As is only appropriate during one of the warmest summers for ages, beach etiquette appears to be the subject on everyone's lips these days. Last week we learned that French women are no longer inclined to go topless, partly through skin-cancer fears, but also because of the rise of social media and concomitant fear of one's pasty bits being pasted, all over the net, forever.

Many of us will also have commiserated with the two young Northern Irishmen who were threatened with a criminal record after skinny-dipping in Belfast Lough. But the most eye-catching controversy came courtesy of the Berlin tabloid Das Bild, which attempted to get its retaliation in first in the annual summer battle which sinks Anglo-German relations to a new low and xenophobia to the status of art form.

Brits were simply the worst beach tourists in the world, it argued, complete with a hilariously unfunny cartoon describing the symptoms of "the English patient" – "underwear amnesia", "Welsh wandering hands" and "vodka cough", named after Rushkinoff, a cheap vodka available for €3 (£2.50) a litre in certain Spanish nightspots and made, apparently, from equal parts rotting cabbage, glycerin and Swarfega. The British press tried to fight back, the Sun and Telegraph in particular exhuming hoary cliches about Germans and sunbeds. But the damage to our self-esteem had been done. Are we really such vulgar eyesores when we go down to the seaside?

I sought answers on the beachfront in Brighton, and first stop was the nudist beach, tastefully hidden between groynes (ho, ho) near the marina, with a shingle wall bulldozered into place landward so as not to frighten the horses. It was my first experience of having to chase after three recently decidedly nude men. My tactic had been to wait until one started putting on his clothes and then, once they were out of the zone, chase. Perhaps not surprisingly, two didn't want to talk to this fully suited and booted chump lurching towards them, blinded by waterfalls of sweat, over disasters of shingle, in a determinedly chase-y manner. But Jonai da Silva was coolly courteous.

Originally from Brazil, he moved here 15 years ago because his country was "too hot". He remembered his home country well enough, though, to recall basically all Europeans behaving with intense politeness. "Maybe, admittedly, they were different types of tourist: it costs a bit to fly to Brazil." Money can't buy courtesy – often, it seems, the very opposite – but it can perhaps open doors to the fine forgotten thing that is social shame abroad.

Some nude women, incidentally, would have been nice, but although that beach is open to both genders there were none: count them, none. It was the day before Brighton Pride, and there was a feeling abroad of all-over tans being topped up in a last-minute rush: whatever, every inhabitant of this particular naturist beach was avowedly male. Brighton is not unknown for its androgyny, but in these circumstances it was too easy to check.

Further back, on Hove's genteel lawns and beaches, I meet Linda Holme, fresh from a shivering early-evening swim, with husband Carl and daughter Carla. Nearby linger languorously variously toned beauties whose theme song is obviously A Thong at Twilight. Linda, for her part, thinks the Germans have it pretty much nailed. "According to the papers, at least, we have, especially this year, some dreadful examples of Brits behaving badly abroad. Too much drink, too little decorum, too little taste." She didn't quite say "I blame the parents", but she blamed the parents.

"I don't know quite when it all changed – the 80s? – but we've been terribly busy raising an uncouth and spoilt generation." Conversely, she and Carl have nothing bad to say about Germans in Hove, of whom there are many due to the preponderance of language schools, though the Spaniards come for a choice mouthful: "They just seem so unaware of anyone else on the pavements."

Nearby, Billy Cotter, an expat Irishman who used to run two waterfront pubs, the Beachcomber and Concorde, can similarly fail to remember any problems with Germans, even drunk ones: "There's few nations you can say that about: the worst were always French, Aussie or the Saffers."

His is a nuanced, sensible take on Brits abroad: "If the papers want to go looking for misbehaviour, of course you'll find it in Magaluf and Benidorm. But those are not the people who go to Galicia, San Sebastián, any number of lovely places around the world: it's simply, yet again, lazy stereotyping."

The putative "spat" with Germany is, according to all my evidence, just the latest non-row, the latest lashed-together tissue of confection which will always accompany rows between tabloids of competing nations, based on spurious non-research. 'Twill, I suspect, be ever thus. The silly-season tabloid wars should bother no right-thinking person. But there is a serious note, picked up by Susan Grant, a fortysomething primary teacher visiting from Broughty Ferry, Dundee and intrigued by my tale, prismed through those French fears of web exposure, of the etiquette of social media: "I may not be an expert on beach manners." Being from a part of the Tay estuary not notorious for its year-round baking heat, Susan isn't unduly troubled by skin cancer or the subtleties of thong etiquette.

"But I growing increasingly conscious of a huge generational difference to the etiquettes of personal privacy. Young people can be deeply careless with the privacies of their colleagues from more decorous times: I and many similarly aged colleagues have featured on Twitter and Facebook – for, say, maligning a director of education or some such – when such conversations as we had either didn't exist or were bound by between-ourselves rules. A phrase that doesn't seem today to exist, and I can fully believe that young Brits are the very worst."