This is the time of year when, traditionally, we indulge in things bookly and literish. We fret the bookmonger’s groaning board like word-starved waifs confronted by a logoscrumptious buffet. And we give books nilly-willy. Books are papery gifts that say lots and lots — much of it stuff that the author never wrote.

We give them to people we’re obliged to and secretly hate.

A book says: “I’m cleverer than you.” It says: “You need to read this because you have no conversation and your thoughts are wan, halt things. I’m giving it to you with the thin smile of pitying patronage. And it will be a personal and private recrimination for years to come, because I know you’re cancerous with guilt about all the unconsumed words left on your bedside table.” A book says: “I loved this when I was 13. Now you’re in your late forties, you might be able to appreciate it.”

Never for one single, naive moment imagine that a book at Christmas is well meant. Read between the lines, dummy — it’s an ode to snobbery and loathing.

Of course, for those of us already tattooed with ISBN numbers, Christmas is altogether more tooth and nib than ribbon and tinsel. The bookshop is not a smorgasbord, but a trench. I look with mounting avarice and jealousy at the pages of best books that every newspaper runs. It’s not that my book isn’t mentioned by anybody and everybody. It’s that everybody who’s nobody has been asked — and nobody’s asked me.

So, in a fit of embarrassing pique, here is my favourite book for Christmas: National Anthems of the World, 11th edition, edited by Michael Jamieson Bristow. I stole it from my publisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which will sell it to you for a very reasonable £60. It includes the new anthems for Timor-Leste, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mozambique and Rwanda (it used to be Tutu Tootsie, Goodbye. Now, it’s If You Knew Hutu Like I Know Hutu). The blurbs on the back are glowing: “An absolute necessity for all concerned with protocol and the arrangement of functions — The Diplomatic Press”. You think I’m joking. I’m serious.

A national song is a very odd idea. Whoever thought of it? Well, actually, we did. God Save the King was the first. Anthems are a strangely subversive and compulsive insight into nations and their people. For instance, the second verse of Finland’s goes: “The flowers in their buds that grope shall burst their sheaths with spring ... ” And they get kids to sing that — bursting sheaths and all.

How about: “Bless Latvia, O God, our verdant native sod”?

Or the less bosky Burkina Faso: “Against the cynical malice in the shape of neocolonialism and its petty local servants ... ”?

Switzerland’s comes in five languages, all drearily Swiss. Italy’s has a great tune and the surprisingly prophetic line: “With the helmet of Scipio, where is victory?” Where indeed? Greece’s has 158 verses, the first of which begins: “I shall always recognise you by the dreadful sword you hold.”

The best written are India’s and Bangladesh’s, both by Tagore. Haydn wrote the music for the German one, but it wasn’t his finest moment. The most moving must be South Africa’s, which is also Tanzania’s. But my favourite verse is Mauritania’s: “They misrepresented him, by making him similar, and made all kinds of excuses. They made bold claims and blackened notebooks. They let the nomads and the sedentary people both make bitter experiences. And the great sins of their innovations bequeathed small. And just in case a disputant calls you to dispute about their claim, do not, then, dispute on them, except by way of an external dispute.” Words by Baba Ould Cheikh. Respect.

I’ve noticed that postcolonial francophone countries tend to go on about liberty, whereas the anglophone ones thunder freedom. They’re not precise synonyms. The sliver of difference says something slight but profound about us and the French.

We got liberty, ironically, from the Normans. Its first use in English is in 1425. But King Alfred used freedom in 888, to mean self-determination, free from fate, control or necessity. I’ve been struggling to define the difference neatly, and I haven’t quite got it, but I think that liberty is a thing you are given or granted.

It’s civic. Freedom, you’re born with. It’s innate, metaphysical. Perhaps there’s a book in it.

Anyway, let’s get this week’s sorry restaurant over with. Launceston Place sits in a quiet corner of Kensington. It has been a quintessential hooray local for years. I was told it had a new cook, and was worth a visit, but as you walk in, there’s that familiar stench of boiled fish and cabbage, emanating either from the soft furnishings or from the staff. And the place still looks like the canteen for David Cameron’s A-list candidates and the constituency chairmen who are going to make sure they’re never selected.

The new menu looks good: hearty English ingredients frotted and liberated by a light French-ish hand. I started with lentil, ham and cabbage soup, which was like a cloudy pond with dense gravel and bits of heron gizzard. Mercifully, it tasted of very little. Mozzarella and artichoke salad with pumpkin seeds arrived with the seeds still in their shells, as your parrot would expect them to be served. “Is this right?” we asked the waitress, who, being French, ran through the full gamut of her Marcel Marceau righteous irritation and said that, yes, of course it was.

For main course, I had slow-roast mutton with baby vegetables and polenta. The polenta was an emetic slurry of subsistence substance. The ingénue vegetables were midgets and dwarves, boiled so that they held their natural shape only by a collective act of nostalgia. But they were ambrosia compared with the mutton. The colour of a gravedigger’s fingernail, it was a mortified curl of muscle from some unknown extremity of ancient ovine. It resisted knife and fork, being mostly translucent, sweaty gristle and greasy fat. It was inedibly disgusting, without question the nastiest ingredient I’ve been served this year.

Anything else about the restaurant is really beside the point, because a kitchen that would — or indeed could — contemplate sending this bit of gloop out on a plate as food for a customer and demand £19 in return really has no business in the hospitality business. I can’t imagine how any chef with a filo of professional self-respect could allow such a thing to pass the pass. And any kitchen dumb enough to serve it to a restaurant critic deserves all it gets, which, in this case, is one dull star — and that’s only because it’s nearly Christmas. Perhaps they could follow it and return by another road.

LAUNCESTON PLACE

1a Launceston Place, W8; 020 7937 6912
Lunch: daily, 12.30-2.30pm. Dinner: Mon-Sat, 6-11.30pm; Sun, 7-10pm

5 stars Songs of praise
4 stars Sing when you're winning
3 stars On song
2 stars Same old song and dance
1 star Swan song

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