Sunday Herald, The: Double standards: lap-dancing bad, gambling good. Or so those in

THERE is a disparity amounting to double standards verging on hypocrisy between Glasgow politicians' complicity in setting up vast gambling dens while at the same time going to great lengths to ban all lap-dancing clubs from the city.

It is apparently socially acceptable for a gambler to pop down to the casino and blow the family's entire monthly budget on the turn of a card or the spin of a wheel but it is entirely verboten for a chap to spend a tenner having a scantily clad lady shake her booty in his general direction from lap, pole or table.

Frankly, at Buffer Towers we cannot see the point of either activity. Life is enough of a game of chance without gambling. The world is full of comely women to please the eye. Betting - or the process of handing over your hard-earned cash to turf accountants, lottery companies, or any other licensed highwaymen - appears to us a particularly brainless pursuit. We did the lottery for a while when it was a novelty but quit when it became obvious we were not in fact going to win (pounds) 17 million and be able to keep on working and get up the nostrils of fellow workers.

The lottery has been good to us. We reckon to be at least (pounds) 500 better off since we stopped buying tickets. As a member of a private baths club in Glasgow, we are grateful for the (pounds) 4 million or so of lottery funding to renovate the building.

To be exact, we are grateful to the good people of Possil and other underprivileged areas who religiously try to punt their way to prosperity and only succeed in making life sweeter for us chaps in our private baths and those who go to opera and theatre.

We have been to the races at Hamilton Park, but usually mostly to enjoy the hospitality. There was one occasion when the Buffer took a deep interest in the proceedings on the turf. Our horse, a 20-1 shot, was well clear of the field and heading to a lucrative victory. Then some idiot in the crowd threw a turkey at the horse. Seconds later the horse was hit again by a tin of Ye Olde Oak ham. The jockey finally pulled the horse up when he was hit by a Christmas pudding. The course officials said it was the worst case of hampering they had ever seen.

We must apologise at this point for being unable to resist an old joke and for digressing. We are supposed to be talking about casinos. Glasgow is to get a whole raft of new super-duper Las Vegas style gambling complexes. There will be a (pounds) 120m casino at Ibrox and the Odeon cinema will be converted into a gaming joint at a cost of (pounds) 150m. That is at least (pounds) 270m of investment which will have to be recouped from the wages of Glasgow punters.

The Buffer saw a chap dispose of his entire monthly pay cheque in a casino. It is not a pretty sight. There is nothing glamorous or exciting about handing over your earnings to some plc. The Buffer is fortunate enough to find gambling, and casinos in particular, boring. We spent a weekend in Las Vegas and it seemed more like a fortnight.

Once you have got over the extraordinary tackiness of such places as Caesar's Palace and New York, New York, there is little else for the non-gambler to do but have an early night and watch the television. Except that in the Buffer's suite at the aptly named Circus Circus hotel the TV channels were severely limited and unwatchable. They don't want you watching the telly when you should be downstairs playing the slots.

You could, of course, go to the Vegas resorts' famously cheap restaurants but only if you want to experience the reduction of perfectly good lobster tails and shrimp (big prawns to youse) to a state of inedibility. There is, also, only so much fun to be had standing outside the Wee Kirk O' The Heather watching couples go in to be wed by an Elvis almost-lookalike.

The Buffer ended up seeking places where there were no gambling. One we found was a Japanese restaurant, sushi without slots. We also went to various churches but only in a vain attempt to find a Scottish chap who had joined a Catholic monastery situated in or near Las Vegas. His task as a mendicant brother was to go around soliciting gifts for Jesus of those valuable pieces of casino plastic. He was apparently known as the chip monk.

Inevitably, there was little else to do but play the machines. (The Buffer has an aversion to face-to-face card games ever since the trauma of losing 4s3d, that's 21p in today's money, in a poker school in 1966 in first year at Strathclyde Uni. That was nearly two pints of lager in those days.) In a casino at a bus station, we put a dime into a slot machine with the prospect of winning a car. We ended up not with a car but with a large bucket full of dimes. Tiring of the one-armed bandit business, we gave the entire bucket as a tip to the Hispanic chap who was cleaning the washrooms (cludgies to youse). Nobody told us you could trade in the buckets of dimes at the counter for the equivalent in greenbacks.

The best way is to treat the casinos at their own exploitative game. An RAF chum on manoeuvres with the American air force recalls pleasant visits to the gambling joints in Reno. Being canny Scots they split their cash and bet on both red and black and never lost. Meanwhile they hoovered up great quantities of free drinks and canapes.

The Buffer had a brief spell frequenting Glasgow casinos in the wee small hours of the morning many years ago when our work of bringing the news to the nation meant a late finish well after midnight. At that time of night, in the 1970s, the casinos were the only place late-workers could have a pint.

The Stakis establishments also offered the full early morning breakfast for 25 bob ((pounds) 1.25 to youse). We rewarded Uncle Reo Stakis's generosity by eating the cheap food and then using the RAF Reno technique at the roulette table of maximising the food and drink while minimising the fiscal loss.

If there had been a decent, normal, non-gambling establishment where late workers could go to have a beer or a snack, then we would have gone there. But we are talking about Glasgow here, where night owls are an endangered species.

This brings us neatly, almost, the topic of lap, pole, and table dancing. The man behind this crusade is Cllr Jim Coleman. Mr Coleman is the man who tried unsuccessfully to close Glasgow at midnight. He lives in Barlanark and thinks all citizens should be safely happed up at home by the witching hour and not stabbing people. He forgets that there are a large number of Glaswegians who can have night out without a knife or a machete.

But Mr Coleman - who is deputy leader of Glasgow City Council, and there is the scary thought that he might one day rule it - is obsessed with his campaign against the lap-dancing clubs. Coleman's attack on lap-dancing shows this obsession. He used (pounds) 7000 - cash paid by us council taxpayers - to commission a feminist academic to carry out an investigation into such clubs. Her conclusion - and please hold the front page here - was that lap and other dancing is A Bad Thing.

The Buffer has never frequented a Glasgow lap-dance club. We are less likely to do so since hearing a captain of local industry urging, after a night in a pub, "Let's go to a titty bar!" We ended up in a pole-dancing place once by accident, honest, in Washington, DC. Visions of pulchritude and silicon were gyrating far too close to the eyes.

The deal was that customers would approach the stage and place dollar bills into the dancers' garters, their only form of clothing. There was the Catholic embarrassment about being in a place where naked women disported themselves. There was the Scottish meanness when we wondered where we might put the quarters and dimes instead of the dollar bills.

However, we did the garter bit with the bills but only because of the socialist ideal that a worker is worthy of her hire. But, quite frankly, we would rather have been in a casino.