I took a five-day holiday in Istanbul earlier this month. It was the first time I had been in Turkey since 1986, when I joined friends on a gulet cruise out of Bodrum. This was too long away, I quickly realised on return. Here is my kind of country – lots to see, lots of very pleasant people to meet, lots to eat.

On the flight back (British Airways, of course) I read in Highlife magazine that Turks spend more time scoffing than people from any other country in the world – an average of 162 minutes a day. Much of it, I had noticed, was done on the hoof, in constant ‘grazing’ from stalls selling (for instance) wonderful fresh fruit, doner kebabs, fried or steamed mussels, barbecued mackerel, roasted chestnuts and – most often, perhaps – sesame seed-encrusted simit, Turkey’s answer to the bagel. Locals must endure agonies during the day-long starvation of Ramadan.

Inevitably, some restaurants proved either costly tourist traps or run-of-the-mill fast food joints. An exception we chanced upon one lunchtime was Güney in Sah Kapisi, where we sat at outdoor tables (it was warm enough) beneath the 14th-century Galata Tower. one of the city’s landmarks and, at 61 metres high, best vantage points. The food was so good that we returned the next day, when something that both pleased and amused me happened.

From a tempting display of dishes being shown off by the chef, I selected a couple for delivery to our table outside in the sunshine. The boned poussin stuffed with herby rice tasted so good, and looked so good, that I immediately whipped out my camera and took the shot you can see at the head of this piece.

Two minutes later, a film crew set up ‘shop’ at the table next to us. Another example of the boned poussin arrived and a large and learned gentlemen began discussing its excellencies as the cameras rolled (or whatever they do these days). He was making a food programme, I discovered, for Lebanese television.

Our main reason for crossing the Golden Horn the previous day, by way of the famous Galata Bridge, had been to visit the Pera Palace Hotel, where Agatha Chrisitie wrote Murder on the Orient Express. It was, said our guidebook, “virtually unchanged since it opened in 1892”.

It is being changed now, though. We arrived to find the place closed and cloaked in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. It was undergoing what a notice called “restoration, rehabilitation” and something else beginning with ‘re’ which I now can’t read in my notebook – probably reconstruction.

We saw tributes to Christie, however, across the water at Sirkeci Station, where the Orient Express terminated. There are a number of photographs of the Wallingford-based author along one wall of the splendidly old-fashioned dining room. Next door there is a fine little museum devoted to Turkish railways in general and this train (which last ran in 1977) in particular.

Apart from a few rides on the city’s excellent trams (fare less than £1, whatever the distance) and one ferry ride across the Bosphorus to Üsküdar – this being the first time I had been anywhere in Asia – all of our sightseeing was done on foot.

It was as well, then, that I took a sturdy pair of black brogues, maintenance of which proved a simple matter with so many shoe cleaners around in the streets.

Other occasions when the shoes came off included our visit to the Blue Mosque, hugely impressive but marginally less so, I thought, than the mighty Aya Sofa, built as a Christian church in the 6th century, later a mosque and, since 1935, a museum.

They were removed again, along with everything else, when I indulged in that other activity de rigueur for the Istanbul tourist, the hamam, or Turkish bath.

Again, this was a first – and an experience I am not sure I should care to repeat. At around £30, plus a tip not so much expected as demanded, it was expensive. I found exposure to the heat and steam more uncomfortable than therapeutic and the massage painful.

What a grump I am!