Flicking through the pages, several entries catch the eye. “Number 384: Keep Food From Sticking to Pans”… “Number 528: Refuse a Date to Ensure Another Request”… “Number 780: Care for a Black Eye” (useful, presumably, if you haven’t mastered refusing a date successfully).

This is the quality which makes it such a tempting purchase. It is bite-sized enough to encourage dipping in and out of between Chocolate Orange segments; diverse enough to appeal to almost any relative; yet looks serious enough to create the it could become a trusty source of family reference for years.

But read beyond than the individual title entries, and the cracks quickly appear. For instance, “Number 5: Learn to Type”, in which the route to a potentially life-enhancing skill is boiled down to a host of banal bullet points.

“Type the following letters - looking anywhere but the keyboard - saying the names of the letters out loud and using either thumb to hit the space bar: f f space j j space d d space k k space[etc]… Repeat this as many times as you need to in order to feel that you’re getting an intuitive sense of these letters.”

The result is a leaden course in drudgery anyone could have worked out for . To its credit, the book offers helpful tips at the side of each entry - “consider taking a typing class” - but 17 is a lot to pay for such obvious advice.

The relative difficulties of items are measured in hammers. Learning to type is a three-hammer entry while “Number 58: Become Prime Minister” merits five hammers.

Nestled between such grand feats is a huge amount of useful practical . How to decorate a room so it seems bigger, how to get your name off mailing lists, how to request a reference from an employer, and how to give a negative reference for an employee.

But just when it seems this might be a genuinely useful tome of reference, the reader stumbles upon big issues for which there could never be a right or wrong way.

“546: Get him to propose… Drop subtle hints from time to time, such as ‘We’d make a great team,’ or ‘I can’t imagine my future without you,’ rather than bombarding him with demands about marriage.”

“547: How to Propose Marriage to a Man” might as well be subtitled “What to do if Your Boyfriend Doesn’t Get Your Subtle Hints”.

The curious mix leaves the reader somewhat puzzled as to whether this is fish or fowl. Is it a serious book or just a bit of a laugh?

So here’s a bit of advice I would really like. How does one write a book which is ideally suited for an irrationally generous Christmas market and which will sell piles? This book will tell you how to write business plans, CVs, limericks, love letters and mission statements, but on this vital task the book speaks for itself.

Review by Giles Wilson. On Wednesday, Schott’s Food & Drink Miscellany