Anyone wanting to lose weight could do worse than try and blag their way into covering the Venice film festival. The area around the Casino building, the nerve centre of the festival as far as the press is concerned, has just one restaurant that we know of, a small pizzeria which is invariably packed to the rafters and not that good.

Sure, there are a few food stalls set up for festival goers, but the grub is by and large grim and it requires bravery and patience to negotiate long queues jostling for their slice of pizza. Discarded paper plates, tins and the rest of it mean the area outside the festival looks like Leicester Square on a Saturday night — i.e. a crowded dump. Other options are the two (very) expensive hotels where the movie stars tend to stay - “Des Bains” and the “Westin Excelsior”, but on your average reporter’s wage they are out of the question.

Or you could head to the main street on the Lido island, some way away from the Casino, or even hop on a water bus and make your way to Venice, but that is a luxury many journalists rushing from screening to press conference to interview to laptop can ill afford.

Film festivals in Cannes and Berlin are far better equipped to cope with the arrival of hundreds, even thousands of journalists. It would be nice if the Lido tried to catch up.

What’s more, my hotel is a 15-minute bike ride from the Casino, meaning an hour’s cycling every day at least. That’s no bad thing — the view along the waterfront looking across to Venice is stunning and the exercise welcome, but I’m losing weight I can ill afford to shed. Feeling sorry for me? I didn’t think so.