There is so much to be said about Venice, and would-be writers keep on saying it over and over, so I think I'll stick to the food. First, of course, the market - the amazing Rialto - street theatre newly invented every weekday morning, thronged with people, as filled with action as it must have been when Shakespeare imagined that dodgy loan negotiated between Antonio and Shylock. But nowadays they don't fix business deals on the Rialto, and the tourists and the locals mingle happily as they buy fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and seafood, all brought in (one supposes) from the lagoon and the Adriatic Sea and the great Venetian plain that spreads from here to the foot of the Dolomites. In fact, the lagoon is probably too polluted to give much of a living to any fish, and the plain is heavily urbanised, much of it under concrete. Still, there's quality here, some of it brought from a long way away: fish from the Indian Ocean, tropical fruits, vegetables flown in from Africa. Never mind - the quality is high, the choosing and buying theatrically noisy.

Here I am, choosing fish (with some help from a Venetian friend who is also a cookery teacher) among the stone columns of the fish market. And look at these chillies and artichokes - I don't think I've ever seen stuff as good as this in England.

But soon it was lunch time ... A friend had given me the name of a small restaurant called Vecio Fritolin, and the street address. Except that there aren't any street addresses in Venice; the city is divided into six segments, called sestriere, and in  each sestier the buildings are simply numbered 1,2,3 .. up to however many there are - usually over 2000. After asking various shopkeepers, and their assistants and customers and passers-by (in Venice, everyone joins in), and after an outburst of mild panic in case we missed lunch altogether, we found it ... but don't ask me to find my way there again. I can only assure you it is well worth the effort, and the fun, of re-discovery (in the Calle della Regina). It's in a long tradition of Venetian fried fish restaurants, and both the setting and the cooking are quietly perfect.

These soft-shell crabs might perhaps have been the same ones that I'd watched, an hour or two earlier, scrambling hopefully around on a market stall while they waited for someone to buy them. The man who was selling them just picked them up in handfuls, like wriggling chestnuts, and popped them into a bag. Roger went for the mixed fried fish, which actually arrived on a sheet of paper, just as they were served in the old days for people to take away and eat in the street.