Apparently, my first few blissful Christmases were spent with a new Fisher Price toy in my hands. In a remarkable reverse, my latest Christmases have been spent in the hands of the Fischer family, who have taken to inviting me to stay and join the festivities in their handsome Cotswold family pile in the village of Upper Quartile.  

What? You don’t know who the Fischers are? Of course you do. Everyone knows them. They’re the charming if perhaps slightly eccentric family who set, analyse and report on our exam targets. 

That familial devotion to school data may sound odd at first, but in reality they turn out to be just like any other family. Mum, dad, and their children Excel, Target and Progress are an absolute pleasure to spend time with, as are various relatives seemingly in permanent residence there. (The family Christmas card is a sight to behold, as you can imagine.)

I can’t wait to go. Christmas at the Fischers last year was just one long, hazy-crazy party, with each day of analysis seamlessly rolling into the next without anyone even noticing. There were none of the seasonal family fallouts that you so often find elsewhere. All right, there was a small bust-up and a little blood spilled in a Christmas Eve disagreement over conditional formatting - but nothing serious.  

You know you are in for a memorable stay as soon as the huge, stone-faced “Yellis” (their slave-turned-butler, captured from a famous enemy data family) gradually edges open the creaking front portal. As he ushers you in you notice three imperious dark birds gliding repeatedly from one beam to another in the vast hallway. 

Then your eyes fall on the wood-panelled walls, listing the names of each of the 13,600 plus schools who use their services. Every entry is lovingly and immaculately engraved by Grandad Fischer in “Comic Sans” font. 

It’s a work of beauty, though that’s where any sense of order in the house ends. As you might expect in the home of a brilliant family of data eccentrics, the rest of the house is in utter chaos. Every cobwebbed room contains a ramshackle collection of variously aged chairs, desks, lights, RM computers, keyboards and sofas. Stacks of curling paper have often tumbled from a table and are strewn across a faded carpet. 

The family rarely stops working. But when they are in celebratory mode, it’s all very different. I am not at liberty to say much more than that. “What happens at a Fischer Christmas stays at a Fischer Christmas” warned Target (aged 12) as we said our farewells last year. Target may have been smiling, but there was steel in that voice - and you would never ever want to cross a Fischer. There is a darker side. 

One servant let slip to me that Grandpa uses one of the rooms - always locked and off-limits to guests - to hatefully carve the names of all the schools that haven’t yet subscribed. For these places he employs a dripping, “Scarlet Gothic” font and the room is full of images of the various heads concerned. He probably doesn’t mean anything by this, though it was a bit odd last year how an invited headteacher from one such school seemed to mysteriously vanish on Christmas Eve. Was the turkey a bit odd the next day, or was I just imagining it?  

Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire