Pineapple and Ginger Jam? Avoid.

I have a to-do list as long as my arm, growing more fingers by the second, but I dump the whole lot this morning.

I have to. If I do not, I must listen to BUT YOU PROOOOMMMIIIISSSEDD howled about my ears from one of the three banshees I keep chained to the radiators.

Pineapple and ginger jam.

I promised it, obviously. I assumed I would be safe, not delivering on this promise for a few years yet, because I refuse to buy full-price pineapples, and everyone knows that pocket meanness always overrides stupid promises made to children.

But then. I walk into the local Tesco and, between dodging the truancy patrol and trying to pretend my emergency shop in the biscuit department is really a fully-scaled up maths/business/marketing lesson, Tiger eye-spies three pineapples, unceremoniously stuffed, bottom up, in the reduced price veg bin. Horror of horrors - three chunks of reduced-price ginger root sit right next to them.

Fate came into my world. I dumped the emails about booking the theatre, planning the chemistry, organising the trip to the British Museum and generally sorting 2013, and I rolled up my sleeves to get stuck in creating the promised land of Pineapple and Ginger Jam.

In hindsight, I should have looked at them in the reduced price bins and left them there. I could have bluffed my way out with Forty pence for a pineapple? You must be joking. Come back when they're a penny, then I might consider it.

The problem is, with Pineapple and Ginger jam, after two teaspoons you're gagging for a shot of emergency insulin. It is so sweet it peels your throat off. And it never set properly like jam should. It stayed as a liquid, running out the pan as a gloop of disgusting yellow gunk, packed with great wodges of pineapple and ginger knobs as thick as your thumb-end.They fell all over the working surface while I was trying to coerce them into the Kilner jar. I shouldn't have bothered with that, either. The escaped banshees were licking up the semi-hewn pineapple wheels faster than I could find the camera to photograph the end result.

So now I have a sugar bath all over the kitchen and another addition on my to-do list: Make an appointment with the dentist to have new false teeth fitted, because for certain those old ones were just digested by a sea swell of syrup with sugared pineapple wheel.