Selfish Shellfish

 It would be selfish of me to write a daily blog and not comment on the pro-Trump rioters that have stormed congress and been shot.  I'd fallen asleep on the sofa, exhausted from having to think too much and when I woke up the TV was showing Les Mis, or so I thought. I'm not very interested in it though, so that's all you get.  However, if you do fancy it, the costumes are amazing: bare chested men with two dead racoons on their heads.

I do want to talk about types of selfish, though.

There is a lot of chat on social media about selfish people again.  The curtain twitching neighbourhood police are beginning to get fired up.  Twitter is full of vitriol for people who aren't following the rules and they rules are made more stringent than they actually are with each tweet.  

Let's skip over the fact that Trump is actually so selfish that Twitter have suspended his account.  (Oh we really are living in interesting times) and talk about the kind of selfish that people in the UK are talking about.  The selfish that affects how we get out of this pandemic.

I have always had a problem with blaming individual behaviour for the progress of a new virus.  Something like this requires good leadership and clear messaging.  We haven't had those.  We were also given a lesson in selfishness by a government advisor in the first lockdown.

There are two types of selfish.  

The first is where you are on the Titanic, the boat is sinking and you push all the women and children out of the way to get on the lifeboat first.  This is probably like organising a rave,  going on an anti-covid demonstration, posting false information about chips in vaccines online,  never washing your hands and licking them before you touch door handles, spitting in the face of the woman in Marks and Spencers because she won't let you in to buy lobster without a mask, keep going to work when you've got a cough and are feeling a bit off or appointing your useless best friend's  incompetent wife to run a country's test and trace system.

The second type of selfish is where you are in a plane crash and you put your oxygen mask on before helping anyone else.  This is where you take the dog out twice a day because no one can work in a dog fart filled room.  It's where you don't use hand sanitiser because it makes your eczema flare up.  It's where you see someone because you think you can't go on.  It's where you go to your mum's house because your boyfriend has threatened you with a frying pan.  It's where you go out for a walk of longer than an hour because your brain is so fried you have started to try to call people with the calculator app on your phone (this was me yesterday).

Sometimes you have to be a little selfish so that you are still able to help others.  We all have to be in a place, when we come out of this, where we can still function and self care is never selfish.

So many people on social media mis-spell selfish as shellfish, which always makes me laugh.  It reminds me of one of my favourite jokes.