What do a Morlock and a Sprout have in common?

That all depends on whether you believe the 1960’s film version of The Time Machine or not.

I digress, and I haven’t even begun.

The eldest of my nieces, the princesses, has a birthday just a couple of days after Christmas. It is not the easiest of times to have a birthday: one is already swamped with presents and parties and good food, and what is a little more during this festive season?

Her relatives are generally meticulous about ensuring that horror of horrors, the joint-Christmas-and-birthday-present, is simply not a phenomenon in her sphere. No, there is a separate package specifically for her special day.

This year, as for the last two, Maddie, Felix, Phil and I have been away for her birthday, and my kind sister has laid on an extra do when we return.

With a joint total of five children, including my rumbustious nephew Big Al, we have never been short of party guests. If anyone is having a celebration, from Halloween to First Holy Communion, rent-a-mob is there to spice up the occasion. Everyone gets on their glad rags and gathers round a party table which must have various varieties of silly crisps and lots if sinful cakey creations baked by my sister.

If there is a cake with candles to blow out, all the better: there is not more ceremony in the Queen’s opening of Parliament than in the blowing out, re-lighting, and blowing out again, of the candles on the birthday cakes of our small charges.

However the cake had been long since put through its paces by the time we arrived: not as late as the wise men, but not far off. Instead, my sister had supplied a different, and perhaps even more festive, experience.

She has had a friend since forever, a lovely jovial smiling clever companion. They meet every now and then, but it is always as if they have never been apart. Their rare friendship has been a feature of all of our lives for as long as I can remember.

Her Christmas present to my sister’s family this year was utterly inspired.

It was a box of Christmas crackers. But no miniature pack of cards, no nail clippers inside these. Not for them, the small ineffectual magnifying glass or the miniature set of screwdrivers which so perfectly fit my flute.

No: this set of crackers each contained a clockwork sprout.

I kid you not.

Inside was a perfect sprout with a face and, indeed, a party hat. And two feet, and a clockwork key to wind it up.

When one wound up the key, the sprout would caper across the table, and everyone would laugh uproariously, and Big Al would become even more rumbustious than usual.

The set included a start line and a finish line. Felix was put in charge of this, and took great pleasure in working with my sister and her tape measure to lay out a course of the correct dimensions, some 50cm I recall.

Meanwhile the sprouts were bringing out the true human in each of us.

The littlest princess was trying to gather as many sprouts to herself as possible, eyeing up the extra cracker and lining up Felix to help her pull it the moment she had secured permission from an adult.

The eldest princess is a generous soul, and ever-solicitous of her brother, she waited until he had totalled his sprout and then gave him hers.

Felix, self-appointed manager, was attempting to organise all the sprouts. Maddie was allowing herself to be organised.

And Big Al, with a beatific smile, wound his sprout, the one with the yellow party hat,  the wrong way and then dolefully declared it broken, which it was.

And my engineer father sat with all the sprouts which got broken, running a veritable sprout-hopital, ingeniously mending and returning sprouts to their owner.

The most grievously wounded sprout was in at least three pieces. I had already tried pushing it unceremoniously back together with little success. Painstakingly, my father solved successive micro problems until a recreated sprout stood before us once more.

We wound it up, and it moved triumphantly, if backwards. “It’s moonwalking! Thank you Grandpa!” Felix exclaimed with joy unconfined.

Returning home, one of Felix’s favourites was on the telly: The Time Machine. Not the version made a handful of years ago, but that classic 1960’s retelling.

Felix loves The Time Machine story. He goes to sleep listening to HG Wells, and knows it better than I do. But we have held back on watching the film for one simple reason: Morlocks.

Felix and his cousins have a truly gothic leader in Maddie. She adores the grotesque, the theatrically unsettling. And Morlocks, the underworld human mutations which farm the people of the overworld in Wells’s novel, play right into her hands.

They have never seen a representation of a Morlock. We have Wells’s description: a white apeish creature. Maddie has hinged every bogey-man legend she can onto the Morlock, and we have had to ban talk of it when the Princesses are present.

The early Time Machine possesses the artless effects of the 1950s, and we figured: if anything will diffuse the myth my daughter has built, perhaps this will.

We watched carefully with a hand on the on-off button so Morlocks could, if necessary, be dispelled with the flick of a switch.

The 1960s Morlocks are green with long white hair. They are monsters all right: but not in the graphic style of today’s special effects. The children awaited them with delighted trepidation, Maddie with a copy of the Radio Times to put over her face if things got too much.

Enter, the Morlocks. Felix said: They’re not scary at all! Maddie concurred. We continued to view.

Right up to the moment the hero is accelerating back in time to escape the creatures as they come towards the time machine. I’d forgotten that bit. Talk about A Z and Two Noughts. The decomposition of a Morlock is not a pretty thing, and we employed the switch with all speed.

So: what do a sprout and a Morlock have in common?

It wouldn’t make a good cracker joke. They are both green, if you believe the film: and mobile, providing the sprout’s mechanism works properly. You wouldn’t catch a Morlock moonwalking.

And they both engender the same expression on the faces of my children.