Dua Lipa’s strip club row is a drop in the stag party ocean

In his latest reflection on places and pathways, Will Gore leaves Glasgow’s seedy back streets for the West Highland Way

Dua Lipa arrives at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles in January (Getty)

Stag dos are rum affairs. Often, they appear to provide an opportunity for spending large amounts of money on activities no one really wants to participate in.

With the wrong best man at the helm, they can be grim for the groom. I was fortunate: strict instructions to avoid anything seedy were firmly followed and I enjoyed an afternoon playing cricket with lots of friends, followed by a curry. Tame? Who cares. It was right up my street.

When my turn came to organise a stag event, I too sought to keep to the brief: an overnight stay in the Highlands, with a bit of easy walking and a decent meal seemed eminently doable. I had to assure the proprietor of the hotel that, no, a group of 15 lads definitely wasn’t there to celebrate the forthcoming nuptials of one of our number, but I reckoned they wouldn’t turn us away when we actually arrived.

The only other difficulty was the amount of travelling involved. To make the trip feasible we eventually agreed to meet in Glasgow the day before, have a night on the town, and then journey onwards the next morning.

My planning for this additional Glasgow leg had been minimal, and as the group gathered it became obvious that some had more appetite for partying than others. At the time, my wife and I were undergoing fertility treatment and I was therefore not drinking alcohol. As everyone else tucked in, I wondered about the wisdom of sobriety.

With grim inevitability, after hours of boozing someone suggested we find a strip club, and, after one was eventually located down a ropey-looking back street, we trooped in.

A seedy strip joint in a Glasgow alley is no place for the sober, nor the faint-hearted, nor frankly anybody who even vaguely thinks of themselves as having a moral compass. It was the kind of place which might make Dua Lipa think twice before she next puts a dollar bill into a stripper’s thong, as she and her fellow pop stars did – to great outrage – after last week’s Grammys.

Beinn Dorain was far from the city, grime and humanity (iStock)

Without wishing to sound like a tabloid hack, I very swiftly made my excuses and left, nearly tumbling into a meaty Glaswegian as I departed.

“What’s wrong?” he demanded with ’roid-infused hostility, a woman on each arm. “Girls here not good enough for yer?”

I stammered something about having to be somewhere else (anywhere else, as it happened) and half ran back to my hotel.

The next morning, I was at least rewarded for my abstinence by a pain-free train journey north, while everyone else stared out of the window, desperately trying not to vomit.

Were they reflecting on the previous night’s hell-hole too? On the fact that it was blokes like us who helped to provide the market for such places? I could hardly claim to be much less complicit than anyone else: I had made my choice to pay my entry fee, and to cough up an inflated price for the half-drunk Diet Coke I’d left at the bar. How much choice did those working in the club have? For some of them at least, the answer was not much.

In the afternoon we strolled along an easy stretch of the West Highland Way between Bridge of Orchy and Tyndrum, with that mild-mannered mountain, Beinn Dorain, basking in the sun to our left. Two or three latecomers in cars met us at Tyndrum, offering welcome relief to the weary by way of a lift for the return journey.

One of our group decided to run back, to get out of his system whatever was in it. I returned along the path on my own at a more sedate pace, glad to be away from cities, grime, humanity.

As I did in those days I thought a lot about how much my wife and I wanted to have a child. And I wondered if we perhaps would have a daughter, and what kind of life she might have. We have one now, and I hope at least she will always have choices. But then, shouldn’t everyone?