Sex, drugs, alcohol and humping cars in Tenerife

No Sex Please, We're British Europeans get drunk 'to have sex', reports Captain Obvious at the BBC, which seems like no news at all!

Of course, that's followed up with the grim pronouncement that "the UK has one of the worst reputations for binge drinking and underage sex." And, we see plenty of them doing it in Tenerife, don't we?

The British do have this reputation, not entirely undeservedly from some things I've seen and heard, from which it is frequently assumed here (though the assumptions are frankly ignorant) that we're all loose / willing.

Therefore, I was most interested to read the results of this study, carried out in 9 European cities, which found that in Liverpool, 30% had drunk alcohol and had sex by the time they were 16 compared with 37% in Palma, Spain.

Pot, kettle, black, huh? (Well, unless that merely means 7% more youngsters in Palma, Spain are honest about it!) Even more interesting to note, though is that Diario Tenerife have chosen to run the same news report, in Spanish.

What neither version does is to give the percentages for all of the cities, but on what is given, it looks like the British are the least offenders of the lot!

Cars multiply in Tenerife Cars multiply in Tenerife

While looking for a suitable image for the above story, I was presented with this other option (right).

So that's how come there are 690 cars per 1,000 inhabitants in the Canary Islands? Or maybe if I say that there are 69 cars per 100 people, you'll get the irony? :)

Actually, sexual innuendo aside, it's a disgusting statistic, when looked at alongside the world average of 164 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants.

The average in Spain is 471 vehicles per thousand inhabitants, on a par with the European average of 472. Tenerife is worse with 720 vehicles per 1,000 people, not far behind the United States' appalling number of 765, though at least we haven't reached Lanzarote's level of 875, where we have to assume that even dogs have their own cars and toddlers drive themselves to nursery.

Of course, we have a large car hire fleet, but that surely is not the only answer, because other tourist destinations must too. The good news is that vehicle registrations have dropped recently on the island. The bad news is that this is usually reported as being a negative thing, related to the economic crisis.