As more and more people wait until their thirties to get married, stag dos are getting more adventurous and a whole lot more expensive.

Legions of wealthy city boys are spurning London strip clubs and jetting off around the world to exotic locations and scaring the locals.

With the glut of cheap flights making it cheaper to get to Prague than the closest tacky seaside resort, your Easyjets and Ryanairs are filling with noisy, irritating groups of half-drunk high-spirited girls or boys who you wished were confined to Blackpool.

Our attempt at emulating other thirty-somethings was perfectly planned. My best mate Steve proposed to his long-term girlfriend and they planned to marry a year later in December, 2007.

So we booked a top end Ibizan villa for a week-long knees up during the closing parties in September - a couple of months before the wedding to allow plenty of recovery time. We couldn’t stretch to a private jet, but beyond that no expense was to be spared.

Then bad news: Steve got a severe attack of cold feet and called off the wedding. Our planned knees up had gone belly up (and no, they never did get married - or back together).

But having paid a hefty £1,500 deposit on a £5,000-a-week villa we resolved to party like it was the real thing. There were 10 of us in a mixed group, including a couple of brave friends who had married the week before. I’m told that a stag do with women makes it a hag, so we had ourselves a pseudo-hag-with-honeymoon do.

Our bunch of waifs and strays included a project manager (handy), a nutritionist (should help), a marketeer, a web geek, a cinema manager, a fellow journalist (also a lawyer - just in case), a ‘colourist‘ (not so useful), and a builder and plumber from our local pub (essential for running repairs). It was set to be an interesting social experiment, hopefully not as inane as Big Brother or frightening as the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I’d not been to Ibiza before, considering it cheesy and expensive, but it fitted the stag bill perfectly. Arriving at the villa in Cala Moli, on the southwest coast near San Josep, the owner, Monsieur Gerard greeted the first arrivals.

The cliff top villa, over three floors, was more impressive than the brochure let on. All bedrooms had terraces looking out to sea, with a covered barbecue area, acres of decking and a large living room. And the infinity pool.

Gerard’s paperwork was spread over a table and there was a notice board filled with family photos. Perhaps it is a tactic to make visitors feel welcome. The only disappointment was that the private jetty, 200m down the spectacular cliff, had been washed away in a storm a month earlier.

The first evening we left the honeymooners and headed to Playa den Bossa for a bit of dancing to ease into things. The town is home to clubbing mecca Space and legendary beach bar Bora Bora but it’s more Costa del Sol than sophisticated Spain.

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