One of the things I enjoy least about travelling is the feeling of being a tourist. True, there have been some memorable times when it has felt like a privilege. In the USSR and eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in China in the 1980s, visitors from the West were still quite rare and had a special status. Many locals would positively want to meet and talk to you. It is still often true in remoter parts of the world, though only where tourists are a novelty rather than a nuisance.

But for the most part, in the big holiday destinations of the world, we tourists are a blight on the landscape, clearly wanted for our money, but often resented, or at least regarded as irritants, by the local population.

I have just come back from two weeks in Venice, where the problem is acute. Watching old ladies and young mothers struggling to get through the crowds of visitors on the water buses, I found it is easy to see why the number of permanent residents is in serious decline, and why tourists can often get an impatient response from locals.

But while you can’t avoid being part of the problem, there are things you can do to keep a lower profile. This has its advantages. After all, camouflaging your tourist status not only helps you feel less of an intruder, it makes you more secure - a much less obvious target for opportunist pickpockets and conmen.

Of course it won’t work in all cultures. Unless you are of Oriental extraction, you will always look like a foreigner in China, for example. And unless you are a linguist, you will always get found out when you try to speak the local language.

But in European or American cities, it is possible to take a more discreet approach to travelling. Here are some ruses to lower your profile, and make you feel more like a local.