JUST as well The Beach Boys came from America’s west coast rather than Scotland’s. The dream the fab five sold of fun in the sun might not have had the same global appeal if it had to incorporate some of the scenes at Troon beach over the holiday weekend.

All together now, to the tune of Surfin’ USA: “If everybody had an ocean; across Caledoni-a; then everybody’d be surfing; like Caledoni-a. You’d see the mounted police massing; as the Red Cross stood by; let’s get sozzled by lunchtime; surfin Caledoni-a . (Apologies to The Beach Boys).

Yes, a great ball of fire appeared in the skies over Scotland and the locals duly went loco a long way from Acapulco. To be precise, some members of a certain age cohort behaved badly. An estimated 2000 teenagers set up camp on the Ayrshire beach, playing music and drinking. Mounted police separated the partying youths from families; the Red Cross were called on to provide medical help; and police escorted a number of youths off the beach in handcuffs. On trains to and from the town passengers reported drunken youngsters smoking, vomiting and behaving in an intimidating fashion, with one woman passenger describing the experience as “pretty terrifying”.

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Hardly the stuff of a VisitScotland campaign. It was not the first time, either. Fighting broke out amid similar scenes on the same beach last July and ten arrests were made.

Are Scotland’s young people clueless about how to behave in public, or are the rest of us becoming a nation of Victor Meldrews?

Go into many a park after a sunny day and there will be smashed glass waiting to shred toddler knees and dog paws. It is a lucky person who travels by train on a weekend evening and does not encounter groups of overly merry youngsters playing music and generally irritating the heck out of everyone else. Be cool, you tell yourself. You are the product of the punk age. You saw Bowie in his prime. Unpurse those lips. Relax that stomach. Breathe, breathe, breathe. But man it can be difficult.

Let us have some perspective here, however. Scotland has a population of 5.4 million. Of these, a million are under 15, and 596,000 are aged 16-24. Assuming those on Troon beach mostly fitted into the latter category, that represents 0.33% of the age group. Of that 0.33%, only a handful behaved badly enough for police to intervene. Not exactly the Mods v Rockers riots of Whitsun weekend 1964, which themselves were over-hyped. Despite newspaper headlines of the time reporting “A day of terror”, the total number of arrests at the two worst hotspots, Brighton and Margate, was 140. Compare this, in turn, to the 2011 riots in England in which five people died, 4000 were arrested and hundreds of millions of pounds worth of damage was caused.

Moreover, it was not just lairy teens who made trips to and from Troon difficult. A signalling problem caused delays, cancellations and subsequent overcrowding. It was ScotRail that could not find enough replacement buses.

Just as there was no sex in Britain till the 1960s, so teenagers are a relatively recent phenomenon. As charted in Jon Savage’s acclaimed book, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945, before teenagers most youngsters left school early and went straight into work, then married and had children of their own. The unlucky ones fought wars. The teenager was born when education reforms allowed children to stay at school longer. Business was initially delighted at their arrival. Teenagers, plus pocket money, equalled chances to flog them music, fashion, films and the rest. But then the youngsters started becoming too big for their brothel creepers and beehives, demanding the right to do their own thing, and before you knew it the generations had started grumping at each other.

In Joan Bakewell’s recent BBC documentary about 1968, Vive la Revolution!, she raised the appealing notion that among the forces which made that year so tumultuous was the coming of age of the Dr Spock generation. These youngsters had been brought up according to the credo “allow, permit, encourage”. Much child-rearing theory since has emphasised making a child feel special, the centre of their parents’ world. The result, say critics, are generations who believe they can do no wrong. Which takes us back to Troon beach.

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It sounds like an awful scene to be caught up in, but let us add to this picture a few home truths, uncomfortable as they may be. First, there is a certain assumption at work about the teens who were in Troon. They were described in reports as “being from the Glasgow area”, which sounds like code for coming from parts of the city better off people pass through on their way home to the suburbs. Yet middle class youngsters can behave badly, too.

Indeed, teenagers in general are not the only ones who can be a pain. From trains and cinemas to airports and pubs, too many adults have forgotten how to behave in a public space. They treat everywhere like it is their own front room. Unwilling to tackle them for fear of how they might react, the average person leaves it to the staff to sort out, often at risk to themselves.

Compared to this lot, your average teenager, going through huge life changes, and in many ways under more pressure than their predecessors, is a pillar of rectitude. As Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist whose new book, The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain, was discussed at the Hay Festival this week, put it: “We should not demonise this period of life, we should understand it, nurture it, and celebrate it.”

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We should also call out its bad behaviour when necessary, ditto that of selfish adults. Perhaps Scotland needs to bring back the old public service adverts, but instead of Charley the cat telling us to be careful around cookers we could be reacquainted with the basics of politeness, which at its core is simply consideration for others. From Californi-a to Caledoni-a, hell need not be other people.