LAST night, as I write, I was re-reading The Road to Mingulay and Derek Cooper’s passionate rage against the appropriation of land in Scotland for shooting estates.

Boy, it fair stirred the blood, particularly the passages about Victorian times, when weird cranks from south of the Border came killing things for pleasure and treating the locals like inferior beings, an encumbrance in the way of the mighty quarry with which these bold hunters and tweed-armoured sickos so courageously engaged.

Cooper wrote several classics about the Hebrides, land of his forebears, though he is usually described as a food writer in the main.

Food writing is above my pay grade, as I never touch the stuff, but I do love a dram, Cooper’s other great passion, even if I suspect he’d take issue with my view that only Islays and to some extent Skyes, rammed with smoke and peat, are real whiskies. The others are just soft drinks designed for jessies.

Of Skye’s famous whisky (with Torabhaig too coming into contention), he said: “Talisker is not a drink, it is an interior explosion, distilled central heating; it depth charges the parts, bangs doors and slams windows.” We concur.

Cooper was a founder and presenter of The Food Programme on BBC Radio 4, interrogating with courteous but unrelenting vigour those who would adulterate the nation’s nosh. He had a soup strainer moustache and married a woman called Feaster, so his direction in life was always pretty clear.

He also had a deep, mellifluous, friendly but authoritative voice variously described as being like a peaty malt, “custard over a syrup sponge”, and as emerging “out of the ether like a gigantic........

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