OUR own Laurence Sterne wrote "an Englishman does not travel to see Englishmen". If the Coxwold novelist were around to pack his sun cream and Jilly Cooper today, there is one destination he'd be sure to avoid: Faliraki.

For in this Greek resort, he would not only see Englishmen - eight out of ten tourists are British - he'd see far too much of them. There is plenty of flesh flashed in Faliraki (trying saying that after 17 alcopops).

Faliraki revellers are in the news because the Greeks have had enough, and are cracking down. Things must be pretty wretched if the civilisation which invented mass debauchery can no longer stomach our behaviour.

The loutish levels increased after the ITV series Club Reps glamorised the drunken exploits of English tourists there.

Reporters touring the place for various newspapers this week saw girls lifting microskirts to show their tattoos, men urinating in the street and more trouser-dropping than a decade's-worth of Run For Your Wife.

Every lagered-up lad succumbs to the power of the Mediterranean moon. This custom is now so widespread it has reached the rheumy eyes of retired Tunbridge Wells colonels.

"I am one of the British tourists arrested in Faliraki for baring my bottom in public," huffs Simon Topp, in a stunningly original opening to a Daily Telegraph letter.

He acknowledges that Torygraph readers would applaud the Greek police for throwing him in the slammer, and would agree - "with hindsight".

Mr Topp, it was the sight of your hind which got you into this mess.

He goes on: "I am not a lout, but a public-school-educated university student" - as if the latter precluded the former. And then Mr Topp whinges about his treatment by the Greek police, who held him in a filthy cell and called him English scum.

No sympathy from Tunbridge Wells colonels nor North Yorkshire columnists, Simon: you got what was coming. After all, is a Greek prison cell any filthier than a Greek street spattered by English vomit and urine? Isn't the English proclivity to moon and leer, pee and spew while on holiday pretty scummy?

It is a shame that the Faliraki scenes should be in the headlines so soon after the World Cup. Before the tournament, everyone feared that football yobs would smear the good name of the English abroad yet again. But our fans' good-humoured antics delighted the locals.

Instead it is the package holiday hooligans who are letting us down.

That is not to suggest that I am a model of abstemiousness who has never made an idiot of himself after five too many. But there is something alarming about this herd hedonism, and an undercurrent of sexual excess.

Over the past two months, three British women were raped in the resort. It should be no surprise. Everything about Faliraki suggests sex is available on demand. From Club Reps, which brought alcohol-fuelled lechery to a mass audience, to the names of the bars - G Spot, Big Peckers, Climax - the message is: anything goes.

By flinging the likes of Simon Topp in prison for dropping his drawers, the Greek police are finally saying that anything doesn't go. My advice to Simon is to return to Greece in a calmer frame of mind, perhaps to pursue a sedate, uncontroversial hobby. Plane-spotting springs to mind.

AMERICA is celebrating Independence Day tomorrow. The parties will be long and loud. Fortunately, there will be no Afghan air force pilot flying above them, ready to misinterpret the party poppers and fireworks as a hostile attack before bombing innocent women and children to kingdom come.

Updated: 11:19 Wednesday, July 03, 2002