IT'S rare that this jaded scribe finds his soft, under-worked fingers rubbing the lids of his ever-bleary eyes, yet that is precisely what happened yesterday upon reading within this newspaper of a quite bamboozling proposal from the organisation charged with maintaining law and order in what it clearly perceives to be modern-day Babylon.
Among 21 points set out in an Agreed Intervention Action Plan, Police Scotland, reported Herald arts correspondent Phil "Windy" Miller, wanted The Arches in Glasgow to interrupt its club nights every hour, mute the PA and turn on the house lights, presumably to prevent punters from self-combusting or sweating themselves into an early grave. Or, you know, having fun. The suggestion came soon after Regane MacColl, 17, died after taking ecstasy at the club in February 2014.
Granted, the police are not expected to be familiar with the finer details of nightclub protocol - those officers who relish popping a pill and shaking their booty probably keep the fact fairly quiet - but you could reasonably expect them to predict that enforcing the clubbing equivalent of coitus interruptus might be (a) a big ask, and (b) detrimental to the economics of the nightclub in question.
In such a climate of opposite and clashing realities, the indignant police flexing their muscles on Planet Moral Panic and the management of The Arches the castrated inhabitants of Planet Common-sense Liberalism, the latter didn't stand a chance. To hang with the cultural activities underwritten by The Arches' club nights - an example had to be made and collateral damage was inevitable. So today The Arches is no more and 129 members of staff at the venue are waking up without a job. Good work. That's the war on drugs well and truly over.
You wonder where next the police might apply this approach of interfering with the very warp and weft of our culture to keep vice at bay.
Perhaps at the next Old Firm match the 90 minutes will be split into three segments each lasting half an hour, between which the players depart the pitch and the baying mob is transformed into a unified congregation of mutual love and understanding through the broadcast of tropical birdsong on the PA and their being misted with ice-cold rosewater. Or when One Direction rock up to the Hydro in October, will the management be obliged to bring proceedings to a grinding halt every 45 minutes to prevent casualties down the front, turning spotlights on the audience and sounding a deafening lust-annihilating klaxon for good measure?
It's probably too much to ask, but you hope Police Scotland might learn something from the justifiably negative publicity their handling of The Arches has generated. Surely something good must come from it.
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