What’s the collective noun for ravens? Too late, I’ve already googled it. It’s a conspiracy or an unkindness. For those of you who guessed a murder or a clamour — close, but no carrion. That’s crows and rooks.

Now, a number of things strike me about this (or a crumple, which is the collective noun for things that strike). First, who says so? Who decides on collective nouns? Is there an international collective-noun collective? And would they be a baptism of collective-noun compilers or a moniker? Did you know, for instance, that it’s deemed a stir of teaspoons, but a beatitude of apostle spoons? Or that it’s a depilation of ostriches, a frot of poodles, a curmudgeon of rubber bands, a stride of scissors, a tackle of Post-its, a lie of condoms (unused) or a lay (used)? No, you didn’t, because I made them all up. They are a merkin: the collective noun for a bogus collection of collective nouns.

I started all this because of the ravens. I’ve been stalking in Scotland for the past two weeks, and I saw what I now know to be a conspiracy or unkindness. It’s very rare to see more than a pair of ravens, so I wondered if they had a collective noun.

My annual stay in the Highlands is the finest, most invigorating, rewarding, refreshing, hugely fun time I spend all year. Scotland makes up about one-third of the mass of mainland Britain. Of the 60-odd million of us, only 5m live north of the border. Of those, 4.5m live in the central belt, between Glasgow and Edinburgh. That leaves an expanse of bog, heather, granite and black loch inhabited by just ½m people. Those who live here haven’t so much opted out as opted in to being a figure in a landscape.

Take three of the men I went walking with. They looked after the ponies that carried down the stags. None of them was a Scot, but each had escaped to something. Bill, a Yorkshireman, had spent 20 years in a McCain chip factory. Whenever he reached some high point where he could get telephone reception, he’d call his old workmates. “I’m at the top of a mountain in Scotland with two ponies. What are you doing?”

Mick had left a skilled job as a juvenile-salmon inoculator. “You turn them on their backs and inject them with a cocktail of antibiotics. You could do thousands in a day. Trouble is, you can only miss and inject yourself twice. Third time, you die of anaphylactic shock. And did you know, it takes three tons of ground-up wild fish to feed two tons of farmed fish?”

And then there was Nick, a quiet Australian, who came to the Highlands to get away from a koala hospital in Queensland. A koala hospital? “Yup.” Did you get a lot of patients? “Hundreds.” What do they suffer from mostly? “Chlamydia.” You’re joking? How do they get it? “From people.” Oh my God. Australians will do anything. “No, they have a dormant virus that’s brought on by stress, which is caused by contact with people.” How do you treat it? “We put them down.” No? “You can’t give koalas antibiotics. Their digestions are too delicate. I guess there won’t be any koalas in Queensland in five years.” Wiped out by a sexually transmitted disease caught by simply looking at Australians. Isn’t God weird? “Yup.”

There’s famously nowhere to eat in the Highlands. Beauly is a small, hunched, granite town with a petrol station, a good butcher and Campbell & Co, a fabulous tweed shop, where I make a pilgrimage every year. There is a hotel that sells brown food. Brown is the preferred colour of Scottish hospitality. Brown furniture. Brown food. Brown drink. Brown water. And their conversation is usually pretty broon.

So you could have knocked me down with a well-placed punch to the solar plexus when someone recommended I visit the delicatessen. The Highlands and delicatessens go together like whisky and Coca-Cola. And when I saw the Corner on the Square, I must say, my hackles rose. I bridled. I had a queeny moment. Here was a neat, modern, brightly lit Fulham deli selling 34 types of froggy cheese, a dozen olive oils, exotic mustard and the uber-MacMissionary of pan-global Mediterraneanism: balsamic bloody vinegar.

We sat down at little wooden tables among the gossiping women and ordered sausage and mash. I started with tomato and lentil soup and we shared a plate of hot-smoked salmon salad, both grudgingly fine. And the sausage and mash was actually very good: a nice local venison banger and tweedy potato. For pudding, we had an clungy, sputoid vanilla slice that was like eating sweet Magimixed maggots, and a cup of tea served in a fiendishly twee little pot arrangement that was the lid of the cup. So you poured the entire contents of one receptacle into the other. Ridiculous.

I know what it was that made me momentarily resent the Corner on the Square. In my annual, touristy, Landseer-eyed way, I didn’t think it belonged here. It represented all the things I come to the Highlands to escape. But then, I also make annual jokes about the absence of public food for visitors. This place is a quantum leap, a brave and daring act of faith and taste, which I wouldn’t notice in Battersea but which, in all fairness, I should applaud here.

They’ve painted little bons mots on the walls, which set the tone. Above us was “A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine”, already something of an irony up here, where gay Phoebus can leave you radiantly teetotal from November to March. Could I have a glass of wine, inquired my companion. “Ooh, I’m afraid not,” apologised the waitress. “We’re not licensed for that sort of thing.”

Ah, the authentic voice of ma haemland. A glum of Scots.

Corner on the Square

1 High Street, Beauly, Inverness; 01463 783000

Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-3.00pm; shop, Mon-Sat, 9am-5.30pm

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