[dspillett]

> Now quit bachelor partying in Spain before they throw objects at you.

While a fair number of us do a lot to earn our collective reputation, some of us nip to Spain for other reasons and carry ourselves with a bit of care and comportment so your assumption there might be a bit too knee-jerk.

Anecdata: I spent a week in a small seaside town in Costa Brava in mid May. Took part in their local annual running festival, explored the countryside, did some more obvious touristy bits around there and in Barcelona. I'm trying to learn the language¹, and managed to use some of it without people spotting my lack of ability and instantly switching to English².

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[1] as I might like to live over there in later life and refuse to be the sort of git who arrives and expects everyone to speak English.

[2] in fact a couple of people I encountered, a taxi driver and a lovely woman running a small family run bookshop³, didn't speak a word - and through their patience and my pidgin Castilian we managed to successfully interact.

[2] a rare to find these days, especially in a bit city, I hope the place does the roaring trade it deserves as I hope it'll still be there so I can drop back to get more practice reading material next time I'm nearby.

[petre]

If you attended a running festival, you are clearly not the type to fall off a yacht while being drunk.

We were also there in May a few years ago. An English drunk individual took off his indispensables at the hotel's pool so that the lifeguard, a middle aged woman, had to caution him to put them back on, accompanied by the laughter of his drinking companions. It at Occidental Puerto Banús, so not at a cheap hotel.

[dspillett]

I should have left the second paragraph out, we could trade anecdata until the cows come home. My point is that I think you judging a whole by the standards of a very loud and obvious few.

Our big drinkers are a problem at home as well as aboard. Unfortunately our other stereotype comes into play in that for every loud idiot, there are many of us quietly tutting at them and hoping they'll get bored and bugger off if we don't interact with them… One of the reasons I drink a lot less these days is that I grew tired of apologising for other people's behaviour when someone in or associated with our group had "one too many" and couldn't regulate himself¹ after that, or making excuses to leave early before that happened. In the generation after mine (and the next so far, but many in that cohort are not yet old enough to, so more time is needed to see if the pattern holds) are drinking a lot less, both in the sense of having a healthier attitude to drinking when they do and in many cases simply not taking alcohol at all, in part as a reaction against all this too.

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[1] Not all unpleasant drunks are male of course, but in my experience a higher proportion of us that drink much have an unhealthy relationship with it, and this is exacerbated by a lower proportion of women drinking a lot. I'm not sure how other types fit into this, certainly none of the out trans people I know are that sort of problem but this is probably too small a sample to be making generalisations from.