Take me back to a cold Christmas term at Hogweed's school of Medicine and Surgery.

I would scurry across the courtyard to Professor Mill's pharmacology class armed only with my finest Phoenix feather stethoscope, and an enthusiasm to end all enthusiasms.

But today, as the scar inflicted on me by the medical school bully still aches on a bad day, those times seem long ago.

Things were different then, of course. Doctors were a happy breed, and me? Well, I hadn't a care in the world - and at Christmas time I couldn't think of a better place to be than in a hospital.

There were impromptu carol concerts on the ward, and those hospital Christmas shows, where consultants, relieved of their starchiness, became almost human.

Impersonations

Doctors like me got up to all sorts of 'Carry on' japes at Christmas.

Is it a Spanish nurse?

One of our specialities was impersonating Spanish nurses who didn't know the right way to hold a bed pan.

I soon realised, of course, that no one really wants to be in hospital over Christmas - least of all the patients.

And it was amazing how the impending festive season seemed to impart strange healing powers to the once sick and injured.

Long-term patients who normally couldn't even fall over in a straight line became suddenly adept at navigating their Zimmer frames like geriatric Michael Schumachers, in order to bamboozle their social workers into letting them home.

No malingerers

Patients who, according to the text books, should have taken days to recuperate from their operations mysteriously got their discharge papers on Christmas Eve.

Inevitably, with nothing much going on you start to think up silly things to do

And, miracle of miracles, no slightly twisted ankles or annoying tickly coughs that might turn into pneumonia (in their dreams) ever turned up in casualty.

So, apart from a few really unlucky patients, a hospital at Christmas is like a ghost town.

And with a near deserted hospital this left me with the temptations of sister's sherry after the morning ward rounds - and the three hours of undisturbed bliss sleeping it off in the on call room.

Then, inevitably, with nothing much going on you start to think up silly things to do.

Other departments like X-ray, can equally be at a loose end, so the bored radiographers were happy to oblige when we put in an unusual request.

Thankfully, the ultrasound confirmed that our Christmas pudding was free from tumours.

Surgery

It's not all go at Christmas

For one group of patients, however, there was no escape at Christmas - heavy pregnant women.

And the potential difficulties of a complicated obstetric delivery were certainly enough to focus the minds of us doctors too.

It is quite difficult to motivate yourself after a lazy day and a portion of Christmas pudding that has the atomic density of Plutonium.

But duty called, so we all trooped in to the obstetric theatre for the emergency caesarean section.

As skin turned to fat, then to womb, and then to that horrible trickling of amniotic fluid and blood down my leg (as the consultant always tipped the table in the direction of his assistant) I was suddenly transported back to the very first Christmas.

Just the one tiny difference - it was twins.