Mother Teresa knew a thing or two.
And, in her own words, one of the things that she knew was ‘that the biggest disease today is not tuberculosis or leprosy, but the feeling of being unwanted.’
Early on in the pandemic, after the Prime Minister had exhorted us to get off our backsides and volunteer to help the NHS, I got off my backside and volunteered to help the NHS. I got a smart app that made an exciting siren noise when I tested it, and I volunteered to do slightly low risk and social things like driving people’s prescriptions to their houses. Many of my friends volunteered, too, and for a week or two, we all basked in the warmth of a nation pulling together in some grand endeavor.
Well, I don’t know about you, but they never asked for me to do anything. Not even so much as to take my own rubbish out. When I tried to contact them to say that, actually, I was serious about helping, there was just an eloquent silence. And every time I met a friend who had signed up, the answer was the same: they hadn’t been asked either.
Frustrated, I then signed up for the ex-military equivalent of this scheme, who immediately started texting me with opportunities. At first I cherry-picked roles that interested me, but it turned out that the prospect of having me knocking around didn’t interest them, either. So I started saying yes to just about anything, eventually including mortuary assistant in a faraway area that was getting hammered by the disease. ‘No, thanks,’ they said.
A couple of nights ago, I volunteered to help out in a vaccination centre in Eastbourne and, almost before I had sent it, a text came pinging back saying: ‘application declined’. It turned out that, even when I offered myself for free, and to cover my own expenses, I was too old, or stupid, or impractical, or grubby to have my ‘application’ to give them three days of my life accepted.
In Roger’s 2021 Britain, it seemed, it was easier to get a coherent policy statement on school closures out of Gavin Williamson, than to successfully volunteer to help out in the pandemic. I was starting to come to the conclusion that, when my possible future grandchildren asked me with bated breath what I did in the pandemic, the answer would have to be limited to ‘learned how to make a passable lamb biryani’.
Then suddenly, yesterday, the worm turned. Like the changing of a spring ebb tide, my potential use to society had started to filter back through the cracks, runnels and creeks of the community, and it felt breath-takingly good. My local surgery wanted me to come and help call priority groups in for their vaccines, something that I have just spent a happy afternoon doing.
Then, no sooner had I got home, when another text informed me that my offer to do vaccination marshalling in my town had been accepted; finally, the ex-military group said, in a sort of way, that they had been too hasty and, yes, I could be useful down in Eastbourne this weekend and beyond. I could even go to that mortuary if I wanted. Just at the point in the pandemic that I had decided that my best place was cowering in my cellar, I found that I had never been more in demand in the outside world.
Obviously I can’t do it all, so the local surgery gets me for as long as they like on the basis of first-come-first-served. I’ve never really seen myself as a commodity before but, like coffee without sugar, a man can get used to most things given time.
It all reminded me of a lesson on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that I sat through at a business school decades ago, in which I seem to remember that belongingness comes somewhere between love and self-esteem.
I’ve never seen myself as one of life’s great team players but, selfishly, there’s a time and place for everything.
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