Covid-19 still hangs over the world like a cloud, but let’s take heart from silver linings.

While some people see isolation as a prison sentence, the rest of us see opportunities for trying new things that we didn’t have the time or inclination to try before.

Like baking bread. It’s not as if it was a priority when, for a while, it was harder to get hold of the ingredients than it was to buy a finished loaf.

But it wasn’t necessarily the promise of tasty bread at the end of it that was the appeal, so much as the therapeutic aspect, or just the sheer satisfaction of baking your own.

We’ve done it at home before, but never on the scale that we do now.

And finally, after nearly 60 years of sampling all kinds of food, all over the world, I can be absolutely certain that nothing - repeat: NOTHING - either smells or tastes as good as hot bread from your own oven.

That must come as a terrible disappointment if you are a fan of Masterchef, Bake-off or any of those other annoying programmes based on playing with, fussing over and getting snobby about food.

Because no matter how fancy or exotic or indeed expensive your dinner gets, bread is king.

That’s despite it having the simplest and cheapest of ingredients and being such a doddle to make that any fool can do it. Even me.

Let’s face it: 99 per cent of it is just waiting around.

And it has become even easier since the advent of that most wonderful of inventions, the bread machine.

Thanks to lockdown I discovered that to get even more pleasure from the operation (and even better bread), the trick is to get the machine to do the donkeywork - mixing, kneading and managing resting and rising - before whipping it into the oven for half an hour at the end, and claiming all the glory.

What I have only just woken up to, however, is the miracle of yeast.

I listened to a podcast of the Radio 4 programme, Crowdscience, which was all about the seemingly magical qualities of this most simple of things, and the feasibililty of growing your own. On paper at least, creating your own free and potentially inexhaustible supply of yeast is dead easy, and although it’s something I would never have considered before this year, I’m giving it a go.

Those dinosaurs who are still harking back and clinging to all those outdated ideas and so-called values that we started the year believing in, still have some waking up to do.

But if there is one thing that Covid-19 has taught us, it’s the time has come to rethink everything we thought we knew about the world, from yeast upwards.

And if you are wondering where the world should be heading, here’s a thought: sometimes a single-celled organism can be a better guide than the combined brain cells of a whole cabinet of blinkered and biased men in suits.