Paras left his village and walked down a well-trodden path through the farms. On his left and right green fields spread as far as eye could see, a small puff of dust rising with his every step.

The symbolism of wine in the spiritual life has a long and distinguished history. The use of bread and wine as ‘species’ for the Christian Holy Eucharist harks back to the ‘sacrament’ of Melchizedec, the ‘shaykh’ of the prophet Abraham.

Few pleasures in life surpass a cup of freshly ground, roasted coffee, whether in the form of a Turkish coffee found in the bazaars of Istanbul or an Americano served at one of the more established international coffee chains in the capital cities of Western Europe.

In January 2018, I went back to Kampala, the capital of Uganda, my birthplace. We Ugandan Asians were exiled from the country in 1972.

My weekly blog on food and culture for the Nigerian newspaper 234Next had earned that reputation of being an early morning table where people came, sat around and bantered about Nigerian food as anodyne for the tensions and stresses of a typical Lagos morning

Food of the future continues to enthral and amaze with its limitless potential. Technology, climate change, a growing population, and scientific discovery are all combining to enact a dawn of the weird and wonderful on our dietary horizon.

Muslim societies have long railed vociferously against the monolithic view of our cultures as immutable theocracies. We are not iron bound orthodoxies of obedient would-be radicals, but rather possessed of overwhelming diversity of thought, appearance and lived experience in our midst

My seat was in Iraq. It sounded like as good a place as any for me to colonise my Made in the US of A posterior for the evening’s performance. I cannot believe this act of irony was the product of chance alone.