Well, you just can’t predict the things that will press people’s buttons. I have been roundly ticked off by several readers for remarking a few weeks ago that I couldn’t understand why people bothered with bread-making machines when it is so pleasurable to do it by hand. Marilyn Laws – my current favourite correspondent – wrote: “I went out last week and became one of the statistics for increased sales of bread-makers. Whatever the reasons I had, over many years, for making bread, pleasure never came into it. Better bread, cheaper bread and, at one point when there was a strike, any bread at all were the reasons.”

The results from her new machine were great, she added, and she no longer had to worry about inefficient use of a large oven. “This take against bread machines reminds me of my mum’s refusal to buy a dishwasher because, she said, it was good fun to be up to one’s elbows in warm suds. I was the family dish-washer at the time.” Peter Lloyd thought I needed to get out more: “I use a bread-maker because I can’t stand the shop stuff,” he wrote. “But I don’t have time to fart-arse about in the kitchen every other day making it by hand, pleasurable though it is.” Inelegant but fair; he’d rumbled me as a dilettante, only making bread when I feel like it or want to show off.

I met David crossing the yard and told him about this small tsunami of reprimands, anticipating some sympathy, but he launched into a rant of his own: people who made their own bread were robbing decent, hardworking bakers of their living. “We might as well do our own blacksmithing,” he said crossly. He was particularly exercised,

I think, because he has discovered his ne plus ultra of bread, made by a new, young “artisan” baker called Alex Gooch who has just set up in Hay-on-Wye. “It’s perfect,” said David the other day, brandishing a piece of lightly toasted, dense sourdough.

Just before Christmas, I went to visit Alex at his fledgling bakery: a breezeblock and steel shell on a light industrial estate at the edge of town. It was still deliciously warm and scented from the morning’s baking and the beery aroma of the rye starter culture, which bubbled and popped like a tiny Vesuvius. Sitting on the long, oiled oak work table were shiny, conker-headed brioches and several little loaves of stollen – a German bread, studded with fruit and spices and with a marzipan centre represent-ing the Christ child swaddled in blankets.

Alex gets up at midnight to make bread through the small hours, with the World Service for company – “I’ve never been so well informed” – and works a 19-hour day. His social life has ground to a halt: “If I go out, I fall asleep,” he says. His parents help with deliveries and farmers’ markets, his brother chipped in a bit of capital, and there was a development loan from the Welsh Assembly. “He’s doing what he loves,” his mother told me. “What more could you want?” n

valleygirl@thetimes.co.uk