IT WAS, in the end, all about beer and clothing in Las Vegas. The bride wore a mini wedding dress with matching white leather cowboy boots, the groom a stylish brown jacket and slashed, faded jeans and, considering that neither had slept a wink the night before, preferring instead to hit The Strip for one last stag and hen night, they both looked pretty good.

By the time my son Adam had gained a bride and I had gained a

daughter-in-law (albeit a daughter-in- Nevada-state-law, a jurisdiction which, judging by the amount of “illegal” yet blatant prostitution in town — “Naked girls, to your room, 24 hours a day” — would seem to be something of an oxymoron) I had been in Vegas for two days, approximately 48 hours too long.

Still, as weddings go, it was short and, given the setting — a shack at the seediest end of the extremely seedy strip — curiously sweet (despite the chapel’s next-door neighbour, a closed and derelict motel, still displaying the sign revealing that its owners had failed to get the Vegas joke: “No wedding party allowed: stay out”).

Romance is an odd commodity for a town like Vegas — so blatantly and gratingly founded on greed, tacky escapism and cynicism — to be dealing in, but thousands flock there every week to tie the knot (the Brits, at least, pleading irony, despite the production-line nature of the “joke”).

Jon Bon Jovi — who, like Adam, married at the Graceland Chapel — isn’t the only one who has given love a bad name there, from Mickey Rooney (who liked the Little Church of the West so much when he married Ava Gardner in 1942 that he returned to repeat the experience with seven other women) to the likes of Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford and, last year, Britney Spears and whoever that bloke was that she divorced two days later.

Vegas isn’t romantic. It’s a gigantic, hollow, tacky theme park packed with fat, sweaty losers waddling up and down The Strip — a kind of elongated Leicester Square without the class — and hoping against hope to trade up their social security cheques into a fortune, despite the evidence all around them that the only way to make money in Vegas — as the serial “destination” hotel owner Steve Wynn has smugly remarked — is to own a hotel there.

Linda Lou, a dealer in one of the hotels (I forget which: Vegas is one sprawling, travelator-linked conurbation of slot machines and obscene all-you-can eat “destination” buffets) had her own take on Wynn’s maxim. In an instantly successful bid to get into the Vegas spirit, I sat down at her roulette table and asked her to show me how the game worked. “That’s easy, hon,” she said. “You give me your money, and I keep it.”

And she did.

It’s hard to say what’s the worst thing about Vegas, but low-life central Circus Circus (so bad they named it twice) has to be down there. Even back in 1971 Hunter S. Thompson divined, through his ether, speed and cocaine-induced psychosis, that it was the grimmest of the grim, “what the whole world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war”. But then you see New York and Paris and the Luxor, built since his time, and the dumb, gawping crowds, clutching ice-creams, sucking on 18in carry-out cocktail tubes and staring in Homer-like awe at talking statues and scale versions of the Manhattan and Parisian skylines and a ten-storey Sphinx that is actually bigger than the original, and you realise that, some time since 1971, there must have been a rematch and the Nazis actually did win the war.

The best metaphor for the neon-bathed Vegas is in the vast white light that stabs heavenwards from the top of the Luxor’s black pyramid: the shaft holds a glittering swirl of what appears to be some kind of stardust but is actually a whirling column of voracious bats gorging themselves on the crowds of insects lured helplessly into the light.

The best thing about Vegas? The I-15 highway, heading west, down which we fled in a rented Mustang convertible (the luggage wouldn’t fit in the goddamned European Audi) to the relative civilisation and sanity of California. There, in the Malibu Country Mart — a low-key, open-air mall off the Pacific Coastal Highway and a Californian version of Stellar Street — we bumped into the post-Gere Ms Crawford in a pet shop, buying a dog for her daughter. You’d think that, having once been sold one pup, she’d have learnt her lesson.

jonathan.gornall@thetimes.co.uk