Helmintholog

Presumably this story is all over the better tabloids but I only have the Times, which is not a good tabloid.

Once upon a time (1944) there was a girl No Better Than She Ought To Be, who had an illegitimate baby because she went Too Far with an American soldier. She gave the boy up to adoption, and disappeared. He grew up to be a policeman named James Callandar, married, prospered, and retired. Once all that part of his life was over, the law in Britain changed to make it possible for him to find his real mother, and he started a world-wide search.

He found her in New Zealand, where she had had two further daughters, now 56 and 53. Overjoyed, he invited his new family back to Bolton to celebrate Christmas with him and his wife. After some persuasion, they agreed, flew, and were photographed by the local paper. Then they got stuck into the booze. According to Janis Callandar, a former landlady,

“They were party animals. At one stage they drank solidly for 14 hours and treated our home like a hotel.

“Ours is a non-smoking house yet they were smoking about 60 roll-up cigarettes each day.

“One morning they polished off three bottles of champagne between them and then got stuck into Baileys, red and white wine, vodka, port, brandy and lager.”

It’s not just the fact that this was meant to happen all of a morning: I am also awestruck by the amplitude of the Callandar drinks cabinet. In any case, by the time the turkey was served, things were strained: the New Zealand family were also strewing the butts of their rollups all over the floor, and when the elder Mrs Callendar started feeding her son’s dog with turkey scraps on the carpet there was a violent eruption, which ended with the departure of the New Zealand contingent (last heard of at a hotel in Scotland somewhere) and Mr Callandar giving a fresh interview to the Sun: “I wish I hadn’t bothered to trace them. I thought it was going to be perfect having them here but they made our lives a living hell. My mum was OK but my sisters were a nightmare.” I suppose this is how we know they really were related.

When I was a young man, I used to think my problems were due to interesting and personalised character flaws, which other people would envy if they thought they could have them. Nowadays I realise that they are largely the result of conwardice and idleness. This ought to be an encouraging reflection, since these are in theory vices that I can do something to correct. Why is it then so hard?

I did publish a damn good book last year, in both England and America. The American edition is rather better published, and has pictures. Improve your new years, and mine: buy it.

I was in the middle of an anecdote about two Nobel Prize winner when the telephone rang. It was a third, Sydney Brenner. I answered, as I always answer the phone “Brown”. This is apparently a syllable that people find hard to parse, for the unmistakeable South African voice at the end of the line said “This is Sydney.”
“Oh. What an unexpected pleasure!”
“Now that the high-water mark of Christmas is over, I just wanted to thank you for the bottle of whisky you sent me for Christmas.”

“But I didn’t”, I said. I hadn’t actually spoken to him since the grand worm festival in September, when he told me that there were 24 errors of fact in the worm book, but declined to name any of them.

He asked how my Christmas had been, grumbled about his health, and said how nice it had been of me to visit. At this point, I asked whether he was really trying to talk to Andrew Brown, and he said no. He must have misdialled. There was a sticky pause, and he hung up without much ceremony.

After that, I was so affected that I got a nosebleed.

The greatest pleasures of the Daily Telegraph are A.N. Wilson’s column on Mondays, and the obituaries. The novelist’s imagination never approaches some of the stories in the obits; This one, about a rich and spoiled convent girl, who lost her virtue to an Italian hotel keeper named Hannibal at the age of 17, but found her metier fighting alongside dashing lovers in the French Foreign Legion, is one of the most astonishing,