When I was a teenager we got drunk but not hysterically so and always remembered where we'd left our handbags. The girls who chose these destinations behaved nothing like the men. They belong to a more innocent age when having fun was a simple matter of snogging waiters and formation dancing. Fifteen or so years later, Sangria is off the menu and a young girl's idea of paradise is a couple of wraps of charlie and a placing in the mud-wrestling competition. Men run about shouting obscenities - so do women.
Men go about in packs and leer at passers by - so do women.
Men moon at tourist coach windows - so do their female companions. Some would doubtless call this equality. No longer exclusively male or working class, the drunks of Tony Blair's nightmares are as likely to be young female professionals as tattooed, underclass no-marks. To take Ibiza as a microcosm of the way things are going back home, the drive to excess is no longer linked with any class or gender. Unlike Benidorm, the island's hotspots are as likely to be peopled by Alexandras on their gap years as Terrys on the promise that they won't spend theirs and Sheryl's savings.