Just back from a fish holiday. Not fishing for fish, but fingering fish. It’s what’s expected of you when you eat out on a Greek island. If the taverna doesn’t tempt you in off the street with a cabinet of the day’s catch on ice, the waiters will bring a raw selection to your table. Fresh. Feel.

I’m in two minds about fish – it depends how much oil and garlic they cook it in and how well they disguise the taste so that you think you’re eating meat – but I poke the carcasses for politeness’s sake. I have no idea what I’m poking to find or how I’ll know when I’ve found it. Should the fish yield a little to my pressure? Should it resist? Should it be rubbery or slimy; should the eyes be open or closed; should the fish look contented in death, or angry?

I make a study of how the other diners do it. They are invariably men showing off to their wives and girlfriends. I don’t mean to make this a gender thing – I’d be perfectly happy for my wife to do the jabbing – but I notice that in Crete, anyway, there is a bond of the sea between the waiters and the male diners. It’s an atavistic ritual. You take your seat – “you” being the man – you ask to see the fish, you poke it and you nod your head. “That one.” For many men, this is the nearest they will ever get to hunter-gathering.

On one occasion, a diner gets so intimate with the fish that he puts a couple of them to his nose as though they’re expensive cigars and, if I’m not mistaken, tries their firmness against his teeth. When the waiter comes to me, I am careful to examine the fish he shows me for bite marks. “I don’t think so,” I say.

He recommends the sea bass. I tell him I haven’t flown across the Aegean for sea bass that I can buy at Waitrose. Don’t they have anything wilder?

The waiter disappears into the kitchen and comes out with a sea bream. I poke it authoritatively. It’s indistinguishable from sea bass. I shake my head. “I’ll try the Cretan mountain goat,” I say.

Order Cretan mountain goat in a loud voice, and you bring conversation in a taverna to a halt. Hunting mountain goat trumps angling for snapper in any language. I tell my wife how I learned to kill mountain goat when fighting with the partisans and how it tastes best barbecued on Cretan maple immediately after butchering. I draw an imaginary Knossos dagger across my throat.

All around me, men stare disconsolately into the filleted remains of their sea bass.