No we haven't abandoned the European tour, we have just been elsewhere.
Anyway this one was always going to be difficult for me, as it is not easy for a British national who has left the UK to write about his native country and be impartial.
Which is the objective? Right?
OK. British stereotypes. Snobbish, plum in the throat, always think that they know better than know better than anyone else, still think that the Empire exists and the rest of the world is there to serve them, reserved, sexually inhibited .....
Good, well that is a small section of the country based principally in the South-East of the country dealt with.
The discomfort with foreigners is more widespread than that though. The xenophobic, neo-Fascist, British National Party has most of its support in the north of England (sad as that makes me, it is a fact that has to be faced), and anti-EU attitudes are fiercest in Yorkshire apparently.
I would like to think that, as we speak a much more traditional form of the English language than they do down south (for one thing we can pronounce "bath" and "cup" correctly), we might also be able to show more intelligent attitudes to the rest of the world. Sadly (in my exile), I am one of the exceptions apparently that proves the rule.
And for the country as a whole there have been disturbing examples of insularity during international crises. The city of Berlin took in more refugees from the Bosnian War than did the entire UK! And after Blair's mistaken escapade in Iraq, the UK also showed extreme reluctance to take in any of the refugees (2 million out of a population of 24 million, NB) from that conflict.
Great - prove your old imperialist credentials by invading a country halfway round the world, but do not take responsibilities for the human consequences and the tragedies that follow. Makes us look really good, right? Leave it instead to pariah states like Syria to look after!
That said after the 2004 tsunami the UK was one of the most generous donors in terms of help from private sources, so it is not always bad news. Merely something of a mish-mash.
Which conveniently brings me on to the subject of sex.
Few people elsewhere understand this, but prudishness and sexual inhibition are not significant features of the British psyche.
The percentage of teenagers under the age of consent who are sexually active is higher than in supposedly knowledgeable countries like Germany, the Netherlands or France. This is, in its way, reflected by the high number of teenage pregnancies (although ignorance may also play its part - not using birth control methods often results from lack of education).
Also since pornography was finally legalised in the UK (some 30 years after elsewhere in Western Europe), the UK has become one of the highest users of online porn services. Maybe their European counterparts regard it as "old hat" and are bored with it by now, while the British find it fairly novel - which may help explain the stats.
And as for the ladies of the night ... As a tourist assume you wanted to make a telephone call from a kiosk in London. Your first day in the city - what did you find? Dozens of postcards in the 'phone box from the city's prostitutes advertising their services - almost falling on top of you, there were so many!
Prostitution was always illegal (though there was a whole variety of very confused laws on the subject), but it was always also there, and in some weird places. There was an area in Birmingham called Bonsall Heath that had its own "little Amsterdam" - shop windows and all - back in the 1980s and 90s. Southampton, Sheffield, Manchester all had their notorious areas. And then, of all places, Ipswich hit the headlines a few years ago, when five girls (all drug addicts) who were working the streets there, were murdered.
The police didn't shut them down? Well the laws were applied, I recall reading of one girl in Birmingham who had started at the age of 15 and had been, at the last count, convicted of soliciting 104 times!
Pay the fine, back to the streets, all the same again. Weird, and it sounds a total waste of time.
The last that I heard on the subject was the previous Labour government decided that the Swedish/Norwegian solution of fining the customers was the way to go. Not sure whether that got pushed through as law. If so I shall be waiting, though not exactly with bated breath, for news of a British MP or judge or local police chief or journalist from the Murdoch press who has been caught offering money to one of these "girls"!
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