Charlotte Raven Tuesday January 22, 2002 The Guardian
I love living in London but, like most sensible citizens, I tend to stay clear of the West End at weekends. This isn't a safety issue - very few of the people you come across in Leicester Square and its environs on a Friday or Saturday night have the wit or wherewithal to mug you. They try to have a go at each other, but as long as you take care not to block the door to the kebab shop, the worst you have to fear is a slobbery kiss from someone who says your hair reminds him of a girl he shagged in Ibiza.
Irritating as it may be, this kind of drunken behaviour poses no real problem to anyone other than the minimum-wage slaves whose job it is to clean up the mess it creates. It is only on their behalf that I feel the remotest sympathy with those who declare themselves outraged by the readiness of certain inebriates to relieve themselves wherever they happen to be.
Apparently, it's no longer common practice for the drunk caught short between bars to contain himself until he finds a suitable alley. For reasons as yet unexplored, young men are now perfectly happy to do it in full view of their fellow revellers with no regard, one presumes, to their sex. What the girls think about this behaviour is anybody's guess. I suspect they are less squeamish than I would have been as a teenager if one of my pomaded swains had started pissing in the street like a dog. They are certainly less encumbered than I was by the kind of bourgeois qualms that lead you to regard the alley or its equivalent as the best - meaning most appropriate - place for doing anything relating to your human instincts.
Now that I've grown up a bit, I can't help but applaud anyone who refuses to do their business in the dark. I'm fascinated by the London pissers because I think their appearance marks a decisive break from bourgeois manners and mores. Where other commentators see vulgarity as another nail in the coffin of "civilisation", I see a refutation of the tenets which supported the most pernicious lie of the last century - the claim that everyone is middle class. In refusing to feel ashamed of their actions, the pissers are reclaiming the ground that was lost when the working class decided that it might have something to gain from transforming itself into a paler, poorer version of the bourgeoisie.
Accordingly, they kept themselves quiet and worried about upholstery until it became apparent that this contract with the devil had nothing in it for them. The presumption that their noble efforts to make themselves worthy of a house with two bathrooms would get them the keys to the door proved to be sadly misguided. At the very moment when Tony Blair was declaring that "we are all middle class now", millions of people around the country were wondering what to make of a promise that had not yet been converted into square yards of garage space. Having embraced the constraints of bourgeois life, they wanted the material benefits. When these were not forthcoming, it was time to say bollocks to the toilet seat cover and grim family meals with the TV turned off.
Of course, this hasn't happened yet. It could be years before the seeds of this transformation grow into something substantial. In the meantime, we should watch the signs. Any hints of people disrespecting their own privacy will probably count, as will the various sightings of working-class women who have traded in their domestic goddess aprons for a place at the front of the bar.
At a cultural level, there are signs that the bourgeois hegemony is being challenged by our taste for the tasteless. The chatshows that used to ape a bourgeois dinner- party conversation now sound like they have been recorded in the back-room of the Rattlebone Inn. The regulars of that establishment have also contributed to a drift away from bourgeois values which is as perceptible at the top of society as it is at the bottom. In the old days, the royal family was a model of bourgeois propriety. The fact that they were stinking rich and could do whatever they liked was never stated under the code that governed their behaviour. All that has been blown to smithereens by Prince Harry. The fact that his minders and the bar staff deferred to the prince's rank shows just how much more honest the world is when the truth of how things are isn't hidden behind the veil of "decency".
When the royal family were honorary bourgeois, the fact that they could have anything they wanted was obscured. Now they have come out of the closet as the rude, grasping toffs they always were, we are free to give them the trouncing they deserve.