Out in the City: The only gay at the hen night

Two of my best friends, Tim and Anna, got engaged last August and the wedding is set for next month. Chic, grey invites have been dispatched to the social A-list, to the bold and the beautiful. It's the unofficial Wedding of The Year, but with no vulgar displays of public affection on balconies, no television cameras stationed on the lanes of Hampshire.

But this weekend, the boys had first to get through the stag weekend. I was nervous thinking about it. The last time I went on a stag - well, the only time I've been on a stag - was a couple of years ago and all I remember is being on a minibus with 15 Old Etonians in black tie coming back to London from some stately home in Kent to go clubbing. It was a fun 45-minute journey back in, apart from the fact that, as the only gay - well, the only "out" one - on the bus it seemed fitting that I should spend the vast majority of it being crowd-surfed from one end to the other. I felt I had regained their respect, though, when after we arrived to the club it turned out that they had to rely on me to get them in.

But for this weekend's stag a Ryanair flight would be boarded on Friday to Salzburg. Costumes fit for extras in The Sound of Music would be donned. Oceans of beer would be drunk. Songs would be sung.

But this wasn't why I was nervous. I was nervous because I wasn't going on the stag - I was going on the hen.

Yes, 12 girls - well, 11 girls and me - headed to Paris this weekend. There was a high chance that I wouldn't be in one piece by the end of it.

Eleven high-maintenance girls in high heels plus me equalled disaster, surely? Would I have to eat whipped cream off a male stripper (as I had off a female artiste years earlier in a basement in Kent)?

But there was to be no budget airlines and booze for us. We whisked ourselves to Farnborough and onto a friend's private jet whirring on the runway. Delicious baguettes were broken as we entered French airspace half an hour later. I can't really remember the exact details, as I was in a cloud of happy oblivion, probably because I was having a head massage or something.

A few hours later I was standing on top of a table in Le Baron, the trendy Parisian nightclub, surrounded by 11 whooping, dancing girls wearing very expensive shoes and very plastic tiaras. Yes, you can count me in with the girls any time.