I am made aware that we are coming up to the wedding season by the visibility of the hen party. Exactly when these parties – or pre-wedding jollifications for the bride – became a wedding tradition I cannot say, but it has certainly taken hold as a contemporary rite of passage. Last weekend, I was standing in a queue at Dublin Airport, when, in a parallel queue, there were about eight young-ish women likely bound for some sunny clime on a hen party weekend. They were dressed alike in black T-shirts with gold lettering and black mini-skirts or jeans – save for the bride-to-be, who was wearing a white mini-skirt, skimpy top and white veil, with “Future Mrs Jones” inscribed on the headdress. They were all adorned in heavy make-up, fake tans, false eyelashes, and long, fake fingernails, evidently modelled on the reality TV star Kim Kardashian. These lasses were exuberant, but not ill-behaved, even if hen parties (like stag parties) have a reputation for deteriorating into a raucous knees-up. There are strong suspicions that, on reaching a destination (Tenerife? Barcelona? Budapest?), much inebriation may follow. I glimpse hen party groups in our town, too, sitting in the local Wetherspoons, ready for their festivities, future bride in veiled white. The hen party celebration is often arranged and marketed with promises of lavish alcohol, but there are also wholesome activities open to hens: spa weekends, life-drawing classes, cookery workshops, shooting lessons in Prague, surfing in Newquay… The ritual is not to everyone’s taste, though. “How would you like to be going away on a hen party weekend?” I whispered to the female security officer at the airport. “Complete nightmare!” she grimaced, discreetly. Yet I think there’s a welcome aspect to hens. It does, at least, celebrate marriage, with the underlying theme that the bride is the “future Mrs Jones”, even if that’s meant half-ironically. And in a workaday world where we have lost sight of the tradition of “carnival”, it introduces a new – or even perhaps reinvented – rite of passage to life events. (In medieval times, didn’t the Church sanction Lord of Misrule festivities?) The differentiation between “hen” and “stag” also indicates that we have not yet arrived at a “gender neutral” state: girls and boys still spontaneously evolve their own revels.