I do not generally break patient confidentiality but I felt it only right to let you in on a little-known secret I’ve been keeping for the last two decades. I am the physician to Santa Claus. Hard to believe I know, but you can forget being GP to the House of Windsor – this is the gig to have.

Be that as it may, let me tell you something for free – he’s one of the most frustrating patients I ever have to treat. How I keep him going from year to year is something of a miracle on health grounds alone, never mind his amazing ability to evade a policeman with a breathalyser.

You see, it’s not so much his health problems that bother me (they are much the same as a great many other people in less unusual occupations) but his attitude. I never see him from one month to the next and then every December, bingo. ‘Patch me up Doc, I need to be fit for the 24th’. He’s even been known to drop in at the very end of an evening surgery when no one else is around and demand to be seen, leaving his reindeer double-parked outside. Typical bloke really.

So where do I start to try and improve his health? The most obvious point is his weight. Tipping the scales at over 23 stone at a height of just over 6 feet he is seriously obese and so is much more prone to the health problems associated with this as well as a higher chance of an early death. These include high blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, various cancers and heart attacks and by his own admission it is down to his lifestyle. He may swear he eats very little most of the time but I know for a fact that by the end of Christmas Eve he has consumed approximately 1 million calories, mostly in the form of mince pies and alcohol. No wonder he finds it hard to lose weight. (He keeps telling me he eats like a bird and I agree with him, telling him that it’s a humming bird, which needs to eat every 10 minutes and eats double its own weight every day.) This pattern of binge eating high-calorie foodstuffs also makes him prone to diabetes, one of the key symptoms of which is a need to pass water frequently. Imagine unzipping your fly at a thousand feet in sub-zero temperatures and you can see why he works so fast.

His ruddy complexion is often passed off as being due to the conditions in Lapland but I can disclose here that I know better – it’s his high blood pressure and I know he forgets to take his tablets. Whenever I quiz him on this he averts his eyes and mutters darkly about pressure of work and union problems with the elves.

We all may feel we are doing him a kindness by putting out a glass of something warming and medicinal with his mince pie and the carrot for Rudolph, but it is only the fact that he is so hungover in the following 364 days that prevents him drinking again and so collapsing his liver. Fortunately this amazing part of our anatomy can cope with the occasional seasonal excess, but for the rest of the year one to two glasses a day is the sensible amount.

So, if you wake up on Christmas morning to find the presents delivered at the foot of the bed, raise a glass not only to Santa but also to me for keeping him in one piece until next year. I never ask him for payment but somehow he always seems to remember my children, which is nice. I also always leave him a wee dram, something for the reindeer and – most important of all – his prescription.

A very peaceful, happy and healthy Christmas to you all!