Stop me if youve heard this one before....
the ferry
Posts: 258
Guys
I know we have had variations on the same theme......but here goes...
Just back from Spain nice modest village one nightclub.
With wife and kids walk past nightclub early hours.
Local lads gathered outside stand aside as we walk past! absolutely no sign/mood of aggresion whatsoever.
We all know how this scene would play out in almost every town or city in the UK
I dont want to move there too hot and boring but i would dearly love us to be more at ease with ourselves.
Why do the Spanish locals look cool and macho but dont feel the need to get hammered and violent?
I know we have had variations on the same theme......but here goes...
Just back from Spain nice modest village one nightclub.
With wife and kids walk past nightclub early hours.
Local lads gathered outside stand aside as we walk past! absolutely no sign/mood of aggresion whatsoever.
We all know how this scene would play out in almost every town or city in the UK
I dont want to move there too hot and boring but i would dearly love us to be more at ease with ourselves.
Why do the Spanish locals look cool and macho but dont feel the need to get hammered and violent?
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Comments
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Don't know if this is the answer but I think our British culture is slowly being lost because we as a nation are culturally closer to the USA than we are our european neighbours. I happen to think this is for the worse.
Not quite sure myself what that has to do with walking past a group and feeling intimidated though.Tail end Charlie
The above post may contain traces of sarcasm or/and bullsh*t.0 -
Culturally, we are between the US and Europe. We have the "everyone for himself"/"I am free to do what I like" attitude of the US without the mental religious upbringing to control it, and we have the social liberalism of the EU (drink, drugs, sex) without the sense of collective social responsibility.
Or, put another way, we want the individual freedoms of the US without the responsibility and the support/entitlements of Europe without having to pay the tax.
Sorry if that doesn't read well - I have had a couple and someone is looking at my pint.0 -
Noticed the same thing in Italy, found myself with my young family in a small town piazza on a Sunday evening, every bar in the place was packed with teenagers, but the piazza was also packed with families, tiny children, grandparents. I doubt if there was a single drunk in the place.
I think behaviour here has a lot to do with the de-industrialisation, population movement, and the general breakdown of communities. As a kid me & my mates would always behave in the local village pubs where you knew that the landlord and half his customers were on first name terms with your Dad, but when you went into the anominity of town, or of to the coast for the weekend...0 -
Because somehow, Britain has lost it. Pride in work, collective enthusiasm and ambition,
respect for others, respect for self, etc etc etc.- all lost The really down side is that one day a group like the BNP will have mass appeal.
Until then there should be some kind of univeral personal code:
work for a living
don't be wasted in public
look after your body
respect other people
don't abuse alcohol & drugs
respect public spaces
have pride in what you do
think of the consequences of your actions
etc.
It's not that hard, but we can't do it.0 -
PS: it is because of CLASS. What else makes the UK - and England in particular - different from the rest of the world? !You have a whole sector of society, the working class, who cannot progress and now many simply don't care. Meanwhile you have a lot of inherited wealth which funds public school education and ensures the succession of tightly controlled access to the professions and other good jobs. There is no social mobility and that makes people resentful.0
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I can offer no explanation but agree. Every time I arrive back in Britain after going to France...or actually, most other countries I've ever visited...I'm pssed off by the attitude of my fellow countrymen on the street. There's not many towns/cities I'd be happy walking through at night. whereas in France, I'd be happy sitting outside virtually every takeaway in the country. I blame the lack of social responsibility but not sure where that comes from or how to correct it. How are you going to tell some scummy parents how to raise their kids? And how can you make sure that their kids raise raise their kids better?0
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Sorry if you think CLASS is the problem and lack of social Mobility because it is not and was not as simple as that. If what you said was true how come the children and Grandchildren and now great grandchildren of a glassworker that started at the age 14 are doctors, engineers, consultants,teachers,etc. I would say the wealth divide in the US and now Russia is much more of a prevention to social mobility.
The problem with comparing one country with another is you are not comparing like with like. Are we comparing Liverpool with Brest or with St. Malo.
Social and personal responsibility. I was taught and I taught my kids that in public you are on your best behaviour and that if you did that you were much more likely to get the little treats you wanted. This is not class related .10 years ago I saw a posh family in a service station with 3 children and they were creating so much that my children then aged 5 and 6 commented on how badly parented they were.0 -
Agree - to an extent. Beware the rose tinting effect that tends to give a more positive light to places you've visited but haven't hung around for any real length of time. I'd try to explain further but you're all smart people and hopefully know what I'm on about.
Case in point: I'm back in the UK after living in NZ for 7 years. Talk to most people who've visited NZ and they'll gush about the place and the people. Yet the binge drinking culture, and the violence that goes with it, is comparably rife, maybe not quite so bad but it's there for sure. Check out NZ's crime figures if you want to do your own research.
Ditto Australia. Probably worse in fact, but I don't speak from a lot of personal experience.
Then again these are also USA-centric cultures, and I think the above comments have merit.
As a kid I lived in Holland for three years. Went to school there too. There's plenty of Dutch suburbs/estates you wouldn't want to walk through at night. Especially if you're English and don't speak perfect Dutch! The mousy brown hair and sub-7ft height are a dead giveaway
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Suspect the same is true in France, Italy, Spain, etc. Just not in the 'nice' parts we tend to holiday in.When Chuck Norris does division, there are no remainders.0 -
Kieron
Thats probably hit home the most up to now especially as you are talking of first hand experiences.
I am surprised at your comments regarding NZ as we have relatives there and although i've never visited i did assume it had a more easy going feel about it.
The rose tinted thing i cant except as much. The village i go to is very modest and would not be seen as some glorious paradise.
I too lived in Holland for a short while, the only bother i found there was from visitors and and almost exclusively British :?0 -
I've been to Andalucia a few times and there are definitely parts that I felt unsafe in - violent crime and drunkness is not unheard of in Spain.
Compare your Spanish village with one in Sleepy suffolk or south Devon - and I think you'll find it's not so different.
Compare our cities with Madris, Granada, Seville, Barcelona, etc. for a fairer comparison.0 -
Some interesting responses. I like to add an additional observation:
In the late 1960s I am told that the standard teacher training course dropped the use of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy.
An interesting book, I remember reading it and being struck on how important social responsibility seemed to be. We all know the Victorians were keen rule makers, but it seems the attitude that underpinned this was that education should primarily be concerned with teaching people their responsibilities (or "place") in society, along with cultural and vocational learning. To be clear, Arnold advocated
1) place in society (paraphrasing)
2) culture (history, poetry, etc)
3) vocational (science, practical and commercial skills)
You could argue it enshrined values that kept the class divide active, or even dulled Britain's technology edge by putting vocational study so low in priority and prestige, but I think this list will ring true with most people.
In the liberal afterglow of the 1960s, I think we started to lose sight of why we chose these pillars of education and how we prioritised them. The teaching can only have reflected this, and it clearly has had some consequences: The children that would have been educated by these teachers, also now have children in some cases.
Not cause and effect, but definitely a factor. Incidentally, I look at my friends in Greece and I think about what was happening at the same time (late 60s early 70s). The Colonels were in power at that time: not surprising then that their kids are politicised: when you p1ss them off, they don't get p1ssed, they just riot (against the police). Interestingly they all then go home quietly to their parents' house and go to work / college the next day.
Of course, I am more than inclined to go a bit Daily Mail and decide that this country has gone to the dogs...
PS the drunks in Suffolk villages are scum"There are holes in the sky,
Where the rain gets in.
But they're ever so small
That's why rain is thin. " Spike Milligan0 -
There's plenty of abusive, drunken behaviour in European cities. I think Brits tend to see things through media/rose tinted glasses. Try nights in industrial towns in Germany like Hamburg - plenty of aggressive, p*ssed up Germans about. I've also been to Bilbao a couple of times and over the weekends, the streets are thronging with teenage drinkers swigging on beer, vodka/red bull, vodka/fruit juices etc etc which they have decanted into large empty water bottles. They then proceed to get lairy, throw up in the street and make a lot of noise. There are literally hundreds of them - go see!Do not write below this line. Office use only.0
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Paris also has some very nasty suburbs. I think poorer people are generally polarised in these suburbs in cities like Paris far more so than they are in places like London. It's more like Los Angeles with wealthy people living in areas like Beverly Hills and poorer people in South Central etc.
London's middle and upper middle classes (and assorted Daily Wail readers) are often mixed with those from poorer backgrounds in social housing. Think of areas like Islington, both very wealthy and some of the poorest people in the UK live very close to each other.
Not that drinking is restricted to the poorer classes, it's probably just that middle and upper middle classes are more likely to get wasted at home or at a friend's place round a dinner table than outside a dodgy pub or club.Do not write below this line. Office use only.0 -
my mate went to barcalona recently and within the same day of his arrival he was pick pocketed by two guys, one pushed him back while the other nicker his wallet and phone etc, then a few hours later someone tried to rob him at gunpoint but as he had already been robbed he had nothing to give and luckily they left it at that0
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I was mugged by 3 guys, 1 with a knife, in Amsterdam back in the early 1990s....Do not write below this line. Office use only.0
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I think SteppenHerring put his finger on it when in not so many words he said, people are well up on their "rights" but not too keen on their responsibilities.
There are so many aspects as to why this nation is as it is today, and putting it right is going to be a very tough task for any democratic government to sort out.Tail end Charlie
The above post may contain traces of sarcasm or/and bullsh*t.0 -
Frank the tank wrote:I think SteppenHerring put his finger on it when in not so many words he said, people are well up on their "rights" but not too keen on their responsibilities.
There are so many aspects as to why this nation is as it is today, and putting it right is going to be a very tough task for any democratic government to sort out.
Some people blame Mrs Thatcher and the 1980s Conservatives for the change to an emphasis on rights rather than an feeling of community responsibility. I agree though, many people now are happy to stand up for their rights even if it means someone else suffers whereas.
My dad who was a teacher til he retired noticed this, he said that when he started teaching, kids only really needed a stern word to fall in line but increasingly kids were aware of their "rights" and knew that teachers couldn't physically touch them or even threaten this and if they did were very quick to scream "abuse".Do not write below this line. Office use only.0 -
SteppenHerring wrote:Culturally, we are between the US and Europe. We have the "everyone for himself"/"I am free to do what I like" attitude of the US without the mental religious upbringing to control it, and we have the social liberalism of the EU (drink, drugs, sex) without the sense of collective social responsibility.
Or, put another way, we want the individual freedoms of the US without the responsibility and the support/entitlements of Europe without having to pay the tax.
Sorry if that doesn't read well - I have had a couple and someone is looking at my pint.
I agree 100%
Most Brits want it all but don't give a damn about the consequences.0 -
Headhuunter wrote:I've also been to Bilbao a couple of times and over the weekends, the streets are thronging with teenage drinkers swigging on beer, vodka/red bull, vodka/fruit juices etc etc which they have decanted into large empty water bottles. They then proceed to get lairy, throw up in the street and make a lot of noise. There are literally hundreds of them - go see!
But even then, the problem isn't the same as in the UK. I lived in Bilbao for two years, when the issue of street drinking amongst teens was becoming a 'problem'. People seemed most upset about the quantity of rubbish - La Casilla on a Sunday morning looked like a rubbish dump - not the actions of youths. Yes they got drunk, and loud, and vomitted everywhere, but they didn't get into fights etc.
Go to Bilbao (or indeed any Spanish town) during Fiestas - everyones well away on Kalimotxo (cheap red wine mixed with coke) - people are certainly drunk and noisy, but they're high-spirited, not aggressive.0 -
I lived in Spain for 3 1/2 years... During that time I saw plenty of Spanish drunks, behaving much the same as any other countries drunks!
I have worked in quite a few locations throughout the world and have seen similar behaviour, too, even third world countries experience it!
Regardless of where you are, the same behavioural patterns exist, but maybe you're less critical when on holiday!...Start with a budget, finish with a mortgage!0 -
I live "abroad" and initially thought that there was no crime at all here (it's against the law). However, the more I get into the local language, papers, news, etc. the more I realise I just didn't hear about it. As a holiday maker you probably don't read the local papers or listen to the news, if you personally don't see any crime or violence, then the place must be an idyllic haven. If you get mugged its a pit of iniquity.
Having said that, I feel much safer in a dark street here, than I would in many parts of the UK, but whether this is the remnants of the rose tinted glasses, I don't know. I don't always lock my bike outside shops, I wouldn't consider doing that where I used to live in the UK.
Agree with the comments on peoples "rights". I'd replace all human rights legislation with human "responsibility" legislation.0 -
I lived in Camberwell and Brixton for nearly ten years - overlooking what has been recognised as the highest crime estate in London - so anywhere outside of LA, Glasgow and The Wire looks idyllic to me.
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