THE contrast is always startling.

Inside the club, people are glamorous, polished. Dark lighting is always forgiving to your flaws so everyone looks that bit better than they do in real life.

There will always be someone a little too drunk, making a spectacle of themselves on the dance floor.

But if you can overlook that, a night out dancing is brilliant, a break from reality. With your friends, and the music and the open possibilities of the night, anything could happen.

And then… the lights come up and the queuing starts.

The tedious queue for the cloakroom. The squeeze to get yourself through the throng and outside on to the pavement.

Chips. Someone will want chips so there’s the queue for that. Then the taxi queue, the endless, endless taxi queue in the Glasgow rain.

Read more: Bid to boost city's night time economy with 4am closing time for clubs

I take the nightbus - only a Saturday, they don’t run Fridays - but that’s a gamble too. If you miss one, it can be a 40 minute queue until the next.

Picking your way through the city means heckles from drunken boys. Skirting round vomit and dropped chips, which have been trod on, making the pavement slippy.

Dropped chip slip hazard. There should be special yellow warning signs for that.

Lassies with their shoes off, swaying. The street pastors out at work, trying to assist the worst of the young drunks.

It depends on the time of year. In the summer, when you know the sun is coming up soon, it can be fairly jolly.

On a wet night it’s grim. The regret starts - should have stayed at home. The feet hurt, your carefully blow dried hair has gone wild at the ends, you’re freezing.

Worse, are the aggressive drunks abusing bar staff and door staff.

Or the kid who’s drunk themselves unconscious. The fights. The extra burden on the emergency services.

Would an extra hour inside the club affect such negative scenes? Glasgow’s licensing board wants to give it a try.

Read more: Glasgow's subway could open later if clubs get an extra hour trading 

Always in such circumstances, the words “a more European approach” and “Continental style drinking” are used. Will we ever get to the stage we have a French or Spanish attitude towards booze?

The argument is that there would be a staggered approach at the end of the night to leaving clubs, rather than the am mass exodus.

There are plenty of things to consider here: how will workers be affected? How will police shifts be affected to cover that extra hour? Will it stop people pre-loading drinks before heading out at 11pm? Can we have more frequent night buses, please? How about keeping the Subway running on a Saturday night?

How will City Centre residents be impacted?

The plan also suggests allowing 16 and 17-year-olds in licensed premises until 11pm. Families with older children wouldn’t need to cut their evenings short and would allow older teenagers to attend gigs. However, the real benefit would come if we could rely on other people in bars to be sensible role models by - and I realise how dull this sounds - drinking responsibly.

But then, that’s what the whole scheme hinges on too.

Will opening an extra hour do anything for the city’s unhealthy booze culture or is it just designed to make more money from the night time economy?

Here’s an idea: at 3am nightclubs turn into late night cafes. A culture where people wound down with a cup of tea, a toastie and a debrief would achieve all the benefits the licensing board are aiming for and ease Sunday morning hangovers.

It’s win-win. If we want a European-style cafe culture, let’s start early.