2003-02-23 at 2:38 p.m.

Last night I caught a bus into town to go see 'Chicago'. I was sitting in the quiet trance most people go into when using public transport (which mostly involves thinking about sex and attempting not to touch the bus seat with anything but the butt of your pants) when my pleasant idyll was shattered.

By shrill, cackling laughter.

A Hen's night.

A group of women flagged the bus down, all of them dressed to the nines and tanked to the gills. There were about fifteen of them, and it took around twenty minutes for them to struggle their way onto the bus. The bride was carrying an inflatable sex doll of the male persuasion, dressed in boxer shorts and decked out tastefully with a number of inflated condoms.

They stumbled to the back of the bus, where they collapsed into ungainly piles and proceeded to make penis jokes for about twenty minutes solid, accompanied by the kind of cackling laugher equivalent to a file down the spine.

You see, I just don't get Hen's nights. It's supposed to be this big celebration of female togetherness, one last girl's night before being shoved into the kitchen for all eternity. (In case you haven't guessed, I'm a bit of a cynic about this whole 'marriage' thing). But Hen's nights have never seemed particularly fun to me. There are only so many penis jokes one can make before things start getting tedious, and only so many daiquiris one can drink without feeling nauseous.

Mostly, I don't get the women who go to these things with the hope of picking up a man at some point during the night. I mean, seeing a clutch of shrill, giggling women roaming about with an inflatable sex doll and insulting the male of the species every ten seconds terrifies the living snot out of me, and I'm not even male. One imagines that this sort of thing is not the greatest of male aphrodisiacs.

So, here's what I propose- if, for some unknown reason, I get married (probably to avoid some form of immigration law) I'm not going to have a Hen's night- I'm going to have a Buck's night. I'll invite all my male friends; we'll drink beer instead of pissy little daiquiris; we'll order a stripper; and we'll go to a karaoke bar and sing 'Peggy Sue' until the sun comes up.

Now that's a celebration of singledom.