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Pippa Middleton's book deal gets us in the festive party mood 2011

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I know she doesn't write for trophies, but do join Lost in Showbiz in congratulating Pippa Middleton on securing her first book deal – a reported £400,000 advance for a volume of advice on party planning. The book is to be published by Michael Joseph, Penguin's more commercial imprint, who beat an array of offers from others including Random House and HarperCollins. The likes of Verso and the Oxford University Press were apparently unaware the property had come to market, and are believed to be launching a high court challenge to force bidding to be reopened.

Anyway, Pippa's literary arrival marks a special moment for this column. Only the other day I was wandering around the Lost in Showbiz archives – they are housed in a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen-designed facility located within the Chernobyl exclusion zone – when I stumbled upon a flocked shelving unit marked December 2008. Blowing the dust off the files, I discovered that Pippa had made her Lost in Showbiz debut that very month, as one of the lines carried in our Winter Collection.

At the time, she had just been voted No 1 in Tatler's list of the "200 coolest kids in town", which is the equivalent of coming top of the TOWIE cast's list of 200 public intellectuals. More significantly, though, in light of this publishing news, Pippa had been promptly rushed on to the pages of Hello! to dispense party tips – perhaps the only 23-year-old the mag would allow to lecture its readers on how to "create the perfect Christmas".

The resultant feature makes exhilarating reading for those keen for clues as to the contents of Pippa's forthcoming work. "Why not serve risotto in mini copper pans?" she wondered, which I understand is society code for "Why don't you just do one, Kirstie Allsopp?"

Indeed, the entire article showcased Pippa's rhetorical style. "Why not," ran another of her inquiries, "collect and clean chicken wishbones in the run-up to Christmas, spray them silver and use each to pinch together a white hem-stitch napkin?" I still can't put my finger on the answer to that question, but am fairly sure it's to do with The Silence of the Lambs. It just feels like less of a napery choice, more a way of enticing a serial killer's poodle down into a well.

But on it went. Pippa was at pains to point out that: "A hibiscus margarita looks just elegant garnished with a caramelised slice of lime."

Of course, these were very much party tips for 2008, and while one wouldn't suggest they have become déclassé since – it should be perfectly obvious that they were always déclassé – there may well be other vogues these days. There will doubtless be new "stemware fashions", "mixer trends", and all manner of emetic phrases I'd find it almost impossible to type were I not currently drinking a large bleach daiquiri garnished with some caramelised prescription uppers.

It's not that I dream of all party planning tips being crafted by Julian Barnes. Pippa presumably knows something of what she's on about, having a part-time job with an events company as well as editing Party Times, the online magazine for her parents' party-planning mail-order business. Having said that, we all know why she's being paid £400,000, though she is of course quite unable to acknowledge it. The "Our Story" section of the Party Times website omits glaringly to detail the only aspect of "Our Story" which is remotely relevant.

What I can never brook, alas, is the sheer tweeness of the copy. As it goes, Lost in Showbiz genuinely loves Christmas, and likes to make it last at least a 12th of the year. But there's something about the type of prose that's always deployed that makes me feel a bit Uncle, and Pippa's outpourings in Party Times are a classic example. You can't say biscuits: you have to say "baked treats". You can't say sweets, you have to say "shiny wrapped treats" or "an array of jovial delights". Canapés are "parcels of deliciousness". Furthermore, I just dispute that scattering sequin confetti on tables "evokes a sense of enchantment", unless by that they mean that the little buggers are harder to get rid of than mutant knotweed.

The whole enterprise just seems knit into that depressing tendency of the age to see cupcakes as a life philosophy. In recent years, cupcakes have gained such pernicious purchase on what we'll flatter as "the public imagination" that the best way out of this for humanity would be for all those who invest them with near-mystical properties to be taken down in a tulipomania-style collapse.

And you can have that for chapter three, Pippa.

There's a small chance she won't accept my submission. According to what "a source" tells the Daily Mail, Pippa has decided to start each chapter with an amusing anecdote. My own preference would be for extracts from the frankly mind-boggling canon of Prince Harry/Pippa slash-fiction that is mushrooming on the web … but perhaps that's a subject for another week.

PS: Dear Middletons: will the two sets of £2.99 Angel Flames cake candles I ordered from the website on Thursday be with me by next Wednesday? I spent quite a lot of yesterday worrying about it. Also I have changed my mind and wish to untick the box saying I don't want to receive mailings – please could you do this for me? Thanking you and happy Christmas.... READ MORE