Dominating the Christmas period for me was, of course, the grandchildren’s story. It duly went ahead on 27th and parts of our house became a magical emporium run by a delightfully benevolent professor …

The Professor in his emporium

His apprentices got into some amusing scrapes learning the trade …

Measuring a customer in all dimensions

but eventually earned the opportunity to enter the sacred portals of the professor’s laboratory where they turned into serious scientists …

Young scientists observing the lab regulations

The lab came complete with bottled voices …

Bottled voices

and jars of virtues and abilities …

Choice of virtues and abilities

which they titrated into their own amazing prototypes …

Prototype created in the lab

Back in the emporium a shy but cuddly orangutan featured …

Ola the shy orangutan

and a raucous toucan …

Torquil the talkative toucan

A game of charades brought out imaginative traits …

A game of charades

Not even a spectral visitor could scare the professor out of his perpetual bonhomie …

Spectre of death visits the emporium

Innocent fun.

It’s all over far too soon but there’s no time to pine. First, the prospect of a run of regular visitors is driving me to restore an orderly establishment. Then the provisional script of Professor Devine’s Emporium must be converted into a limited edition book (5 copies), which by tradition has to be finished by 12 January (the first family birthday of the year). Would that all publishers were as efficient and committed, eh?

But as I mess about with the usual preparations, thoughts keep turning to the reason for the season. So my blog ought to reflect that.

I guess it all dates back to October. Then, visiting Marrakech, I felt as if I was walking through a film-set during a Biblical epic. I even wrote notes at the time to accompany photos, so strongly evocative were they of familiar scenes from the New Testament.

And recently, with Christmas very much in mind, I’ve been sharing reflections with friends about the sense I had that Moroccon cities, villages and landscapes, dress and customs, are so much closer to the kind of life Mary, Joseph and Jesus would have known, than anything we in the UK take as the norm today.

Well, it looks like someone else got the same feel. This week the BBC has been showing a four-part drama, The Nativity. And where has it been filmed? In Morocco! I’ve just finished watching the last in the series.

My interest was piqued originally by two articles in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday. The first was a rather touching piece by Olly Grant in the Review pages. As he says, the fact that the BBC is showing a Bible story on prime time feels ‘like something of a miracle,’ given the decline in religious programmes over the year, and all the talk of political correctness and discrimination, etc etc etc. And the second was an interview with the screenwriter, Tony Jordan, who didn’t believe the gospel story three years ago when he began working on the play, but now does.

Well, The Nativity wasn’t ever your average religious programme. And what’s more, the author set out quite deliberately to make a film that would ‘reach beyond the “God Channel” fringe’. So he framed the story in a way that would bypass the usual scepticism about angel visitations and virgin births, and instead unravel a young couple’s relationship in a meaningful way – a ‘marriage in meltdown’. As he says, we may know that Joseph and Mary were caught up in an incredible event, but they didn’t. How did these happenings affect them?

He has researched his subject thoroughly, and been remarkably faithful to the gospel accounts. Having said that, only two of the gospels mention the nativity at all, and those that do (Matthew and Luke) devote a mere 120 verses to the subject. So there’s not a lot of material to go on; lots of room for the imagination to manoeuvre then. But Jordan has created a narrative that challenges the viewer to look again at the impact of these events … on a young woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant at a time and in a place where adulteresses were stoned to death; on her devastated parents; on a man who feels betrayed by his promised wife; on his family; on a debt-ridden shepherd … I for one see no harm in a little speculative artistic licence if it provokes healthy challenge and helps us engage with the big questions, though others beg to differ.

Jordan’s aim was for those who have a faith, to have it reinforced; and for those who haven’t, to think: ‘Wow, I don’t know … maybe …’ I suspect that there are hundreds of clergy this week wanting exactly that. But they don’t all have Morocco as their backdrop, prime time TV as their conduit, or key figures being converted along the way.

For me personally, though, this approach has an extra allure. It’s trying to combine entertainment and authenticity with emotional and intellectual challenge. Much as I’m trying to do with medical ethics. Would that I had their publicity machine and audience ratings! Maybe a word in the ear of Tony Jordan …?

But in the meantime, Happy Christmas, everyone!

So, it’s Christmas Eve. I’ve been immersed in the editing of Remember Remember this week – a brain-splitting session with my courageous editor on Monday drove me back into it. But today it’s time to down tools and take a few days’ break.

I’ve been having a ball creating a Magical Forest. Each year I write a story for my grandchildren and they act it out; DJ takes photographs throughout, and in January we present them each with an illustrated book of the story.

This year preparation involves making magical trees – the chocolate tree is destined to become a favourite, I suspect. And there’s a stone which mysteriously lights up when the children (actually forest pixies – well, I come from Cornwall) touch it when they’re energised by magic from the chocolate tree. A sort of mini-Geiger-counter. The photos show the staircase in the process of being converted into a forest. If you thought you had problems with needles shed by one tree …!

Once 27th is over I’ll be back to rooting out inelegant juxtapositions of metaphors, scanning for homophones, and pruning adverbs, but for now a very Happy Christmas to you all, and thanks for visiting my blog.