Insert horizontal slut upside groove B with grey widget perpendicular.

The world is full of people who do things by the book, meager souls who cannot see delight in the potential. Like Paul Kruger's rumoured denial of the existence of the giraffe because it wasn't in the Bible, they are blinded to wonders and the future, since none of it has been written down on paper.

"Insert horizontal slut upside groove B with grey widget perpendicular. Model unit assembled now and ready for nailing on head pleasure. Boffo A number one!" Nobody quite gets the fine art of writing a manual right, the way Asian scribes used to.

It's sad to see that the manufacturers of those products seem to have taken umbrage at the amusement. Sometimes the joy of reading the manual lasted far longer than the enjoyment of the product, no matter how many flashing lights it had, or how silvery the plastic looked.

Unfortunately now the manuals are becoming literate. One senses that, at a certain point in the history of manufacturing, an army of dewy eyed Oriental headhunters went out in search of the best western scribes and assembled leading manual writers from around the globe.

That sad hypothesis, or aspersion, which is probably true, has robbed us of the motivation to read manuals, and taken with it endless hours of fun and more frustration than the final level boss on a new first-person shooter. Christmas days will never be the same without perplexed fathers turning purple with rage as they try to assemble intricate robots without the set of weird mini screwdrivers that wasn't included in the box.

It doesn't matter much anyway, not if you're a real man. Manuals should be for amusement only. Real men look at stuff and figure out how it works. And if it doesn't, reverse engineer the thing and re-engineer it until the stupid thing begins to work, or Mommy kills the fun by reading the manual and telling Daddy what he should actually be doing.

Fact. Real men don't read manuals. Fact. Reading manuals spoils the fun. Fact. The first surgery was performed without a manual. Fact. All you need to fix a car is a hammer, a couple of rusty spanners and a mobile to call for a tow-in, in the very unlikely event that something does go wrong.

I have a sense that if men, actually read manuals, the world would be a poorer place. I am sure hundreds of inventions found their auspicious births in sudden moments of inspiration that come from sticking Part A into Slot B instead of Groove C like page 17B of the appendix in Hungarian said to do.

The ethos of this thing may seem bizarre, demented and quite likely lethal if you are trying to do something spectacular with 'My Great Big Exploding Chemistry Set', but if you think about it, it has precedents. I believe that Lego makes its manuals, not so much that you can build the goodies they have in the manual, but so that you can try and do as well with your own doodat, if not better.

If you do a search on You Tube for 'Lego machine', you will see precisely what I mean. I particularly fancy the one which folds paper planes and launches them. It's entirely useless to my mind, because I have hands to do that for me, but it goes to show the sort of fun you can have when you finally get past the diagrams.

The world is full of people who do things by the book, meager souls who cannot see delight in the potential. Like Paul Kruger's rumoured denial of the existence of the giraffe because it wasn't in the Bible, they are blinded to wonders and the future, since none of it has been written down on paper.

One wonders sometimes how they incorporate Tuesdays into their existence, or any of the other days of the week. Those had to be invented by someone. They didn't spring into existence as a function of a fully fledged prehistoric year planner.

This has vast potential for learning of course. I don't advocate the sort of sorry revolution that chucks away things that are known. Instead obstinate people with narrow visions of how things should be, and armfuls of manuals and dogma, should be cunningly inserted into groups of people who are willing to change.

That one malevolent act should be enough to precipitate a million questions about purpose and effect. At worst the thinkers will migrate. At best they will rebel. And possibly, those manuals may be 'upcycled' and patented as new and interesting ways to light fires.