West African markets are a bit different from your usual pahnd-f'rer-pahnd Brit variety. In fact, pretty much all they've got in common is tomatoes.

Take snails. I'm not talking cute little garden path snails. I'm talking gastropodian behomoths that look like this. Scared yet?

People use them as flavouring in soups - a sort of natural stock cube - and I've probably already eaten countless of them without knowing it. But they're best used fresh, so a typical snail stall is covered with hand-sized molluscs all lazily contemplating escape. And the piles are often so big that you wonder who is in control. You suspect that the old woman minding the stall is eating snails because if she doesn't, they'll end up eating her.

Then there's fish. Again, I must have eaten this countless times without knowing it. They're one of those things, like recycling water from sewage, that I'm happiest not knowing about. They're sold in huge flyblown piles of sundried stink, in every imaginable size and shape. Catfish are spiked round into fishy bangles, their skins the colour of greased axles. Whitebait is piled up in miniature refuse heaps, with a scoop of them in an old tomato-paste tin on the top of each one. Flatfish are stacked and restacked like sandy slabs of stone, and thousands of dessicated little eyes gape up at you as you pass by. The smell is like finding the secret fish graveyard.