'An Alfresco Oral Sex Contest'

The Bad News Britons are taking their binge-and-vomit tour on the road, debasing themselves and threatening the public decency wherever they go. So says Sarah Lyall in the NYT:

They are the ones, the locals say, who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases. They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan: drinking themselves into oblivion.

“They scream, they sing, they fall down, they take their clothes off, they cross-dress, they vomit,” [Cretan town] Malia’s mayor, Konstantinos Lagoudakis, said in an interview. “It is only the British people — not the Germans or the French.”

Such are the perils of living in a place that’s increasingly becoming one of the most mirthless of all pink police states: a nanny whose rule is so regimented that she permits you the luxury of barhopping until the wee hours and screwing and spazzing your way across town after town. What works in Picadilly, however, is hell at 30,000 feet — or in anything less than the most debauched resort destination in the Mediterranean. Fortunately traveling Americans are usually too fat and lazy to make such an organized disgrace of themselves; our college freaks are bottled up more or less safely in Mexico. But it does us well to remember that fun itself can occupy the role Marx and Nietzsche attributed to alcohol: drug of consolation for the oppressed herd of international schmucks. Only in the old days, these poor sots were laborers; today they are just as often virtually as inefficient and redundant on the job as they are off.

Read the whole article, which is hilarious and dreadful at the same time. But don’t buy the argument that the British are too ‘repressed’ somehow at home. It’s the other way around. No, it’s possible to be unhinged to the max and still, well, miserable:

“I think that in their country, they are like prisoners and they want to feel free,” said Niki Pirovolaki, who works in a bakery on Malia’s main street and often encounters addled Britons heading back to their hotels — “if they can remember where they are staying,” she said.

The opposite of the imprisonment in question is not the freedom practiced in hope of an answer.