Or maybe it was the random person who confided sotto voce they thought just being in the same air as me got in the way of their goal to be a better person. For a second, I thought this was a bawdy compliment, and was about to put on more lipstick, but no. Obviously now I'm aware there is Ebola-like vitriol oozing out of my pores, I'm obliged by the UN to do something.
No more Eartha Kitt. "I wanna be wicked, I wanna tell lies, I wanna be mean and throw mud pies." I have an inkling how I got it so wrong. I liked being a bad smurf.
I could have been Alice Roosevelt Longworth: "If you can't say something good about someone, sit right here by me."
But this has got to change. I have started valuing niceness as a notion. Or rather, I have become aware of how dangerous it is to be grandiose. In the past I've subscribed to an admittedly rather intellectually sloppy notion that if you just sort of stumble about doing random socially-beneficial things like getting your car registered, defleaing your dog, flossing, buying overpriced bad art at charity auctions and, you know, not killing anyone, you are doing all right in the virtue department.
I was misled. I also had a fondness for that convenient gimmick of enlightened self-interest that has funded an entire scented candle industry. You know, "put your own oxygen mask on first" - you need to make yourself happy before you can make others happy. (Pampering is not my thing. It took me years to get the courage to ask my hairdresser not to give me a head massage - they make me feel like I'm cheating.)
There is another problem. Edwin the Boy Scout-type do-gooders are subject to the law of unintended consequences - P.G. Wodehouse fans might remember Edwin was hell-bent on doing a good deed each day, but only succeeded in burning down Wee Nooke.
Evolutionary psychologists point out trying to "help" people can backfire. And boasting about being good - grandiosity - seems rather to miss the point.
There is a giant portrait of Sir Owen Glenn at the Sir Owen Glenn business school, although there were other big donors to the school. (Some others apparently didn't want their pictures put up.) Anyway. I've taken the first step. I've decided to become a better person, but now I need to work out how to go about it.
Don't put acrylamide on door handles, don't sleep with other women's husbands, that kind of thing. In the first instance, I am going to work on being less grandiose. "Behind manifest grandiosity there constantly lurks depression,' writes Alice Miller. "The person who is grandiose is admired everywhere and needs this admiration; indeed he cannot live without it.
"He too admires himself, for his qualities - his beauty, cleverness, talents - and for his success and achievements.
"Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of severe depression is imminent."
In the interim I will just quarantine myself, lest I infect anyone else.
