One foot in the rave

On Tuesday night Marco Pierre White threw a 40th birthday party at the Mirabelle restaurant. Bernard Manning told a score of offcolour racist jokes, Madonna listened and misunderstood, and the food critic and journalist Jonathan Meades was, according to The Mirror, "off his face" with drink.

Yesterday the tabloid newspaper reported that Meades "greedily tucked into a gourmet menu" and then, "staggering around from the amount of booze he consumed", heckled the comedian and was then sick in the lavatory.

According to Marco Pierre White, "Meades was drunk, rude and obnoxious. He embarrassed everyone, humiliated himself and, frankly, I never want to see the horrible little man again."

This presumably is the same Marco Pierre White who would roundly abuse his customers if they asked for ketchup. This is the most glorious example so far this century of the pot calling the kettle black. It would need a stomach full of bad oysters not to laugh. The foulmouthed ageing chef who has made his reputation with his churlish and ungracious behaviour has now, without a soup?on of irony, berated an ageing rou? for doing exactly that. (Actually, in many people's eyes, Meades behaved rather well by being exceptionally rude to the appallingly bigoted Mr Manning and yet still managing to find a lavatory in which to be sick.)

But what is most cheerful about this incident is the light in which it casts London's fashionable, middle-aged, middle classes. They are not, as previous generations were, interested in celebrating the run-up to Christmas with "a flick" and a quiet Italian. Not for them a small glass of white wine and a concert on the South Bank or a modest cocktail party. The balding trendies are out in force this month squabbling, snorting and chug-a-lugging at a raft of parties as if they were 20.

For despite reports this week of binge-drinking by teenagers and an increase in cirrhosis of the liver, it is yesterday's baby-boomers and the Seventies Generation X for whom the booze, the partying and the bad behaviour is still meat and, of course, great quantities of drink.

Meanwhile, it is the young who are quietly tapping their toes this Christmas to the crooning Robbie Williams singing Sinatra's greatest hits and drinking non-alcoholic energy drinks.

On that same Tuesday evening, Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones played a gig at the Shepherds Bush Empire. Ronnie a fiftysomething likely lad, who is as well known for his extraordinary appetite for liquor as much as his dexterity on the guitar, was joined by his son, Jesse (rhythm guitar), and daughter Leah (backing vocals). The spikyhaired rocker with a face as wrinkled as a walnut also managed to inveigle his ageing chum Slash from Guns N' Roses to play along with the family.

This jolly festive hoe-down was the hottest ticket in town for the elderly chattering classes, hotter than the artpunk outfit Queen Adreena playing at the Monarch in Camden town or the fashionable rock band Archive in EC2 - both also playing that night. And certainly considerably more chic than the Norwegian soprano Solveig Kringelborn, who was belting out his programme of Mozart, Wolf and Schubert classics at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

The reason Formula One boss Eddie Jordan was at the concert, as well as the model Kate Moss, The Corrs, Jude Law and the photographer Mario Testino, was down to Wood's fearsome reputation for partying, rather than the music. It was the same reason a group of pot-bellied journalists skipped the Financial Times Christmas party to make it, and that the trendy West12Bar (the San Lorenzo of the menopausal media) had its own private guest list at the event. It didn't matter to the exclusive, invited crowd that they were bullied by bouncers, had to queue outside in the cold, were forced to grovel at the box-office and then, once inside, were only offered plastic beakers of warm beer and spirits. Nor did it make much difference to the social foot-soldiers that the concert was at best a second-rate village-hall affair.

Nobody took any notice of the band anyway. The thirtyand fortysomethings were too busy partying in the bar in the back.

But at least Ronnie Wood didn't harangue his audience for its drunken antics and for ignoring the band. For he knows only too well that his generation has been behaving like that since Chubby Checker did the Twist and The Beatles asked them to Twist Again. In fact, when he was the lead guitarist in The Faces with Rod Stewart, the two of them behaved in exactly the same way.

The Absolutely Fabulous generation that has been fuelled on cocaine and cheap champagne is now the Establishment. And it is not so much reliving its youth as making sure it doesn't do as The Faces rock 'n' roll compatriots The Who once suggested in its song My Generation, and die before they get old. The only pipe and slippers on its horizon is the pipe of paper made from a rolled-up note with which to snort the coke and the velvet slippers from Shanghai Tang for dancing.

This new London establishment is partying until it drops, or at least until the private health care runs out with no one grown-up around left to complain.

In the late Sixties a muchloved slogan painted on walls and worn on T-shirts stated: "We are the children our parents warned us against." Perhaps it should now be amended to: "We are the parents our children should be warned against."