Tourism is still a huge money-spinner for Scotland, and lang may that lum reek.

We have history, we have scenery, we have culture and we have food and drink and this is happily proving to be continually irresistible to visitors.

I have only been to Venice once, and briefly, and although I enjoyed it very much and would like to return one day, I found it very hot, horrendously overcrowded and vastly expensive.

Which takes my gondola neatly round the canals to the imposition by city fathers of restrictions and levies on the busiest month of the year.

Loudspeaker-bearing tour guides are banned (and that’s no bad thing) and groups of visitors limited to no more than 25 (again, I can’t fault it). Cruise ships are banished and tourists have to pay a tax of five Euros for a day trip.

The idea is to protect the city for the minority who live there from the majority who visit – around 30 million people per year.

So should Helensburgh start such a scheme? A fiver to amble along the front and peer at the sugar boat? A fiver to feel the atmosphere in the home town of the inventor of television? A fiver to see the Hill House? A fiver to sit at Kidston Park and watch the submarines? (Actually, there’s a wee side earner here – a fiver per submarine.)On paper it’s certainly a money spinner. But far from attracting tourists, I fear it would drive them away instead.