My girlfriend's 18-year-old brother recently arrived from Australia to play for a local cricket team.

To celebrate, we took him out on the town and to a club I used to like - the Funky Buddha.

But it was displaying the inexplicably old-fashioned door policy which still plagues small-town clubs - and the young Aussie was turned away for wearing trainers.

Does the Funky Buddha still think, like my grandparents, that trainers are "scruffy" but shoes are smart?

This way of separating the beautiful people from the hoi polloi stopped working in about 1952.

Does it really think more clued-up clubbers wear shoes? Why don't they insist their customers wear ties? Or perhaps nice, smart, ironed jeans?

If the Buddha himself turned up for a boogie, he'd probably be turned away thanks to the woefully naf "exclusive" door policy.

"Sorry, mate, no orange robes or transcendental philosophising."

Funky Buddha? Yeah, right.

-Tom de Kadt, Brighton