Cawdor, Nairn, Inverness; 01667 404777 Lunch, Mon-Sat, noon-2pm; Sun, 12.30pm-3pm. Dinner, daily, 5.30pm-9pm

Five stars Sunday Times Four stars Sunday best Three stars Sunday painter Two stars Sunday service One star Sunday, bloody Sunday

Some Sundays I catch my friends shrouded in a brown study, momentarily stopped like wet clocks, a remembrance of sadness, a premonition, the sigh of someone standing in stilettos on their mossy graves. It’s always Sunday, and I always know why: the madeleine of being sent back. The dog-end of dripping autumnal weekends are, for my generation of boarding-schooled children, for ever a stoically endured sadness. Being sent back to school. For me, it’s the first notes of Songs of Praise. They clutch at my heart, and for a moment, I think I have to hurry to King’s Cross to catch the gloomy little train with a quarter-bottle of vodka. This feeling, this amputated ache, is pretty much the only thing that’s stayed with any of us from school. All that time and effort, all that cash. Those tears. All the pep talks and threats, the bribes and new starts and turned corners. And that bucket of disappointment.

For my grandfather, Sunday was carborundum day. He’d stand over the beef and stroke the knife and dip a thick sop of bread into the blood, sprinkle it with salt and pass it, with a pantomime sleight of hand, to me. Monday was cottage pie. Tuesday was tripe. Wednesday, chops. Thursday, liver and kidneys. Lambs’ liver — undervalued now and rarely asked for. Fridays was fish, northern white fish in a parsley sauce. The week was named for the unvarying routine of my grandmother’s kitchen.

Have you ever considered how odd the names of the days are? Called for Norse gods. The seven-day week is pretty ancient. The Greeks had it, but it was by no means universal. The Romans were a step ahead with an eight-day week, the eighth day, the nundina, being for markets, sacrifices and invading Gaul. The Romans, who were so efficient at so many things, were useless at numbers, so they didn’t have names for the days of the week, just names for three days in the month. Calends, nones, ides. To get a specific date, you counted back from a fixed day. And then they moved from an eight-day week to the continental seven. The books say they did this gradually. How do you lose a day gradually? “Ave. You said you’d be here three days before ides, and here it is, six days after calends.” “Hang about, Julius, keep your toga on. You’re still playing with the full eight-day week. We’re phasing it out, mate. We only use the eighth day once a month.”

The Ottomans, the towel-heads who invented bureaucracy, made a huge book-keeping cock-up. They had two calendars. One for civil servants, the other for agriculture. Over the years, they diverged so much that tax dates lost contact with the harvest, and the empire collapsed in a brainache of pederasty, silk strangulation, sherbet and rotting pomegranates. The Mayans also had two calendars: one was astronomic, the other was predestinatory. That was a list of things that had happened on certain days of the year for hundreds of years. They augured good or evil for particular dates. So you'd arrange to have your wedding on the one calendar and then check that this wasn’t the day where they always lost FA Cup matches and it usually rained. The Mayans collapsed in a depression of bad luck when they realised that every day of the year was going-back-to-school day.

The first day of the week is Sunday, the day God rested. Unless you’re Jewish, in which case, it’s Saturday, as it was for the Romans. Computers, atheists and my heathen Sunday Times diary assumes that it’s Monday, as do Slavs and Balts, but not Finns. In Iceland, Saturday is Laugardagur: “washing day”. Most of the rest of the week is simply numbered. Northern Europe took on the Norse god names in the Dark Ages, during the general Krautification of Latin. The Wagnerian deities kicked out their Latin opposite numbers. Monday, the moon god, was called Mani. Tuesday, Tyr or Tiw, was the one-armed god of battle and swearing. Thursday was for Thor, who, like Jupiter, had a thunderbolt as his superpower. Friday was Freya’s day, who replaced Venus as a blonder, more pneumatic disciplinarian goddess of love, sex and bondage. Sunday was the sun god.

Wednesday belonged to Odin, though the Germans oddly call it Mittwoch (midweek). The Romans knew it as Mercury’s day. Mercury and Odin have little in common, except — and here’s the good bit, this is the bit that’s worth the price of the paper — they were both psychopomps. A psychopomp is a guide, an intermediary, between the living and the dead. They take souls over the river. Almost every religion owns this character, who, without judgment and with great solemnity, helps the shades to the further shore. Charon is the most famous, but Jung used the mystical idea of the psychopomps as a link between the ego and the id, the ethereal conductor of dreams, from the unconscious to the conscious. I’d like to think of myself of something of a psychopomp, delivering the last gasp of deceased and decomposed ideas to your maudlin Sunday bed.

All of which has precious little to do with the Cawdor Tavern, except that I went there on a Sunday, for lunch. I have a middle-aged and middle-class prejudice about catered Sunday lunches. I think it’s the thin end of a wedge that leads to a year’s free interest on a three-piece leather suite, baseball caps worn in the house and a pitbull in the microwave. Sunday lunch ought to be cooked and consumed by amateurs at home, for people you love, or share DNA with. It’s not about skill, or taste, it’s about cleaving and the strop of the horn-handled carving knife on a smooth carborundum.

The Cawdor Tavern sits in the shadow of the thanes of the eponymous castle, an exhausted gallop from Culloden Moor. This Sunday, it was humming with families taking ancient grandparents out for a lazy treat. There were a lot of best jumpers and awkward teenagers removed from their hoodies with oyster knives. This is a big pub, with a big pub car park, catering, I expect, for the hordes of visitors drawn to a fine castle by Shakespeare and the twofer of being able to do Culloden as well, thereby getting Macbeth and Bonnie Prince Charlie — a pair of self-pitying, entitled monomaniacs — done in a day. The dining room is a great Gaelic clash of competing nylon patterns, lit with sconce lamps that give off an eerie, brassy glow and make everything and everyone look jaundiced.

I took Christophe Henkel and Julian Freeman-Attwood. We’d been stalking on the west coast and could have murdered Sunday lunch, which, in the circumstances and the neighbourhood, would have been appropriate. I started with a prawn cocktail. In a blind tasting, I wouldn’t have been able to identify it in 20 days. I probably wouldn’t have got the sea as its principal habitat. It was only chilly and wet. It had an absence of flavour and familiar texture that was uncanny.

The roast of the day was pork with apple sauce and gravy. It was like chewing the headmaster’s elbow patches, with some pale, sweet slime and a sauce that had the consistency of conditioner and smelt like Banquo’s vest. Best was a venison burger, which I suppose I may well have murdered. It was just a dry burger. The venison bit was added to give élan to a bun patty that didn’t really merit more than burger. Service was friendly and forgetful and mostly absent. The experience was, as they say up here, dreich. I felt for the other guests, who probably ate out only rarely and for whom this should have been simple, hospitable and a bit special. Instead, it was a ghost of a feast. And the problem is idiotically obvious: it tastes like it’s made for the lowest possible price. The frozen prawns, the factory pig. Bargain ingredients are always a waste of money, however much they cost.

But then this is the experience of Sunday lunches in pubs all over rural Britain. Surrounded by farms and shoots, by rivers and orchards, kitchen gardens and any number of bakers and jam-makers, they continue to serve the meagrest, poorest, industrial urban food. I have been writing this for nearly 20 years now: there’s a sort of cold comfort that despite all of the magazines and the books, the celebrity chefs and the television shows, the examples, the coaxing, the nagging, the educating and the encouraging, Sunday still exerts its malign and miserable, ashen-mouthed, bloodless despair over lunch.

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