In 1973 I travelled round Sicily with my brother Tom. In the course of that epic odyssey, I made the following entry in my notebook: “The wind sucks and blows. The sea licks the lip of the rock; partially sunk bottle lifting lightly in the transparent, sun-mottled sea. Mellow with sensations growing with food and wine; Saki at lunch after a morning of Hemingway.”

OK, OK, it’s a bit over the top. Totally over the top, actually, but I was young then, and full of hope, and I think it kind of captures some of the lyrical spirit that suffuses the soul when eating beside the sea.

My love of marine munching was kindled some years earlier, on a family holiday to Cervia on the Adriatic, where, every Thursday in the Hotel Mare e Pineta, there was a buffet of Lucullan proportions, embracing every kind of seafood - lobsters, crabs, scampi, prawns, shrimps, mussels, clams of infinite variety and fish in as many forms as the chefs imagination could devise. But, to be truthful, it wasn’t this that held me in true rapture.

It was the man walking along the beach with ice creams and fruits encased in a friable coating of caramel as delicate as a butterfly’s wing.

Since then eating by the sea, on the sea, looking out to sea, has had an inexpressible magic for me, and the places where I have done it have a particularly happy niche in my gastronomic memory. I once ate five lobsters one after another on an island off the coast of Maine (gross, but I knew that I would never have the chance to do it again). I sat in a restaurant in Portonovo in Italy 40 years ago, waiting impatiently for the boats bringing fresh mussels for dinner.

I remember The Three Chimneys on the Isle of Skye, where the langoustine and crabs and oysters from the sea lochs beyond the windows seem to have leapt from the chilly water straight on to the plate. In Sri Lanka I have stared out from an unnamed beach shack on stilts at the aquamarine waters of the Indian Ocean and watched fishermen haul in their catch for the day’s shellfish curry. What was it that fellow wrote? “Mellow with sensations growing with food and wine. . . warm, slow, moving freckles of light on water.” He hasn’t changed that much.