I KNEW it was too good to last.

Two weeks ago I felt a rare stirring of national pride when the British embassy in Riga made the small but significant gesture of flying the rainbow flag from the embassy balcony. This happened while childish, nineteenth-century insults were being hurled at a small group of homosexuals on the other side of town for daring to walk around openly in public.

They were greeted by a ragtag welcoming committee of skinheads (unaware that they looked the biggest poofters of the day) and snarling Christians who manage to conveniently forget a couple of Commandments every time they think about other people’s bedroom habits. Which they seem to think about an awful lot.

So the British embassy’s flag-waving gesture was a small statement of common sense and tolerance, prompting me even to send a ‘well done’ email to the ambassador, the likeable Richard Moon.

But last Friday, the reputation of Britons (or more accurately, the English) returned to the gutter. Literally.

The agents of this reversal were a group of drunken English louts causing trouble in Livu square. The police were called to a bar when their boorish behaviour started causing problems with other patrons. Unfortunately, only one officer seems to have been asked to deal with the situation. So three Englishmen beat him unconscious and then ran away like true heroes.

After such an incident it’s difficult to argue against a growing tide of resentment against the English in Latvia. The last time one of them was caught pissing on the Freedom Monument, Interior Minister Mareks Seglins described the whole English nation as ‘pigs’. He copped minimal flak as a result for the simple reason that all the evidence available in Latvia seems to point towards his assessment being pretty accurate.

There used to be a remarkable store of goodwill for the English in Latvia. It’s all been pissed away now – literally, once again.

Of course not every Englishman is a violent, drunken arsehole. I know plenty of Englishmen in Riga who work hard, respect the law, learn the language and generally try to integrate. But given the overwhelming evidence pointing in precisely the opposite direction, their efforts are futile.

Until something happens to transform English culture – bubonic plague perhaps – we’d might as well accept that we are the pariahs of European tourism and that we have richly earned that reputation over many years. We no longer even need the excuse of a major football championship to go abroad and be obnoxious to the locals, other tourists and anyone else unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

The details of the assailants have yet to be released but I’ll offer three to one they are from Liverpool, this year’s hilariously inappropriate European Capital of Culture. The Ryanair booze express flies into Riga at 11.15 on Fridays, which gives ample time for the Morlocks of Merseyside to get themselves into a violent frenzy by the evening. The assault of the policeman happened before 9pm.

For the last few years I lived in England I would never even think of venturing into a city centre on a Friday or Saturday night, as it was a sure bet that after 9pm the place would be transformed into a urine-soaked, litter strewn boxing ring that young men would destroy and then vomit on. Police would never dream of turning up at a troublespot unless there was a vanload of them in riot gear.

Basically, I didn’t go out because I didn’t want to meet Englishmen. It is difficult for people in other, civilized, countries to comprehend the depths of England’s binge-drunk depravity. Ironically, I now don’t go into Riga’s Old Town on a Friday or Saturday night because I don’t want to meet exactly the same selection of English scum.

So for the next few weeks I will be redoubling my efforts to learn Latvian and avoid using the language of Shakespeare, Dickens and Wordsworth. With a bit of luck no-one will notice that I am English, because I wouldn’t blame them one bit if they wanted nothing to do with me and my kind.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous, Latvia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.