A few days ago, as we sat talking with friends in our front room, I thought I saw something move in the garden. No one else seemed to have noticed. But, as the leaves which half-screen the window seemed to be on the move again, I went to the front door and opened it, just in time to see a man doing up his flies as he headed for the gate.
This shouldn’t have been the shock that it was. Not only is someone peeing against the wall of your house small beer in the wider scheme of things, but the rampant night-time economy generated by Camden Market leaves a nightly residue of piss-stained pavements as drinkers, who have started the night’s drinking in their cars*, unload, before getting back into their cars and driving home.
And what does Camden Council do about this? Whilst tut-tutting, and even erecting a kind of retracting pissoir in the street (which 
is not always recognised for what it is, and is commonly misused as a waste bin) they go on issuing alcohol licences.
The culprits in this ongoing drama are, of course, male and the dirty deed is generally done under the cover of darkness, which is why it was so surprising, as we walked down the road in broad daylight, to come across a vicious spat between an angry householder and a passer-by.
The unfortunate passer-by had stopped to readjust her jacket on a spot where there was the residue of a puddle. Convinced the young woman was responsible for this, the old lady, beside herself with rage, was beyond reasoning with. We walked on and encouraged the young woman to do so too.
Tempers run high. Until now, never more so than when, about thirty years ago, a ‘caravan’ of travellers arrived on a nearby open space. Suspected of every violation of householders’ rights imaginable, the only misdemeanour with any foundation and the the one that, understandably, caused the greatest uproar, was their defecating in the street.
But where were they supposed to go? And why did we have to go down to the Town Hall to ask the Council provide a portaloo? They knew it took weeks to process an eviction order. They knew that travellers have the same demanding bodily functions as the rest of us.
That crisis was easily solved. But you can’t provide a portaloo for every rough sleeper and it was no surprise yesterday to see the trickle of urine that stretched from a makeshift tent to the pavements’ edge in our local high street.
Why on earth, when there is a housing crisis and there are people sleeping in the street, does the government not make providing public toilets – many of them sold off and converted into trendy work-spaces, even restaurants – a priority?
Rough sleepers would not be the only people to use them.
Some years ago, when I was living in a remote part of Yorkshire and my lust for do-gooding had no outlet, I signed up to talk on the telephone, once a week, to a group of old people who had no one else to talk to. A wonderful scheme, but you needed the skills of a teacher to make it work.
All my five ladies – three of them Welsh and hard to tell apart – always forgot to to say who they were. But it didn’t really matter when we got on to the subject of public loos, where they spoke with one voice. In the most animated session of my short career as a listening ear, each one spelled out just how far they now had to go when, as it does for rough sleepers – and the rest of us – nature calls.
George Bernard Shaw
I could not even get a word in to tell them that we ladies have George Bernard Shaw to thank for the fact that there were ever any Ladies’ Toilets at all.
* A practice known as pre-loading.
