I have a peculiar relationship to money. I expect to have to earn it, and I try to keep hold of it when I do. The sum of which makes me a perfect pill in Las Vegas. Attention all Brits, who now constitute the largest group of foreign tourists in this baking town of gaudy casinos and strip-malls: Don't take me with you. I'm a drag.

So what am I doing here now? And how is it that in 2003 this cautious, skinflint killjoy got married in this berg? Is Shriver the tight, backslid Prod really capable of tying the knot in a rash moment of drunken, high-rolling abandon? Would that I were so interesting. My in-laws live in Vegas, which is why I keep coming back to a city I will strongly advise all and sundry to visit once for the sheer spectacle, but only once.

My father-in-law might find that advice offensive. He first determined that he wanted to live here in 1954, and nine years ago fulfilled his dream to put down stakes - in every sense - full-time. He routinely arises at 4am and heads to the El Cortez, a seedy downtown casino far from the more internationally familiar glitz of the strip, where he plays $5-a-hand blackjack until lunch, the while sipping tequila and Diet Mountain Dew. (I'm a drear, but you can't accuse my in-laws of not being colourful.) Back home, he enters the day's winnings or losses in a ledger with crimped, perfect printing in either black or red ink. These records go back years. This year he is up $147, which given the odds is impressive.

The first time I visited the strip, I managed to control myself. Although I am constitutionally incapable of slipping a single quarter into a slot machine (but it might not come back! We might need it for a parking meter!), I did manage to keep the disapproving moralism to a minimum. We gawped at the scaled-down Eiffel Tower in the Paris, checked out the awkward replica of the Parthenon in Caesars that sold Gucci chocolate. In the Venetian (whose murals of late afternoon sunlight are amazingly well rendered, although outside the real sky did a remarkably lifelike job as well) I even allowed myself a scandalous mid-afternoon glass of wine. By some miracle, during a single dabble that day I was able to take the place at face value - the only value it's got - and keep a lid on my po-faced, party-pooping despair. But I knew it wouldn't last.

Sure enough, on a second visit to the strip last week, my killjoy genes reasserted themselves.

For one thing, Las Vegas is impervious to jokes, because it already is one. Vegas is mockery-proof. The strip is so over the top, so jubilantly, unashamedly fake (even the rocks are artificial), so ebulliently and confessedly crass, so contented with or even proud of its own trashiness that you can't make fun of the place. How can you deride a wooden Trojan horse two storeys high that doubles as an FAO Schwarz toy store? It is pre-ridiculous. This frustrates the likes of myself no end, because pejoratives like "tacky", "tasteless", and "garish" ping off a giant gold-painted sphinx like pennies off a curb. Because one cannot parody parody and I do not gamble, I had nothing to do.

So it was inevitable that on a second swing through I'd no longer be able to find Las Vegas a zany, kooky, harmless American one-off, but would disparage it as a ghastly monument to American vapidity. Folks in the richest country in the world do not know what to do with their money in their leisure time save try to scrounge more of it, and do not truly embrace their own supposed work ethic.

Indeed, given that many of my countrymen's concept of entertainment is heading for a line of casinos whose decor is so loud it makes your eyes hurt, whose patterned carpet and even air freshener has been carefully researched as encouraging you to lose your shirt, I am not convinced that most of the gamblers I spied on last week would have any idea on what to spend their winnings even if they improbably hit the jackpot.

All money is not created equal. It means something different depending on what you did to get it. Surely earning money - earning it - is an underrated joy. I find being paid for my labours ceaselessly gratifying, and the harder I've worked for any given cheque, the more sumptuous the texture of the paper. By contrast, how satisfying is dosh that you came by not because you were smart or talented or diligent, but lucky?

If this seems hopelessly humourless about a town that intends to be a laugh, the amount of cash involved is serious. The bar at Wynne's, the newest and most lavish casino on the block, boasts of a $75 martini, and you sense its designers grew frustrated at running out of nooks into which to cram polished Italian marble. My father-in-law tells me that when his car got dusty last week he came upon a woman playing a slot machine who was going through $400 a minute. That was $24,000 an hour, at a car wash.

I do admire the nerve and devil-may-care required to put thousands on the stumble of a roulette ball. I concede that if you're canny enough to follow a few simple rules in blackjack - always double aces and eights, always double-down on an 11, don't take a hit if you're holding 12 or more and the dealer is showing a five or six - you can walk away with a few bills left in your wallet. But a quick look round a casino and you start to wonder, who pays all these croupiers and cleaners, who ultimately finances the orchids in every room? Losers. More losers than winners by a yard, and that rational calculation, aside from sheer wimpiness, explains why I don't gamble.

Las Vegas and its ilk - coming soon to a town near you, if Tony Blair's plans hold sway - dishearten me most because this is so many folks' notion of a good time. In fact, what most interests me about the United States is its posing of the ultimate existential dilemma: what is a good life? What, if you've the money, do you buy? Americans, if Las Vegas is any indicator, have no idea.