Learning the Ropes: Why Do Hens Wear L-Plates?

 

Learn­ing the Ropes: Why Do Hens Wear L-Plates?

Some­thing old, some­thing new, some­thing bor­rowed, some­thing blue. This ubiq­ui­tous wed­ding day tra­di­tion has been around for decades; as long as the bride has all four ‘some­things’ on her per­son when she arrives at the altar, her mar­riage will be long and happy. The orig­i­nal poem also rec­om­mended that she have “a sil­ver six­pence in her shoe”, but that part was pre­sum­ably swept under the rug some­time in the seventies.

Hen nights and bach­e­lorette par­ties are rel­a­tively new inven­tions, but the hen cul­ture has already come up with a few lucky charms of its own. They might not lend them­selves so read­ily to rhyming verse, but head bop­pers, bridal veils, and cer­tain phal­lic items have pretty much become the hen night equiv­a­lent of the ‘Some­thing Old…’ check­list. There are umpteen vari­a­tions on all of these prod­ucts, and sup­pli­ers of hen party acces­sories will do their damnedest to con­vince you that leav­ing their wares out of your ensem­ble is a nup­tial faux-pas on a par with head­ing down the aisle in your jog­ging bot­toms.

But of all the hen party essen­tials on the mar­ket, the strangest is surely the Hen L-Plate.* This, after all, is an object that was designed to go on cars, and one won­ders how it man­aged to make the jump from motor­ing to mar­riage. All the other elite hen party acces­sories are either wedding-related (veils, garters) or a bit naughty (every­thing else), so it’s kind of hard to see how L-plates — res­olutely un-titillating as they are – fit in with all of this.

So why do hens wear L-plates? One curi­ous spec­i­men on Yahoo Answers sug­gests that the tra­di­tion arose because soon-to-be-hitched vir­gin brides would have to learn their way around the bed­room pretty quickly if they planned to keep their new hus­band, but a more pop­u­lar line of rea­son­ing tends to point out that a bride-to-be is, by def­i­n­i­tion, not mar­ried yet, mak­ing her a bit of a ‘learner’ as far as mar­riage is con­cerned. Like the inex­pe­ri­enced dri­ver, with his pro­vi­sional license and his foggy notions of how a box junc­tion works, the woman at the cen­tre of the hen party is bound to pos­sess a few mis­taken ideas regard­ing mar­ried life.

And once you cut through the saucy dares and binge drink­ing with which it’s asso­ci­ated, you’ll find that the hen night’s true mean­ing is far more heart­warm­ing. Regard­less of its con­stituent activ­i­ties, a hen party gives the bride-to-be a chance to spend some qual­ity time with her friends before she takes the plunge, and it gives her friends a chance to dole out any help­ful mar­riage advice they might have handy. While one can’t be expected to learn all of the ropes before tying the knot, a well-spent hen night can at least pro­vide a decent primer.
So there’s one expla­na­tion for hen L-plates, any­way. But who knows? Per­haps they’re just sup­posed to make you look like a car.

*Okay, so the willies are a pretty weird one too, but I’ll run down the high street in a wed­ding dress before I ded­i­cate a 500 word blog post to penises.

Joel Dear writes, blogs, and waf­fles for Hen Stuff, a hen party acces­sories web­site whose best­sellers include willy-shaped straws, fluffy pink head bop­pers, and of course Hen L-Plates. At time of writ­ing, he is also prepar­ing to take his dri­ving test. He’s just about mas­tered box junc­tions, although his round­abouts do occa­sion­ally leave some­thing to be desired.