Christmas is a time of guilt. So here I am, putting up the Christmas decorations, cleaning my stinky sock of a flat, and having yet another extended Residents' Association debate over the Jif about whether or not it's acceptable to employ a cleaner just because you are a junior doctor, when suddenly I realise the moment has arrived. Today, I must finally confront the 3ft pile of unopened copies of the British Medical Journal, which has been mocking me from the corner of the sitting room, since the day I moved in a year ago.

Why did I even bring them with me? I know I'm never going to read them. Normally I try not to do myself out of a column by dealing with issues that only doctors will understand, but it comes free to every doctor in the country, and I think secretly, all of you, girls and boys, if you'd just open you hearts and confront your demons: you know you'll never even open them. It's not that we don't want to read about "prevalence of gastroschisis at birth: a retrospective cohort study". But I'm sure there is an impoverished library somewhere which could put them to much better use.

Anyway, I'm not a bad person. Sometimes I read the useful bits online to calm down after I realise that my ex really isn't going to email me, and is probably having sex with some muscular international pop star.

So my Christmas present to the world today is to take each and every one of them out of their plastic wrappers - it's going to take hours - and find a good way of recycling them.

Our hospital, on the other hand, has received a wonderful Christmas gift from Sri Lanka this week: 35 new nurses for the surgical wards. I think, in a lot of ways, even from a non-Christian country, this exemplifies the spirit of Christmas. Those who can ill afford to give, coming together to give us something we don't really need.

I've worked for years in hospitals full of nurses that we have plundered from the third world, and they are great. I mean, they are really great nurses - because most nurses are - and they work hard for really low wages, the kind of wages that British people rightly turn their noses up at, and so in that sense we kind of do need them.

And a darker part of me even thinks that maybe it was good for the fair few racist little old ladies and gentlemen that I've dealt with on general medical wards to have to confront their latent fascist views, in their twilight minutes, as they edged their way towards their final judgment day, on the off chance that God turns out to be a Guardian reader.

But nurses are a natural resource. They are dug like gems from the dry earth and nurtured rather expensively by state-funded training programmes. In the countries we plunder our nurses from they don't have a lot of money to squander. And so it really is very Christmas-spirited of these struggling nations to hand over their nurses willingly, after a little prompting from the two ward managers who nobly went out for two weeks in the summer recruiting them.

I digress. You see, I never would have noticed if I hadn't gone out Christmas drinking with the surgeons last night after their exams, and heard them grumbling, as they all start to apply for registrar jobs, about how all their prized positions are being taken by doctors from Asia who will all go back to their own countries in five years' time after being fully trained up here, and about crap referrals from locum GPs who have only just arrived in the country and can't speak English very well, who are all working in inner-city practices where no doctor in their right mind would volunteer to work.

Now I wouldn't want you to think that surgeons are all about racism and tit jokes, and to be fair most of the evening was spent talking about NHS trusts being sued by the partners of people who had metal staple repairs to their haemorrhoids and didn't think the issue through before they had anal sex. (Apparently it's like grinding your penis on to a cheese grater.)

But as my gift to the world (holds hand nobly to chest) I'm going to find a way to send my embarrassing, unread journals to doctors in the developing world. Maybe. And in the meantime, maybe you could all sort out a government that treats doctors and nurses a bit more civilly, so that we wouldn't need to go around stealing them from people who need them far more than we do at Christmas.