If only that nice Jewish boy Marcel Proust had grown up not in 19th century Paris but 1980s Golder Green.

Instead of messing around with the dainty nothingness that is a Madeleine when it comes to unleashing sweet memories, he could have been biting into something with rather more substance, not to mention a good lox filling. 

For Jewish north Londoners of a certain generation, the late-night smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel was a pretty much de rigueur ending to a Saturday night out.

Whether your teenage search for love had yielded joy or misfortune (with the ratio heavily skewed towards the latter, though hope sprang eternal), you could always depend upon the satiating comfort of a bagful of filled bagels, freshly prepared by the frenetic staff right in front of your hungry eyes before you’d take them home to gorge upon.

For me, one was never enough; a second with a tuna mix was essential for variety; the third hit the spot; and the fourth was inevitable and to be regretted in the morning as I would wake up slumped upon the sofa with crumbs all down my shirt front. 

Several decades on, I doubt the NHS has the facilities to cope with a middle-aged fresser attempting a blow-out of quite that scale, but still I couldn’t resist stopping at my once favourite bakery on a recent visit to the old neighbourhood and picking up just the one smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel for old time’s sake (plus it was midmorning – that desert of deprivation which stretches between breakfast and lunch). 

They’re no longer freshly prepared in front of your eyes, so I had to rip off the plastic wrapping only to discover something had staled and it wasn’t just my memories.

As Walt Whitman never quite said, you can’t go heimische again.