Through the window of my Croatian apartment, I watched the sun climb into the sky, flirting with the sea as if to say, “I might head for the clouds, or I might stay and spend the day with you.”

I breathed in the silence.

“Clive!” yelled an English voice. “Have you got your umbrella? I’ve checked the forecast, and it’s supposed to rain.”

Why is it that, wherever I travel, the English always seem to turn up next door?

I tried to ignore the interruption, but the woman appeared on the patio below and launched into her second conversation of the day.

“It’s supposed to rain later,” she told the apartment owner. “I’ve just reminded my husband to bring his umbrella.” The owner nodded politely, perhaps wondering why English people feel compelled to narrate the weather as if they personally negotiated it.

Through gritted teeth, I watched my neighbour sit in the garden to make a phone call.

“It’s supposed to rain later,” she said. “I just told Clive to remember his umbrella.”

From the enthusiasm in her voice, you’d think she was sharing the news for the very first time.

The Strangeness of Our Own Kind

I know I’m not the only one who feels irritated, and perhaps even slightly ashamed, when I run into fellow countrymen abroad.

Just a few days earlier, some French guys crossed the street to avoid a group of French tourists walking the other way.

“French people are awful,” one of them complained. “They’re so loud and arrogant. It’s really embarrassing.”

Embarrassing.

That seemed to be the operative word.

On the Croatian beaches, I realised I had developed a pointless talent: I could identify an English person before they even spoke.

If someone was sunburned and streaked with half-rubbed suntan lotion, they were English.
If someone staggered out of the sea, wincing at the pebbles underfoot, they were English.
If someone asked a friend to stand in front of them while they got changed, they were English.

I observed all this with quiet superiority.

Then I caught my reflection in a shop window: pale shoulders, careful steps over the hot stones, clutching a towel like a privacy shield.

I looked exactly like the people I’d been diagnosing.

Are We Really So Different?

On my final day in Croatia, I spent time with some Italians on the beach. They were talking passionately, hands slicing the air. I assumed they were debating something serious.

When I asked what the conversation was about, the Italian next to me rolled her eyes.

“They’re annoyed with the guy with the long hair. He just told them he peed in the shower.”

For a second, the illusion slipped.

From a distance, they had looked cinematic. Animated but elegant. Effortlessly at ease. Up close, they were arguing about bodily fluids.

The mystique didn’t shatter so much as shrink to human size.

And that was the point.

From afar, other nationalities seem composed. Up close, they worry, overshare, argue about trivialities, and forget umbrellas. The difference is not behaviour. It is proximity.

I know how the English sound when we repeat the same fact over and over in the morning. I know the tone of cautious optimism when discussing weather systems. I know the faint panic beneath the practical planning.

What unsettles me isn’t their predictability.

It’s mine.

The truth is, I hadn’t travelled to Croatia to escape the English.

I’d travelled hoping to step outside myself.

But wherever you go, you take your habits with you. The forecast-checking. The categorising. The small comfort of thinking you’re the exception.

The English next door weren’t ruining the morning.

They were just making me visible.