It is quite a brave person who, asked in a cafe whether they want their bacon sandwich on white or brown bread, says "white". To do so is to choose the unsophisticated, unhealthy option, and if the range of choice extends to "brown, wholemeal, granary or white", then opting for white seems all the more perversely heedless of health - suicidal, practically.

It's annoying because, let's face it, everyone prefers white. The other varieties of bread don't blend in with Primula so well, or contrast so pleasingly with the shards of crispy bacon. Up north, I was raised on a well-known brand of white, sliced bread. It also came in brown, but this was just the white stuff dyed brown, or so I always assumed. There was certainly no difference in texture or taste, but it catered to a slightly more genteel clientele.

I am not sure about what differentiates white from brown bread, except that slightly posher people eat brown. Granary, I know, is bread designed to test the looseness of your fillings, and is eaten by posher people still, as is wholemeal, about which I am also in the dark. I went into a wholefood shop the other day and asked for white flour, whereon I was told, very rudely, by somebody with the pallor and unwholesomeness I associate with people who work in wholefood shops, that white flour does not come under the heading of wholefood. Why not, I don't know. Not pious enough, probably.

I wanted something called "strong white flour" for my new electric breadmaker, which looks a bit like a microwave, and is just as easy to operate. All you do is pour in the ingredients. These machines are becoming de rigueur in middle-class households mainly because they are absolutely foolproof - almost suspiciously so. I usually set mine to make bread overnight, and I can't believe that an employee of the company that manufactures the breadmakers isn't sneaking into my house at 3am, pouring away the pulpy mixture and replacing it with a perfect loaf of bread: a perfect loaf of, in my case, white bread.

I use the machine to produce tasty, home-made, presumably quite healthy white bread. Middle-class white bread; a circle squared.