In cartoons, when a character gets his finger stuck in an electric socket he  turns into a leaping blue skeleton all frazzled and smoking round the edges. It happens quite regularly in Tom and Jerry,  almost always to Tom.

I might not look like a leaping, frazzled, blue skeleton, but that is how I feel. I am Tom.

Something mysterious has happened to the size of my day. Sort of like my favourite Guess jeans,  the day has shrunk and left me unable to squeeze as much in as I used to.  No matter how hard I try, I just can’t pull the day up beyond mid-thigh.

It might look like I have it easy. I just fall out of bed, sleepwalk through breakfast, then bumble to the computer in my jim-jams and there I am, installed at my workplace for the day. No commuting stress to worry about, mad morning clothing  crises, or grumpy boss breathing down my neck…

Well, it might be like that, if it was not for the dogs (up at 6 to walk them) and then the kids to get ready and take to school, (an entertaining adventure which includes the six hundred yard dash to make it to the second school gate after depositing child number one at the first one).  Okay, but surely when I get back from the school run, I just  sit down in front of the computer and that’s me set for the day? Ahhh, no.

The minute the key turns in the door I am attacked by 85 kilos of canine. Tito yodels and slobbers  in delight usually anointing me from head to toe in strings of doggy spit while Skye weaves round my legs  doing the Boxer kidney-bean thing. I push my way through them and survey the battlefield that is my house every morning (and most afternoons and nighttimes too).

I switch the computer on to boot up while  I throw the dishes in the sink and drown them in scalding water and switch the kettle on. Finally, cup of tea in hand, I sit down in front of the computer and KABAM! another bloody power cut! YAAARGH.

Poor Tenerife Tattle is one of the things that is suffering at the moment. Being my own baby, there’s no one to complain if I skip a post now and then except my regular readers (and I have apologised personally to each and every one of them). Unfortunately my real babies are also getting less attention than usual, a fact that came home to me the other day, when my daughter came home with a special project for her tarea. She had to draw her national flag but didn’t know which country she came from.

It is not a clear cut question actually as she has a salad bowl of cultures to choose from in her heritage – although she knows that I am Scottish.  Wanting to do something different, she opted for the Union Jack instead of the St. Andrew’s Cross for obvious reasons. Even so, the conversation we had about it led me to fret that I was not doing enough to pass on any Scottish culture to her.

Seeing as it has been quite some time since I Stripped the Willow and my Scottish dancing skills were never that hot to begin with I decided to take the easy road and start her Scottish culture classes with a spot of home cooking.

God in Govan, what a nightmare! My daughter watched me tip a kilo of sugar and a healthy knob of butter into a pan and asked me if I was quite sure that I had read the  recipe. I told her all was well, and that this recipe for Scottish fudge was said to be failsafe.  (With a name like Scottish Fudge Fer Dunderheids it had to be).

We both watched and waited for the suger to turn to syrup and I regaled her with happy memories of toffee and tablet making in my younger years.  All was warm and fuzzy and I felt like we were having a real girly moment till she yawned and said she’s better go and do her homework. “Fudge!” I muttered to myself darkly, stirring what was becoming a very dark and sticky mess.

At the point where the condensed milk is supposed to glide into the pot, the whole damn thing exploded in a Vesuvial eruption of burning sugar. My husband let out a manly scream and leapt to the fore with a metal whisk. After he beat it into submission (and to the point when all hope of fudge had flown out the window) I took over the pot again. My daughter had returned and sat cross legged watching all the excitement. “Is it supposed to smell like that?” she enquired sweetly, wrinkling her nose.

In the end, my Dunderheid Fudge turned out to be Toothcracking Toffee. In order to make anything at all out of the sticky mess, I had rolled lumps of it into little balls and stuck them out of sight in the fridge. Now there they sit, looking like black bullets and welded so hard to the plate that you have to chip them off with a knife.

I think it is safe to say that so far, my daughter is not very impressed with the riches of the Scottish culinary tradition.

I received a message of sympathy from wee Margaret, a Scottish fudge-maker of consummate skill who urged me to give it another go.  Margaret is right of course, and my daughter and I have a date carved in stone to spend more time messing up the kitchen together. In the end, it doesn’t matter if we ever manage the perfect Scottish fudge. By not giving up we are putting a different Scottish lesson into practise – Robert the Bruce’s exhortation to ‘Try, try and try again’.