Me, myself and I

‘It’s not all about you, you know.’ Where did this nonsensical phrase come from and how did it enter into common parlance?

I had a boyfriend who used to say it regularly, with particular vigour during times of crisis. I would arrive back from a trip to the Middle East bursting to tell him about how I’d passed out on a Hercules jet in 120 degree heat and been revived by the head of the British army and he would huff and puff and say, ‘It’s not all about you, you know.’

I had a similar run-in with a girlfriend recently. She rang up to ask whether I would like to go to the cinema and I said I was terribly sorry but I had just driven 200 miles to and from the hospital where my horse was being treated for a serious injury and I was about to put myself to bed. She exhaled sharply, slammed the phone down and sent me an exasperated text message minutes later saying, ‘It’s not all about you, you know.’

If she had taken her argument to its logical conclusion, she would have had to say, ‘It’s not all about you and your injured horse, you know. It’s also about my desire to see a rom-com starring Ashton Kutcher.’

But of course people never do take the phrase to its logical conclusion. They just say, ‘It’s not all about you,’ as if that were a complete, impeccable thesis on its own.

And what is ‘it’ when ‘it’ is at home? I think if we could get to the bottom of what precisely is not all about me, we would be getting somewhere, but they never go into that. This is because ‘it’s not all about you’ is an especially half-baked attempt to disguise plain rudeness as cutting-edge psycho- analysis.

Instead of saying ‘I don’t care’, which would be an honest sort of selfishness, people sock it to you in therapy speak nowadays, which means they’ve got you over a barrel: you cannot tell someone who is banging on about the needs of their inner child that they are, in fact, just being a plonker.

The other evening, for example, I met the most horrible woman in London at a party. But no one told her she was horrible because she kept going on about her quest for spiritual fulfilment.

She was lying flat out on a sunbed on a friend’s roof terrace in one of those long, billowing kaftan dresses that look like they were designed for the secret offspring of Demis Roussos and Margot Leadbetter.

The rest of the party was managing very well to stand on their feet and mingle. But Miss Maxidress was reclining in the middle of us, holding court as she swayed, a glass of mineral water in her hand, and occasionally barked orders at somebody to fill it up.

In between telling people off for smoking — ‘Please! Don’t do it!’ — and lecturing us on how to lead a good, well balanced life — ‘Be like me, take joy in the company of others!’ — she kept remarking on how ugly she thought the neighbours in the garden next door were — ‘Ugh! Look at those two big fat lumps!’

All of a sudden she exclaimed, ‘Oh! You are never going to guess what happened to me the other day!’

And the entire party turned its gaze to her as she told her story. ‘I was standing at my kitchen window and I saw a gang of hoodies on the street fighting. Suddenly they ran away and I could see that there was a young boy lying on the ground, dead.’

The roof terrace fell silent. You could have heard a kaftan pin drop.

‘Yes,’ she said, with a look of huge satisfaction on her face. ‘He had been stabbed. This gang of hoodies had killed him. Someone came and covered him in a blanket. The police arrived but there was nothing they could do.’

We stood in silence, shaking our heads. Then she proclaimed, ‘Can you imagine how I felt? I mean, I felt…violated!’

One of the party-goers asked, ‘Did you give the police a statement?’ But it was as if she didn’t hear. ‘Violated!’ she went on. ‘I don’t know how I will ever heal. I mean, there I was in my own home, witnessing this horrendous violence. I’ve been invaded. Invaded!’

The more we asked about the status of the police inquiry the angrier she became. ‘Can’t you see how terrible this is for me?’ she kept shouting. ‘I’m going to need a lot of therapy.’ We pointed out that the boy’s parents might be needing some help, too. But she just looked at us as if to say, ‘It’s not all about them, you know.’

Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.