With the purple revolution sweeping the Thames Estuary as a result of eastern European immigration, spare a thought for the Poles faced with their own invasion – of Brits. Yes, it’s stag parties, the greatest catastrophe for European civilisation since 1453.
Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz wrote in a letter addressed to the diocese’s congregations: “Let’s look at the facts: the city is now full of nightclubs where the body, particularly of that of a woman, is used in a way that can be called profane.”
That’s certainly one way of looking at it. Among the sort of things on offer for stags do’s in central Europe are shooting expeditions with Kalashnikovs and various entertainments involving women in states of undress. And lots of vodka, obviously. (In the far east you can actually blow up cows with bazookas on stag do’s, if that’s your thing).
The funny thing about stag weekends is that almost no one, not the stag, not his friends, and certainly not the women (or cows) enjoys them; they’re a form of ritualised torture that has grown out of control in the last 30 years.
This has come about at the same time as the opening of the former eastern bloc to western tourism, where prices are far lower, and very cheap air fares; one airline a couple of years ago even advertised inviting people to “fly to somewhere you’ve never heard of”, which suggests that the residents there might not expect an influx of culture vultures.
The problem is that, as always, the Brits – 20 per cent of Krakow’s visitors – are the worst behaved, as they are across the Mediterranean (only the Russians are generally less popular as tourists). Donald Tusk, the prime minister until this year, has described the “Englishmen” in Polish cities as “loutish”. What an outrageous slur on our national character, where could he have got that idea.
The English have always had a reputation for being badly-behaved drunks St Boniface, the Devonian who converted the Germans, said that drunkenness was “a vice peculiar to the heathens and to our race, and that neither Franks, Gauls, Lombards, Romans nor Greeks indulge in”. Twelfth-century writer William of Malmesbury, who was half-English and half-Norman, said of the English that “Drinking in parties was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days”.
Nothing much has changed, except the poor Poles now have to put up with; next time you think about the Polish influx in England, spare a thought for the poor people of Kracow.
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