The Endless Pleasures

Tuxedo – check. Desert boots – check. Ridiculous sunglasses – check. Stupid cowboy hat – soon. Wife – check. Susanna Hoffs’ phone number…. Bollocks.

Gate 40 at Heathrow might as well be labelled “Fat People Off To Vegas Gate”. It’s difficult to see how some of these good people will make it through the next 24 hours. A girl in a hen party is wearing a woollen tracksuit which has already begun to arse-sag – by the time she reaches Vegas it will surely look like she has dumped in her trousers. She is already hard on the vodka and has eaten a pret sandwich in one, she probably will indeed soil herself. She is wearing so much makeup her face looks in danger of collapsing. Another large traveller is eating sausages and playing casino games on his tablet – I wonder what plans he’s hatching for his Vegas trip? I watch his wife shop for blue spangly nail polish and carefully apply it at the gate. The stag guys are hugging and screaming and already very drunk, and I suddenly realise the hen girls (women) are all identically decked in the woollen tracksuits mentioned earlier. In a disturbing on-trend beige! I wonder who said, ‘I know, let’s all dress like regurgitated sausage rolls, that’ll slay ‘em in Vegas.’

Everybody on The Lord’s hit-list knows Las Vegas, no need to write any kind of guide to the place. You go there for a reason and you know the reason why. The lonely, the compulsive, the stags, the hens, the addicted, the bored, the divorced, the un-divorced, the wanna-bees and those who couldn’t think of where else to go with the redundancy money.

I can’t tell you about Vegas. You stay in a 10,000 room hotel on The Strip and you begin to consume. We’re in The Bellagio, which is surprisingly good for such a huge sitting target; on our 22.30 arrival there is a 50 yard check-in queue snaking around a reception area the size of a small European Principality. My wife, who is probably the walking definition of ‘seasoned traveller’, takes one haughty look at the mighty queue and tells me sternly to ‘wait here’ – three minutes later we’re in the lift heading for the 30 something floor and twenty minutes later we’re in a rooftop bar called The Beer Park overlooking the notorious fountains and the rest of The Strip. It’s perfect.
To gain employment in The Beer Park seems to require multiple attributes:

* Impeccable customer service skills.

* The ability to stay calm and perform your duties under considerable pressure.

* An easy-going yet professional attitude with customers who might well have been drinking alcohol for some time. 

* Reliable timekeeping and consideration for your work colleagues.

* An amazing pair of huge fuck-off tits.

This is just like Blade Runner – down to the voices from nowhere telling you where to go and how to get there. Empires fall, systems fail, dictators get hung drawn and quartered and their innards hung from lamp posts but Vegas will carry on forever. As long as you can steal the bathrobes and drink all night on one big pleasure-packed street it can’t fail. It’s the whole 21st century in a desert town.