They come out at night

By Goran Sumkowski of the BBC Macedonian Service

The usual image a foreigner has of London is that of a bustling world capital. The city where music, concerts, gigs, clubbing, partying and fun never stop.

If you open any London guide there is a mind blowing choice of every entertainment you might be looking for. But, what's the reality? What do foreigners really think about how the English enjoy themselves?

Views are mixed, here's a male reaction:

"I think they can enjoy a pint but still be quiet and have fun about it. Especially if you're a foreigner, they can sort of welcome you in their ranks and you can even get a free pint of beer."

And a woman's:

"I think the main purpose is just to go and get drunk basically which is quite different from other places. You can actually hear that in trains the next day, people boast on how many times they threw up or how much they were sick or who they were sick all over. I think they do just go out for the purpose of getting drunk no time for having fun."

The two very different versions of their pattern of behaviour still persist. One is the image of the stiff upper lip and restraint while the second is the one which drunken English football hooligans promote overseas. And the English are criticised both for not knowing how to have fun and for having fun till it hurts. Zoe Williams writes on Entertainment for the London Evening Standard newspaper:

Drinking to get drunk

"If you want to go to the theatre, you go on a Wednesday or a Tuesday because that's when the serious theatre crowd goes. A gig you go to on a Monday or a Thursday. But Fridays and Saturdays are for getting drunk. All Londoners know this. Friday, because it's the beginning of the weekend, is the most exciting."

This is what one London pub-goer considers an ideal Friday night out:

"Normally we have a warm up in London. What we do is go out about seven o'clock and we drink for about three hours, get absolutely off our faces and then we decide if we feel like going to a club, we'll go to club. And we've got such a choice in London that we can just go anywhere we want. It's really good.

So, why has drinking for the purposes of getting drunk fast taken root here in England? Zoe Williams says it's partly because English pubs have to close so early. So, unless you go to an expensive club you just have to go home:

"English people do tend to want to get to drunk. They don't drink as a social lubricant, they drink for the specific purpose of getting drunk. And that is because things do shut down at eleven o'clock.

"Where as in America certainly, people are much more relaxed because they know the bars are going to stay open. Whereas in England, it's very much you get into a pub, you stay there still it shuts and you drink as much as you possibly can. I think this is why we've got such a bad reputation internationally is because we are infected by the licensing laws and we behave like monsters."

So, fun and drinking continues until late, excuse me until 11pm. Maybe this isn't everyone's ideal way of having fun but at the end, it's how the English like it, so let's drink to them.