Modern dads, I have that sinking feeling again. The feeling I should be perched up a step ladder, shooting Nazis with a Tommy gun. Instead I’m making stuff with my kids.

Now I’ve fought my way through the wreckage of many a half-term I’ve turned making into an art form. I learnt the hard way. Believe me, you haven’t suffered until you’ve built a scale model of Stevenson’s Rocket using nothing but yellow paint and loo rolls – only to see it smashed in seconds by a bored toddler.

Now we can make castles out of old cereal packets. We can make forgeries of Henri Matisse Paper Cut outs. And we can cook stuff. At least I thought so, until last Thursday.

My six-year-old daughter bounds into the room, full of Christmas cheer. She demands to know how many days it is until Pancake Day. Like a court jester whose jokes are no longer funny I come up with the following one-liner – why don’t we make pancakes now?

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My daughter and I google Delia Smith, pancakes and “for idiots” as my four-year-old son destroys nearby furniture. The recipe is written on the back of the school newsletter – the only piece of paper in the house that isn’t covered with drawings of princesses. To my horror all of the ingredients are in the cupboard. There’s even a lemon in the fruit bowl, which never happens. There’s no turning back.

Two wooden spoons are produced from a drawer. They are of equal weight and size – a military tactic I employ to minimalise casualties in the field. A fight breaks out anyway, over the complex task of sifting flour into a bowl. The bowl rocks perilously at the edge of the table, threatening to spill its contents onto what archaeologists claim was once a carpet.

Frying ensues. My children are placed on a makeshift viewing platform, where they can survey the battlefield. I get the oil to a high heat and pour the mixture in.

I explain to them the delicate art of pancake making.

Any moment now daddy is going to flip the pancake over in the air, and catch it in the pan. But by this point the pancake is well and truly stuck. I try prising it off with a spatula to no avail. I blame the pan.

A second pan heats up only to result in the same problem. I blame Delia Smith. There’s no chance this pancake is going to be flipped anywhere. I may as well be trying to fry it in glue.

Bored and disappointed they leave the viewing platform.

I stand pathetic, broken and surrounded by washing up. I can blame the pan. I can blame Delia Smith. I’d like to blame Jamie Oliver too, just because I’m feeling bitter. Because the only person to blame is me. Children, I have failed you with these pancakes.

And of course were mummy here, she’d probably have made you crêpes.