One of the apparent side-effects of the current boom is that everywhere you go these days, service providers are asking you straight out for tips.
Coffee shops and restaurants are the worst offenders, sticking plates under your nose at the cash register, with signs ranging from the subtle - "tips, please" - to the more direct - "be generous, or expect food poisoning next time, tightwad!"
The trend seems to have started with the US-style diners, although other American concepts such as free coffee refills seem to be taking longer to get here. Service probably has improved a bit (in some cafes now, I can get noticed by a waitress within half an hour of sitting down); but even where it hasn't, faced with one of these plates, you need a neck like a jockey's saddle region not to put something in.
Widespread though it is, however, I hadn't realised just how far this tipping culture had penetrated until it raised its head recently in the gents' toilet of a major Dublin hotel.
I was at a dinner dance in this hotel, and I was drinking beer - the way you do - so that early in the evening it became necessary to avail of the urinary facilities. I'll come back to this general subject in a moment; but on the night in question the operation was going smoothly enough - urinal, washbasin, handri. . . when suddenly I noticed something amiss.
Instead of there being an electric hand-drier or automatic towel dispenser provided, there was a live male attendant, dispensing individual hand-towels. There was a plate provided for tips too; and - this is the really disturbing bit - the attendant was making eye contact, in flagrant breach of the Universal Convention on Male Behaviour in a Public Toilet.
At least, I think he was making eye contact - naturally I wasn't returning it, so I can't be sure. By then I was already fumbling in my pocket for change, noting with a certain amount of distress that there was nothing on the plate but silver (mostly £1 coins at that) and hoping fervently that when I pulled out my handful of change, there would be a 50p among it.
There wasn't. For a micro-second or two, I flirted with the notion of putting 20p on the plate, but I realised bitterly I didn't have that much courage. So, hiding the pain, I tossed a £1 coin among all the others and left, wondering where we were going as a society. Faced with an expensive night if I kept drinking beer, I did what any sane man would do in the circumstances, and switched to shorts.
Now there are some deeper issues arising from this episode than the extent to which tip-soliciting has spread. For a start, it seems to me that any business which allows financial transactions to take place in the gents' toilet is starting on a slippery slope. But on a more philosophical level, I believe that seeking money from customers in this particular way is a profound abuse of what, for modern man, is already a fraught situation.
If you're not a member of the urinal-using sex yourself, you probably have no idea how fraught a situation this is. But just imagine being in a lift with strangers, and then try to imagine being in the same lift with your flies undone, and you start to get some idea.
What you have to remember is, for millions of years, modern man's male ancestors used urination to mark out their territories and warn off other males: each of them then had this whole territory in which no other male ever got to pee. And if you think of evolution as taking place in a day, it's only in the last five minutes or so that the species has been required to do it indoors and in shared spaces (which is why you can see modern man breaking out every night after the pubs close, marking alleys and shop doorways, and so on.)
So toilet facilities that require men to stand shoulder to shoulder while peeing are in themselves the cause of enormous stress, even without pecuniary complications. And every facet of behaviour in the public toilet has similar undertones. Even hand-washing - another recent requirement, evolutionarily-speaking - has its constraints; the trick is to use just enough water to suggest you're not indifferent to personal hygiene, but not so much to suggest there are medical reasons for your interest.
Merely to offer a man an individual hand towel in these circumstances is to raise issues which he can only resolve in the short-term by giving you £1. And guilt arising from the famous male urinary directional problem, often commented on but usually misunderstood by women (sure, there can be basic plumbing issues involved - air in the pipes and so on - but the same instinct for marking territory probably explains why modern man still splashes the floor) is another reason that the attendant's plate was overflowing.
It has long been traditional in mainland Europe for there to be a charge in public toilets. But the person charging is usually outside the door, and money - a small, fixed amount - is paid on the way in, leaving a man free to concentrate on primal issues. This is the way it should be.
Which brings me back to tipping in general. In an ideal world, tipping should be a completely discretionary thing - like, for instance, the time which elapses in a cafe after you get your coffee and before you get the food item you specifically asked to get with your coffee.
But even though most restaurant situations don't compare in terms of fraughtness with that hotel experience, you will regularly meet sneaky attempts to coerce you into tipping. The worst case I experienced recently was a pasta restaurant in which the waiter circled the phrase "service not included" on my bill. So when paying, I circled the blank gratuity line on my credit card receipt and added "service not included here either".
Okay, I admit I didn't do that, because that would have required an element of courage. But I strongly advise you to do it if you should suffer a similar experience. And I offer you that tip for nothing.