Crumpled Britskin

Spot a British Tourist – September 2011

‘I can always tell when someone is British’, said Paul, who was our tour guide in Lebanon in May 2011, ‘By their noises’.

‘What sort of noises?’, we asked, much intrigued.

‘Big pink noises’, he replied, ‘They look like Mr. Bean’.

Which may well be true. But you can spot someone who is a British tourist by a number of other clues too, one of which is their clothes. The clues include:

1. Crumpled trousers. Quite why Brits wear crumpled trousers is as yet unclear to me, for other nationalities don’t.

2. A hat. The Japanese wear hats when overseas too, possibly for the same reason, which I think is that they have been got at by the health and safety inspector, who tells them that exposure to sunlight will give them cancer (or in the case of the Brits it probably is not so much the health and safety inspector as the Daily Mail, which is famous for attributing cancer to just about everything, including even Facebook)

Anyway, whatever the reasons, you can spot them a mile off.

These two are on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The woman isn’t wearing a hat though, so much for my theories.

The man in an ancient uniform is something to do with the celebrations of the day in Bad Kühlungsborn in Germany. Behind him are two British visitors. Well, obvious innit?

Brits in an Italian town. No hats either. So much for theories. But the crumpled-trouser theory is holding up.

The woman on the right, she with the uncrumpled look, I think if I heard her accent right, is not British. These tourists are at the Baalbek temple in Lebanon.

There’s also On Being a Brit, especially if you read down the page a bit.