[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18072905

A court ruling has cast doubt on whether urinating in public is a nuisance - as long as no-one sees. So is it really ever acceptable?

You are driving along an unfamiliar country road. An urgent dilemma nags at both your bladder and your conscience.

With no public toilets in sight, do you carry on in discomfort? Or do you find somewhere discreet to pull over?

While the cultural aversion to performing basic bodily functions in the open air is widespread, all too often it is tested by immediate physical pressures.

The rights and wrongs of this quandary have been tested in court after a couple in Somerset, John and Cherry Pusey, tried to force their local council to close a lay-by near their home which passing motorists regularly used for open-air "comfort breaks".

However, Lord Justice Ward - sitting with Lords Justice Longmore and Patten at the Court of Appeal - ruled that the urinating drivers' impact was not "cumulatively intolerable" because they were not "obviously visible" from the Pusey's home, according to reports.

But whatever the legal position, not everyone will be convinced that this represents a factor in mitigation.

The spectacle of drunken revellers fouling town centres in the early hours of the weekend is regularly held up as a symptom of societal decline.

There was widespread public anger at student Philip Laing, caught urinating on a Sheffield war memorial in 2009. And the practice can be deemed "disorderly behaviour" in England and Wales, an offence punishable with a fine under the 1986 Public Order Act.

Local authorities in Chester launched a crackdown after fears that well-refreshed revellers were causing irreparable damage to the city's medieval walkways.

Getting "caught short" in the countryside is one thing, necking 20 pints of lager then redistributing it on war memorials and historical buildings is another.

In city centres at weekends, where hundreds of "bladdered" ejected clubbers relieve themselves in the street simultaneously, there's a definite hygiene problem.

So it's a from me.