (certainly the most time-consuming) is the unenviable task of organising the hen party. Firstly, you have to get the hen to work out who she wants to attend and then persuade her to send you their contact details. Ok, for most hens this wouldn’t be that difficult but if you have read Monday’s blog (Honourable Duties) you will understand that The Best Friend is not most hens. It took her a couple of months to compile a list and send me email addresses. By this point it was April and the hen was due to take place on the last weekend of July somewhere around Bath – to clarify, this would be the second weekend of the school holidays in a popular area for families to holiday. I was more than a little stressed. Organising accommodation, activities and meals suitable for ten girls is hard enough. It is harder still when there are some you have never met and you are on the other side of the world. And it is much harder still when the hen realises after you have booked the accommodation that fits ten that she has missed someone off the list. So it was far from a stress-free job, not helped by the fact that I am a meticulous planner and need to know that every option has been examined before I make a choice on anything. However, the months of research and organisation paid off, the nails bitten to the quick were worth the pain, as the weekend went swimmingly.


Having been forced, by the rather large obstacles of two continents, an ocean and several seas, to book everything online, I was just slightly nervous that the ‘impressive Grade II listed pre-19th century castellated lodge’ would in reality be more Travelodge than luxury lodge. You can say anything on the internet, after all. However, after getting lost in Bath and taking a myriad of winding country lanes that seemed to lead to nowhere but fields and farmhouses, we drove up to a magnificent set of intricate wrought-iron gates, flanked on either side by Cotswold stone lodge houses. I had been warned that the main house, where we were to pick up the keys for our lodge, was 1.5 miles from the main gate down a narrow drive. It turned out that Gloucester Lodge was then a further 1.5 miles down this drive, taking us at one point across a golf course – I was very glad that it was not my car although, as it was the groom’s I suppose I should have been worried that the wedding could have been called off as a result of a rogue golf ball through the windscreen. That rogue golf ball could also have flown straight into the bride’s head so perhaps I really should have been more worried. I was more preoccupied with the growing anxiety that this couldn’t possibly be the right way. Until, that was, we crested a hill and saw in front of us, in all its grand Gothic glory, Gloucester East and West Lodges. They were truly spectacular and I swelled with pride for having found this little gem.

Inside didn’t disappoint either. An oak-panelled sitting room complete with vast inglenook fireplace, a kitchen with island and Aga (my dream), Victorian-style bathrooms with claw-footed, roll-top tubs (another dream) and lovely bedrooms with views over the grounds. Best of all, we had our very own turret! We could all pretend to be queens of our own castle for the weekend. The only problem was that accessing the turret involved climbing two sets of almost-vertical ladders. I could just see one of the girls slipping after her fourth glass of wine and falling three stories down to the flagstone floor below. That was not going to happen on my watch so I enforced a strict one drink policy. It doesn’t often occur that I am the sensible one but I was taking my Maid-of-Honour role very seriously indeed! At 6.30pm (half an hour after official Drink O’clock and therefore high time we started) I poured bubbly into five glasses (the others had not yet arrived) and we climbed the rickety ladders up to the top. For the next half an hour we surveyed our land, drink in hand, and imagined that it was all ours.

After the allocated one drink had been drained, we moved the party downstairs and outside into the garden where a large table lay under a fruit tree (which was lovely except when said fruit fell from said tree and hit one of us on the head, which happened more than once). Gradually, more and more girls started to arrive and much whooping, screaming and cheering was unleashed into the quiet rural surroundings. It was definitely a good thing that we were in the middle of nowhere, a mile and a half even from the main house. By 9pm we were awaiting just one and she had set off hours earlier. We were all chatting away when we heard a quiet “hello?”. Looking up, we saw a small bodiless head by the garden wall. There was a brief moment of silence until The Best Friend realised that she did in fact know this apparition and jumped up to greet her. The look of relief on this girl’s face was palpable and she visibly slumped.

Fortified with a reviving and relaxing glass of wine, she soon revealed that she had been driving round the area for an hour and a half. Now, we had all had a little trouble finding the place, as remote as it was, but an hour and a half? She had apparently just been driving round and round in circles until, at one point, she even turned up at someone else’s hen do. She had spotted a car full of girls and thought she was extremely clever by following them. “Follow the youth!” she exclaimed to herself, “after all, how many parties of twenty-something women could there be on a country estate?” It was a fair assumption to make but unfortunately, defying all odds, there was indeed another hen party on another part of the estate. She rocked up to the house and called out “hello!” in an excited and exuberant fashion. The group of girls turning to look at her were all unknown to her but it’s a hen party, there are bound to be girls you don’t know – these are friends from all the different strands of the hen’s life. Just to be sure that she was where she was meant to be, she said, “I’m here for the hen party.” “Ah,” they said, “you’re in the right place then.” A few minutes went by and she still hadn’t seen our hen so she asked where she was by name. “Who?” they asked. At this point she knew what a terrible mistake she had made and quickly retreated backwards out of the house. “And that is the reason for my tentative ‘hello’,” she explained, “I just couldn’t be sure that there wasn’t a third hen party on the estate.” This girl spent most of the weekend amusing us with such delights as breaking the very expensive chunk of hard cacao at the chocolate workshop and getting stuck between the counter and the door when she was trying to nip to the toilet as inconspicuously as possible.

That night was full of wine, laughter and loud banter – about what you would expect from a party of ten girls. We played Mr. & Mrs., dressed the hen up, gave her the obligatory willy straws (I mean what’s a hen party without willy straws, really?) and stumbled to bed in the early hours of the morning. Big mistake. I had made the schoolboy error of peaking too soon, hitting it too hard on the first night. I woke up the following morning with a cracker of a headache and an inability to walk in a straight line. I would not be going up the turret today. Still, a few slices of butter-laden toast and several cups of tea later and I was feeling much better. Time to hit Bath and, a chocoholics dream, the chocolate workshop. The hen has a huge sweet tooth... and a huge savoury tooth... ok, she just loves food full stop, so this was perfect for her. We were greeted by the chocolate expert and leader of the workshop, the irreverent and exuberant Phillipe, with gusto. “Bonjour ladies!” the larger-than-life Belgian exclaimed, beaming. He was large in both personality and belly (and bum crack, which he inadvertently revealed to us every time he bent over) and obviously loved life. Giving us each two kisses on each cheek (he assured us that this was de rigeur in Belgium), he then gave us all aprons and chocolatier hats and began by giving us a history of chocolate. All any of us could think about, though, was the massive chocolate machine churning away deliciously, velvety, richly, perfect chocolate. I was sat right next to it and the urge to put my head under the waterfall of chocolate was almost too hard to resist. Before we could try any though, we had to temper it and we all sat there salivating as we watched the hen swishing about a pool of chocolate on the worktop. Sensing that the group of sweet girls before him was quickly turning into a rabid pack of wolves, Phillipe brought out cups of the richest, thickest, most chocolatey hot chocolate I have ever tasted.

Having had our chocolate fix for the moment, we were able to start creating. We made chocolate marshmallows, elephants, strawberries, shells, hearts, guitars, a giant hen, and of course chocolate willies of varying sizes. It wasn’t long until we were desperate for more chocolate again and we resorted to the behaviour of naughty schoolgirls, picking scraps off the growing chocolate mountain every time Phillipe turned his back. I’m sure he knew what we were doing as he quickly brought out the chocolate marshmallows that had been setting in the fridge and gave us each one, as if we were small children that needed to be kept quiet for a while. The wonderful afternoon was capped off with a glass of Champagne, served to us by the very Belgian Chinese girls that worked in the shop. Chinese girls talking furiously to each other in Cantonese, working in a Belgian chocolate shop – this, I am sure, was the true English experience that the many tourists who popped in were searching for when they came to Bath. Given that the hen is a half-Chinese, half-Australian girl marrying in England, I thought that was quite appropriate.