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Since most pensioners will be several decades older than other potential participants, very few are ever invited to a hen night. However, in the unlikely event that you are, you should no longer expect an evening of modest, simple pleasures accompanied by a small glass of sweet sherry.
In fact, the last recorded occurrence of any of the foregoing was in September 2001, when four nursery nurses from Ironbridge read out seemly passages from the bride’s diary and embroidered short excerpts from a Patience Strong anthology before dying of boredom while listening to A Book at Bedtime.
According to the magazine What Bride, the typical hen night now consists of between 70 and 90 women dressed as schoolgirls (unless they are schoolgirls), drinking tequila at every bar in Tenby and accompanied by at least a dozen male strippers who are tied naked to lampposts some time after 5am the next morning.
Some social commentators have suggested that this trend indicates that the archetypal characterisation of the female as dutiful and chaste has been superseded by the emergence of the true sexual Amazon – but as this was proposed by a social commentator attending a hen night, it’s probably not worth the paper it was written on.