Nostalgia can be an awful thing. I find myself slipping into it a lot more than I used to though, which presumably happens to us all the minute we have something to feel nostalgic about. For me, this usually involves Bombay. This morning, it was a chapatti of all things that flipped a switch somewhere, taking on the role of Madeleine to my ageing Proust. Biting into it, I was suddenly confronted with an image long buried in my consciousness, involving a burly man covered in flour.

He was the local flour-grinder, a magical creature who would take our bags of wheat, back in the day, pour them into his magnificent electric grinder, and stock the warm flour in steel tins that belonged to his many customers like us. I remember walking to his flour-covered shop somewhere in my local market and watching him appear and disappear through clouds of white smoke. It's hard to explain to young people long weaned on supermarket-bought sacks of wheat and rice flour because I'm sure the occupation has long been rendered obsolete.