If only the places we love to visit weren’t so popular with tourists...

God be with the days when we knew our place, vis-à-vis tourists.

Our place in Ireland was to sell them postcards of little boys and girls with artificially reddened hair, standing outside thatched cottages filling the panniers of their donkey with potatoes. Our equivalent, in Venice or Rome, concentrated on convincing female tourists that they were the most beautiful human ever to float along their canals or walk their historic streets.