The Changed Face of Brits Abroad
I’ve never been a drum-banging nationalist. My national pride only really came out when I’d bump into German or American tourists and have to be subjected to their ways. Germans make us look bad because of how reserved and efficient the fuckers are, so it’s closer to jealousy, but Americans make us kind of look good because of how autistic they seem.
The thing about Brits abroad is the fact that the cheaper air travel became and the higher our wages rose, the world got introduced to more and more regular Brits. For centuries, most of the world only met well-spoken men wearing top hats and monocles who would write poetry in order to get up inside some lady guts. We were mythical, gentlemanly aliens. That all changed when package holidays and cheap airlines emerged. Suddenly this new breed of English-speaking man was marauding through an exotic town centre and stampeding onto beaches, all covered in a red lobster glow that made the eyes yell, “Ouch!”
The real Brits had arrived. The real Brits liked to drink. The real Brits liked to fight. The real Brits were just awful.
Our reputation changed dramatically across the world. We were no longer impressive because of our politeness and sophistication; we were now impressive because we could drink any nation under the table, survive third-degree burns, and carry on drinking. The Belgians love us for our drinking, and Belgium gave us Stella Artois, which enabled us to beat our wives within an inch of their lives without remorse.
Thailand once was the reserve of the gentleman class and ya-ya gap-year backpacking wankers. That’s why I had no interest in going there when I was younger. Not that I preferred to hang out in Magaluf or Xante with the filth of every council estate north of St. Albarns—where the north really begins—but because I just couldn’t stand people who had miraculously changed because they roughed it in a dirt hostel for a month and petted a fucking elephant. I couldn’t stand hearing about people’s wonderful trips to Asia, how cheap they were, and how they understood the plight of the third world because they got fingered on a beach in Bali by a rent boy. “Just fuck off back there, you cunt,” I would want to say, but instead I would nod and beg the Lord up high that this moment would pass quicker. By the time I first arrived in Thailand, it was already open to everyone else, and this conflicted me: who did I hate more?
The ya-ya types were perhaps more respectful but at the same time excruciatingly condescending, whereas the Brits abroad crew were also condescending—in a different way—and often very disrespectful. A Brit abroad, after all, could start a fight with his shadow. You’d have more fun with a Brit abroad than a ya-ya, but more fun can also lead to far more trouble, and trouble in a dusty foreign country with no perception of human rights was big, big trouble.
Even the old sex-tourist types who were also Brits abroad didn’t have any manners or self-awareness. You’d think if you reached the grand old age of retirement, you would have cultivated meadows of wisdom and seen enough nonsense to know how to properly conduct yourself in the world.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
These filthy old puffins, jacked up on blue pills and a new-found weird sense of self-esteem, were just gross. I once saw a man in a go-go bar who was so old that the Grim Reaper was his fucking wingman. And what was he doing in this bar? Fingering a nineteen-year-old on the table before him. The look on his face was a mixture of pride and sheer dementia. While performing a wrinkled kit-kat shuffle, he was also spanking her and being very demanding towards the poor shell-shocked staff catering to his every need (they probably also emptied his piss bag for him). If it wasn’t for his dishevelled old man face, he could have been any age above 15, purely based on his behavior.
Everyone is gross.
I am gross.
What was I? Which camp did I fit into? Was I a Brit abroad, half a ya-ya, or a filthy sex tourist? Or was I just a digital nomad? I was somewhere in the mix. I never went to Thailand with the sole purpose of slamming working girls every evening—quite the opposite. I considered paying for sex to be beneath me. That was until I discovered how straight-forward and fun it was, and nobody in this bonkers nation seemed to give a shit. But it wasn’t the sex that got me hooked at first; it was the laid-back life and regular access to benzos.
I was a drug-nomad.
If there was a choice between a box of Xanax or a happy-ending massage, the Xanax would win. And I mean, win by a long way, like Real Madrid spanking a Sunday League team made up of alcoholic warehouse workers. I loved drugs more than sex, but then again, the ladies of Thailand weren’t exactly my cup of tea. Perhaps in a different land full of my kind of ladies, the ladies would have won, and my brain would have been less smashed in. But then again, in the end, the Sunday League team did make a miraculous turn-around.
