'A dirty, hoggish people'

How one, admittedly crazy-sounding, Latvian politician saw the British after witnessing planeload after planeload of stag parties puking, pissing, and shagging their way around Riga, behaviour which has prompted the city's mayor to issue a public warning asking all-male groups from the UK to up their game a bit.

I have rather mixed feelings about this. Stag parties are not my thing, and the only one I ever went on involved a bunch of us playing pool in a cottage in Blakeney, having a kick-around, rescuing two small children from the salt marshes (long story), eating some lasagne, then heading back to Norwich full of bracing sea air. I could, I think, manage the 'rugged outdoor activities followed by one big night out in a UK city'-type affair, but the decidedly 2000s practice of decamping en masse to Central Europe, drinking Dreher or Krusovice until it comes out of one's eyeballs, then visiting extremely expensive strip & clip joints leaves me cold. Spending ten months in Budapest's District Seven, effectively the hub of the city's nightlife, has allowed me to witness a lot of these parties at first hand, and they're pretty grim. On our street there's a well-patronised, well-regarded romkert (typically, a squat-like bar set up in a disused building, decorated with furniture collected in the biannual district chuck-out) called Szimplákert. Now, Szimplákert has become, to a degree, a victim of it's own success, and even makes it onto the pages of the typically unadventurous Lonely Planet bar listings, with the result that big groups of Brits - or those smart enough to realise that they're being massively overcharged in the shiny, Square Mile-type bars on Liszt Tér - wind up there. Cue parades of middle managers in polo shirts decorated with 'hilarious', often borderline homophobic slogans ('Budapest 2009 - Gay-vin's Stag Do!' was a recent favourite), yelling at the barmaids in English, and competing with the local winos to see who can leave the biggest patch of vomit on my doorstep for me to step in come Saturday morning.

The thing is, though, that I can't help but feel that the British are scapegoated somewhat. I've seen plenty of Germans, Scandinavians, and Russians behaving identically in District Seven, the difference being that the British only seem to act up when under the influence. When sober, most English people at least demonstrate a degree of embarrassment about their unwillingness to take the plunge with Hungarian, whereas I frequently see Germans snap at shop or café workers (in English or German) then descend into fits of mirth at their addressee's inability to respond. What price a guy from Szeged or Miskolc walking into a bar in Hamburg, rattling off an order in Hungarian, and expressing complete incredulity at his failure to be understood?

I've often asked my students, and people I meet around and about, what their stereotype of an English (or Scottish - they don't often differentiate) person is. Sample answers: 'a snob'; 'an alcoholic'; 'a football hooligan'. The latter I find intriguing - I would have gone along to see Újpest or Fradi by now were their stadiums not more or less given over to Drehered-up ultra groups (witness the behaviour of Újpest's 'boys' as they host cross-border rivals Steaua Bucharest in the Europa League a few weeks back): by way of comparison, I've very rarely felt intimidated either within or en route to any English ground. I do feel that the British, and in particular the English, are frequently asked to take the rap for forms of behaviour which are endemic throughout the whole of Europe. I admit that I feel safer walking around downtown Budapest at three in the morning than I do walking through Norwich's leafy suburbs anytime after eight, but I hardly think antisocial behaviour is a problem exclusive to the UK.

'Academia', 2008

I'm sure I'm not the only one in this circle of bloggers who thinks students should waste their time going to Bauhaus concerts, holding increasingly irrelevant debates about the precise alignment of their crypto-Marxist 'factions' in the students union, and quoting Heidegger loudly - and incorrectly - on the bus.* That isn't how they waste their time, though. They waste their time visiting incredibly tawdry city centre bars and 'posing like porn stars'...

Students, 2008.

* AKA 'I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes they had taught in the years between 1977-1990'.

A brief, CAMRA-ish aside

PhD-completion stress has caused a bit of a loss of momentum on here recently, but I am currently trying to conceive of some more focussed articles to put up on here. I'm currently writing a piece about Ian Rankin which keeps stalling.

Anyway, I thought I'd do one of the customary 'hell in a handcart' articles. Now, I find real ale marketing quite embarassing usually. Problematically for someone who tends to prefer a pint of Frigging in the Rigging or Bishop's Finger over Carling or Strongbow, my tolerance for zany product names cooked-up by the marketing staff at independent breweries is not enormously high. When I used to work at a bar, we once did a weekend of real ale and folk dancing where the 'catch-up' strong beer was Granny Wouldn't Like It from Attleborough's almost unsurpassable Wolf Brewery. Now, the first time some Monty Python-quoting Environmental Sciences student asks you for a pint of that it's quite funny. When the seven hundredth Red Dwarf teeshirt-wearing, 'I'm mad, me!' individual does the same, however, it isn't quite so endearing (you know, it's all a bit 'aren't I naughty, ordering the marginally stronger beer with the ever-so-slightly risque name'). I usually preface my own bar orders of said products with a look that says 'if I were to take relish in asking for this drink, I'd be a wanker, and I'm not altogether cool with the fact that I'm buying a product whose marketers are intentionally trying to make me look like a wanker.' Then the barstaff look at me and know that I'm just a regular guy, a non-scener who just happens to like drinking real ale and doesn't feel the need to get into the paraphenalia of Queen records.*

I really am that cool.

Anyway, I'm cavorting off topic. What I meant to say is that the Portman Group (who I think have nothing to do with Ipswich Town's ground or Miranda Raison's character on Spooks) have criticised the Orkney Brewery for marketing a rather strong ale with the name 'Skull Splitter'. Now, notwithstanding the fact that the logo is a cartoon viking that would be unlikely to incite violence in even the most impressionable of those dead-eyed feral teenagers Eden Lake has got the chattering classes, er, chattering about, precisely how many real ale drinkers do you know who frequently indulge in booze-related violence? In my experience, people who go on holidays which involve attempting to visit as many microbreweries (and, let's face it, non-league football grounds) in a week as possible are not the same as those who loon out onto the pavement at eleven thirty trying to kick seven bells out of all and sundry. In all honesty, they're probably making putatively 'witty' remarks at the exhausted bartenders who are trying to remove them from their beery comfort zone, but violence doesn't tend to enter the equation.

Oh, shit. I sound like Jeremy Clarkson. Can I add a qualificatory note about my heartfelt belief in integrated mass transit and my enthusiasm for speed camera/ traffic management schemes? Hopefully that makes it all a little better.

* But maybe I do fulfill the criteria: non-league football; long walks; dilletantish inquisitiveness about archaeology and history. Hold on, this is turning into one of my famous 'Simon from Teachers' male anxiety attacks.

Real Ale: stronger than you think!

Hence the 'staccato' sentences in the last post. I hadn't even been watching the game; I'd merely read that report as I was eating my late-night chicken in black bean sauce and it had wound me up...

To clarify, the 'I work bloody hard' referred to when I play football, obviously not to the PhD/ teaching/ editing (which generally gets deferred in favour of blogging and, well, playing football.)

Straw Dogs is still pretty much as delicious as a weisse beer can get though...