AND THE HAPPY, HELPFUL ONES ARE AMERICAN PASSENGERS OR INDONESIAN CREW:

Mediterranean cruises: how closely some nationalities conform to their stereotypes: I don't mean to generalise but I think that all Italians are like children, Britons seem middle-aged while the Chinese appear old before their time. (Michael Deacon, 05 Sep 2011, The Telegraph)

The first lesson you learnt while trying to get around on deck was that Italians walk the way they drive - that is, as if there were nobody within a hundred yards of them. You could tell at a glance which passengers weren't Italian: they were the ones scrambling for cover under the nearest sunlounger, to avoid being trampled in the stampede to the coffee shop.

Also, every conversation held by the Italians sounded like a blazing row. Even when ordering drinks they adopted the kind of tone non-Italians might reserve for addressing a teenage boy who's impregnated their daughter.

Naturally there were passengers from lots of other countries, too. In fact, by the end of the trip I'd begun to form a theory: in temperament, nationalities are like age groups. Italians are like children: noisy, boisterous, alternately ecstatic and furious.

The French are like teenagers: pouting, huffy, sex-mad (see how they insist on giving each noun a gender - only a Frenchman could look at a table and think, "Yes, that's female").

Swedes are like grown adults: mature, sensible, a bit dull. The Chinese are like the elderly: cautious, courteous, and increasingly resented because there are so many of them and they've so much money.

And the British, of course, are like the embittered middle-aged, which is why we're so good at making unkind generalisations about everybody else.

Still, there's one characteristic that unites tourists of all nationalities, and that's jadedness. On Wednesday, several coachloads of us went to Athens. By the time we'd reached the Parthenon, everybody looked irritable and bored: perhaps it was the heat, perhaps it was the crowds, but the prevailing attitude seemed to be that, once you'd seen one heap of ancient Greek rubble, you'd seen them all.

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