The middle class must fight for its right to party

On the morning the Best Front Garden judge was due, a dead rat mysteriously appeared on our lawn

The happy, flag-waving throng in The Mall on Monday evening – their affection for the monarchy improbably strengthened by the appearance in the Queen's back garden of Ozzy Osbourne – didn't exactly deliver a knockout blow to the republican cause, but certainly made it look pretty feeble.

Historically, kings and queens are abolished when passions against the monarchy overwhelm passions for, and for all the cogently argued columns in newspapers such as this, the rarity of republicans prepared to camp for three nights on the pavement just to catch a glimpse of their putative president – Roy Jenkins, say, or Des Lynam – suggests that the House of Windsor is not remotely in the kind of peril that its opponents claim.

Moreover, it has been said that the golden jubilee has not captured the imagination like the silver jubilee did. Well, like most people from the Seventies, I have hazy memories of the summer of 1977: Sid Vicious scowling, Elvis expiring, the Queen looking out benignly from a biscuit-tin lid, Virginia Wade overcoming her iffy service toss to win Wimbledon, that kind of thing.

But one thing I don't remember from 1977 is a street party, because we didn't have one. Which was a shame, because a sense of self was just what our street needed. It was still coming to terms with being ripped out of Lancashire and deposited in Merseyside by the dastardly Boundary Commission.

As far as I know, nobody even suggested a street party. And although I can't be sure, I suspect this had something to do with class. Lynton Road – which ran, and indeed runs, parallel to the Liverpool-Southport railway – was a road of post-war three-bedroomed semis, inhabited, in the main, by the genteel lower-middle classes.

The street party, however, was in those days considered an essentially working-class phenomenon, the preserve of narrow Victorian terraces where it wasn't too difficult to stretch a piece of bunting to the house opposite. That just wasn't something we did in Lynton Road and neighbouring Clovelly Drive.

It wasn't that we weren't convivial. We were invited to the Taylors' in Clovelly Drive every New Year's morning (I remember finding it fascinating that the Taylor girls went to the toilet to do "a jobby", whereas in our house we did a "business"; something to do with Mr and Mrs Taylor being Scottish, I was led to believe), but Mr Taylor was not about to wheel a barrel of his widely-admired home-brew into the street in midsummer, and quite right, too.

But that was then. The assertions that we were a more joyful, sociable nation back in 1977, with street parties galore, do not match my own experience. Manifestly, despite Monday's fireworks, we are less respectful towards the monarchy than we were. Yet we seem friendlier towards each other. And the middle classes have shrugged off their inhibiting belief that it is infra dig to be seen having a knees-up, maybe because there are so many more of them.

Perhaps it is partly because we are less in awe of the monarchy that once-rigid class demarcations have all but disappeared. That's the republican view, anyway, while there are others who would have the old certainties restored, perhaps by a social version of the Boundary Commission. "Sorry madam, you can't call yourself middle-class with that stone-cladding. Now sir, satellite dishes are a bit of a grey area. Tell me, do you eat taramasalata?"

Which brings me to taramasalata-happy Crouch End, north London, where plans continue apace for our 2002 street party, vaguely pegged to the jubilee. It will be our third street party. Last year's excuse was the centenary of the first houses in the street, while the inaugural shindig the summer before celebrated the millennium.

They were both marvellous occasions, as I'm sure this year's will be. But they were not without controversy. Who, for example, can forget face-painting-gate, the scandal that erupted when one face-painting volunteer felt usurped by another?

Then there was the dead rat that mysteriously appeared on our lawn on the very morning that the Best Front Garden judge was due to be making his inspection. It seems absurd to imagine that a malicious neighbour would go to such Mafia-style lengths to sully our chances, but what can I say? At no other time have we ever had a dead rat in the garden.

Perhaps we should have entered it ironically for the Best Kept Pet competition, having failed to catch and enter our rabbit, who ran semi-wild in the back garden and was eventually gobbled by an urban fox. Whatever, I am glad that when my children are my age, a proper street party, with sausages and burgers and taramasalata and, who knows, even a Brit winning Wimbledon, may feature in their hazy memories of the golden jubilee.

b.viner@independent.co.uk