Devoted as I am to the ethos of Lonely Planet, I was never a backpacker. “The British Navy always travels first class,” Admiral of the Fleet Lord “Jacky” Fisher used to say as he checked into yet another fashionable spa, and I was similarly conditioned during my adolescent years as an officer with the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers. At the end of the second world war, when we were not getting messy in our dirty old tanks, we were making sure that we ate at the best restaurants and stayed at the poshest hotels.

Nowhere did we honour Lord Fisher’s axiom more loyally than in Venice, where we happily made the most of our status as members of a victorious occupying army. Many of the best hotels became our officers’ clubs, while the most expensive restaurants were pleased to accept our vastly inflated currency (which we had acquired by selling cigarettes on the black market). And in particular, since all the city’s motorboats had been requisitioned by the military, we rode up and down the Grand Canal, under the Rialto Bridge, over to the Lido, like so many lucky young princes.

That was half a century ago, and I have been back to Venice at least a hundred times since. I have never forgotten Fisher’s dictum (although he died, I must tell you, five years before I was born), and until last year I had never once in my life so far neglected it as to take a vaporetto, a public water-bus, from the railway station into the centre of the city. There no longer being commandeered motorboats available, I had invariably summoned one of the comfortably insulated and impeccably varnished water-taxis, which, for a notoriously extravagant fee, would whisk me without hassle to the quayside of my hotel.

My partner, Elizabeth, had not been subjected to the same influences of adolescence. She spent her wartime years as a rating in the women’s naval service, decoding signals in an underground war room, subsisting on baked beans and vile sweet tea from the canteen. But she had been to Venice with me dozens of times, and I thought that by now I had initiated her into my own Fisherian style of travel. However, last time we were there, she proved unexpectedly recidivist. “Oh, Jan,” she said as I hastened her towards the line of waiting taxis, ignoring the throbbing vaporetto at its pier. “Why must you always be so extravagant? What’s wrong with the vaporetto? Everyone else goes on it. It’s a fraction of the price. What’s the hurry, anyway? What are you proving? We’re not made of money, you know. What’s the point?”

“The British Navy always —” I began, but she interrupted me with an aphorism of her own. “Waste not, want not,” she primly retorted. Ah well, said I to myself, and to Lord Fisher, too, anything for a quiet life. Humping our bags in the gathering dusk, fumbling for the right change, dropping things all over the place, with our tickets between our teeth, we stumbled up the gangplank onto the jam-packed deck.

There we stood for what felt like three or four days, edging into eternity, as the vessel pounded its way through the darkness up the Grand Canal, stopping at every available jetty with deafening engine reversals, throwing us about with judderings, clangings and bumps, while we stood cheek-by-jowl with 10,000 others on the cold and windy poop. When at last we debouched on the quayside below San Marco, looking as though we were stepping onto Omaha Beach, Elizabeth turned to me with an air of satisfaction. “There you are, you see. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Think of the money we saved! A penny saved is a penny gained.”

But she spoke this meaningless maxim too late. Pride, I nearly told her, comes before a fall. Standing there upon the quayside, slung about with bags and surrounded by suitcases, I had already discovered that during our ride on the vaporetto, somebody had stolen the wallet that contained all our worldly wealth, not to mention all our credit cards.

Off we trudged to the police station to report the loss, and as we sat in the dim light among a melancholy little assembly of unfortunates and ne’er-do-wells, how I regretted ignoring the Admiral! I bet Elizabeth did too, although she was too proud to admit it.

I didn’t actually say “Penny wise, pound foolish”. I didn’t even murmur under my breath the bit about travelling first class. Never hit a woman when she’s down, I told myself. Virtue is its own reward — and as it happened, it was rewarded. We never got that wallet back, but the carabinieri were terribly solicitous, and said how sorry they were, and assured us that no Venetian could have done such a thing — it must have been one of those Albanians — and sent us off feeling perfectly comforted and a little bit sorry for them, actually, so palpable was their sense of civic shame.

Half an hour later, feeling emotionally and physically drained, we turned up on the doorstep of Harry’s Bar, a hostelry I have frequented ever since those glory days of victory, when I was young and easy, as the poet said, and Time let me hail and climb. With Jack Fisher beside us — he would have loved Harry’s Bar — we pushed our way through the revolving door and told our sad story to the people inside.

And lo! They gave us a free dinner (scampi and white wine, with a zabaglione afterwards) just to cheer us up. For once our truisms did not conflict. Every cloud, we agreed, as the three of us sat there in the warmth of our first-class corner, really does have a silver lining.

Travel brief

Getting there: BA (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com) flies from Heathrow and Gatwick, from £69; EasyJet (www.easyjet.com) flies from Bristol, Nottingham East Midlands and Gatwick, from £50; Aer Lingus (0818 365000, www.aerlingus.com) flies from Dublin, from €89. All fares are for a long weekend in October.

Where to stay: in the fine style of Admiral Fisher, try the Cipriani (0845 077 2222, www.hotelcipriani.com; doubles from £552), on Giudecca island; or, by the Doges’ Palace, the Danieli (00 800 3254 5454, www.starwoodhotels.com; from £309). More modest is the Metropole (00 39 041 520 5044, www.hotelmetropole.com; from £102), near St Mark’s Square.

Getting around: risk a vaporetto for £2. A private water-taxi from the airport to your hotel, or down the length of the Grand Canal, costs about £55.

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