Oi! Clarkson!

I used to admire Jeremy Clarkson. I enjoyed him on Top Gear, although I'd rather go for a drink with either of "the other two". I used to enjoy his columns in The Sunday Times. But success seems to have gone to his head - he's turned into his own joke.

A week or two back, he wrote about British tourists. Seems there was a survey amongst European hoteliers and British tourists came last. Since I live in an area that is infested with chip-guzzling, lager-swilling British tourists, this did not surprise me in the least.

His riposte may have been tongue-in-cheek, but to my mind it was a low, whorish pander to the "market segment" for which he writes. Clarkson: you can't cover shame with a cheap jibe.

The sad fact is that, here in the Algarve, British tourists are generally a very un-funny joke. Rude, arrogant, ignorant, uncultured, miserly, unadventurous, narrow-minded, unintelligent, badly dressed, poorly behaved... you get the idea. We (the collective business owners and residents of the Algarve) would rather have the Irish, the Dutch, the Germans, the French and even the Spanish (old national rivalry thing there), all of whom make better tourists - they spend more money (on a wider variety of goods and activities), they behave better, they are more cultured, etc. etc. etc.

And it's not just the "chips and lager" that irritate us. The other night I was in a favourite restaurant. At the next table an English couple attempted to engage the waitress in conversation. She's from Hungary and after only six months here she already speaks very good Portuguese. The English couple started with the peculiarly-British "slow and loud" way of speaking to "foreigners". When the girl didn't understand, they tried "even slower and even louder" and finally turned to the occupants of my table for assistance. "She's got to learn!" they declared, in the most condescending tone I've heard in a long time. Why? Why has a Hungarian girl working in a Portuguese restaurant in the Algarve "got to learn" English? So that a pair of ignorant, stupid British tourists can ask her inane questions while they share one pizza (with chips) between the two of them? I don't think so!

No doubt Clarkson would have categorised the waitress as "a Latvian girl who arrived in [Portugal] that morning on the underside of a Eurostar train" (to quote from another one of his writings) and fully supported Mr and Mrs Pigignorant's treatment of her.

Shame on you, Clarkson! You're part of the problem yourself.