When Will Brits Stop Taking the Piss on Holiday?

It's odd to think just how strangely the sun makes us Brits behave sometimes. We're all aware of the tired tropes of a glimmer of sunlight creating an army of shirtless men wandering high streets with tees tucked into trousers. A single warming ray encouraging people to bust out the disposable BBQ and those mini footballs. Summer time is the only time we can really be happy in the UK. While we may think we're happy during the winter, or at least content, but it only takes one morning waking up, looking out the window into the darkness, as if it's sucking you towards it, to ruin your whole month. A bit of cold wind lashing at your neck. It's making my stomach hurt just thinking about it. Much like the immediate relief of pain after a worrisome bowel movement, though, you're willing to forgive and forget in summer, and eat that leftover jalfrezi, ready to plunge yourself back into the bottomless pit of discomfort and shaking sadness.

Naturally there's a way out. You can sit inside a big white wing-ed oblong for a few hours and find yourself in Mykonos or the Costa Del Crime or Aruba or Cuba or whatever. Recently a young man going by the name of Adam Burton, 23, wanted to experience a new place, see the world, soak in the richness of earth's cultures, so took a trip to Peru. There he proceeded to walk the famous trail up to the mountain-top Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, a site of extraordinary natural beauty, to soak in the palpable history and marvel at the ruins of the nation's ancestors. That, and get his cock and balls out so a Frenchman could take a photo of it.

Burton and his cohort Eric Xavier Mariec were arrested and charged with 'moral misconduct'. Apparently streaking and nudity happens a lot at Machu Picchu, so security and surveillance was raised in 2014. It's a story reminiscent of 23-year-old Eleanor Hawkins, who posed naked on the sacred Mount Kinabalu in Malaysia with a gaggle of other irritating backpacker types from the Netherlands and Canada. She was arrested, fined nearly a thousand pounds and jailed for three days, with the threat of doing porridge for three months in unpopular Borneo prison Kota Kinbalu. Luckily she was able to return home, but not before irate locals blamed her tits for a fatal earthquake.

These are fairly milquetoast examples of Brits making shams of themselves while on holiday. My childhood was a seemingly endless cavalcade of stories in The Sun about disgraced holiday goers getting on party boats and giving each other gratuitous blow jobs and scandalising their home nations by doing shots out of each others arseholes and rutting on the bow of the ship like they're in Brazzers Presents: Titanic, the XXX Parody. We daren't even mention the areas of mainland Europe that we've managed to colonise with racist comedians and shows where women pull trash from their vaginas.

What is it about holidaying that causes us to lose our inhibitions? You don't see Japanese tourists going to the Taj Mahal and grab-squeezing their testicles making a 'whoosh' face do you?

The easy answer is that British people are fucking cunts. We are historically one of the most evil nations on planet earth, and our attitude to international relations and respect for cultures has been 'rape and kill'. Perhaps there is an element of colonial backdraft where we feel we must degrade any and all country and its traditions and values, as if as soon as the plane lands we are 'activated', Manchurian Candidate-style.

But we're not so bad really. We're a weak country now, on the back foot, on the cusp of leaving Europe, our mummy and daddy, to go it alone like a child who runs away cuz there's no batteries for the Xbox controller and no one wants to drive them to the petrol station. We pose no threat. It's the heat we can't deal with. After months and months of constantly being brow beaten by the sky, the sense of release induces a kind of shitlad psychosis, a big tab of ultraviolet acid straight to the bonce. It's also the change of environment. When you go from thinking about buying some pens from the Ryman's closing down sale every day to seeing a Wonder of the World, the feverish excitement can take over and make you act like a bellend.

This may be a fair answer for the vomiting-on-my-shoes-while-someone-else-vomits-on-my-head crew, but for these tepid nudists, these adventuring middle managers, it's a chance to shed the gloomy Keep Calm and Riot Clean Up behave yourself puritanical chasteness of living on this painfully twee island. Going away is sexy, it makes you feel sexy, and sometimes it's easy to get carried away and disrespect an ancient monument to the gods, because Milton Keynes doesn't have an ancient monument to the gods, it just has several Burger Kings in various stages of closing down.

Though I'm in two minds about it. While on the one hand I think it's good to let loose and get some catharsis from this fucking place, the phenomenal levels of obnoxiousness my countrymen display constantly awe me. Perhaps there's a middle ground. A quiet internal scream when faced with the majesty of the Serengeti, or just wearing a T-shirt with your waps on. That way you can break the habit of a lifetime, and not cause natural disasters with your disgusting pasty genitals.

@joe_bish

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