We’ve all done it (well most of us anyway) - headed to Magaluf, Ibiza, Kavos, {INSERT DESTINATION HERE} and partied just a little too hard. Give us a little sun and a fishbowl cocktail and all our inhibitions disappear.

Brits abroad have a bad reputation, fact. Not only are we least likely to bother attempting to say please and thank you in a foreign language, we’re also notoriously bad for hitting the sauce and getting into trouble. The ill-feeling has reached such fever pitch that Benidorm is rumoured to be following Ibiza and Magaluf’s lead and deploying Bristish police officers to keep alcohol-fueled holidaymakers out of trouble. Yet having found this infographic by My Voucher Codes, it would seem all the press about our antics in Spanish resorts might not be as clear cut as it seems.

Ill and ill minded - An infographic by the team at Where Brits get into trouble abroad

Yet although this suggests we’re not as bad as the media would have us believe, there’s more to this than simply arrests. Having seen how us Brits behave on various party strips around the world, I’m thinking we’re either too drunk to commit arrestable offences, or else too inebriated to know we’ve been the victim of crime. We might not be pinching wallets, defacing shop fronts or thumping each other, but we are absolutely guilty of crimes against decency.

I’ve seen it all. Lads playing drinking games and downing their own urine, girls flashing anyone and everyone, and public displays of, let’s call it, affection. Young people aged no more than 20 stumbling back to apartments bloodied and disorientated - totally incapable of knowing if they’ve been assaulted or not. It’s scary, messy and appalling in equal measure, and sadly I’ve experienced it myself.

Ten years or so ago, that was me. Heading out on a girls holiday without my parents, mistakenly thinking €400 was enough to feed me for a week and get me obliterated every night. I’d packed little more than bikinis and barely-there dresses and my friends were the same.

Stepping off the plane we headed straight for a bar, dragging our suitcases along beside us (we didn’t even drop them off at our hotel). Excited to be on our own making our own rules we drank steadily for some 5 hours, in the blazing sun with no water to hydrate us. We had met some lads and were flirting outrageously and making fools out of ourselves. It was a case of who could be the most controversial and best flutter their fake eyelashes - that girl would bag the tallest guy with the six pack.

It’s the same theme that has been popularised & normalised by BBC3′s Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents and The Inbetweeners Movie; the usual immature hedonism that so many of us explain away by dubbing it “a rite of passage”. And that was the moment we had our luggage stolen.

Reporting this to foreign policemen whilst intoxicated was a necessary but ridiculous endeavour and we we’re not sure to this day if the crime was even properly recorded. Needless to say we all placed shouty calls to our parents and had them send us money to buy clothes and toiletries - the first of many that would put us all back several months in proving how responsible we could be.

Memories of that holiday are hazy. I know we had a sort of scorecard to brag about how many times we’d been sick and how many guys we’d kissed. It was all a bit tacky and we were lucky to leave the island without any serious injuries or worse.

Subsequent holidays saw me get food poisoning on day 1 and spend 3 days on a drip in a dirty hospital, break my nose as a result of falling from a bar stool and witnessing friends go home with boys who looked in need of a wash and some jail time. I’m not proud of any it and can’t say any of it made me stronger, more self-aware or happier. When I think of how we simply threw polystyrene chip packets on the street, relieved ourselves behind bushes and went out cashless yet still got stand-up drunk - I feel completely ashamed. I know my own children won’t be let out of the country in a group until they’re emotionally ready to cope with the temptation to do the same.

I just think we all need to look at the way we act when holidaying. Arrests or no arrests, many of us are still letting ourselves down.