A friend said to me the other day ‘I just want things to go back to normal.’ We were talking on the phone, and I could hear in her voice her frustration and sadness about what’s going on in the world. She was yearning for the days where you could hop on a crowded bus without fear, go shopping without standing behind lines of tape on the shop floor, and you could look at a crowd in a football stadium on TV and not feel like you were going to have a nervous breakdown.

Here’s the problem, you can never ‘go back’ in your life, and there is no normal now on the planet. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my thoughts on that one but it got me thinking about how people do seem to say ‘I just want my old life back.’ They usually say this (I’ve said it myself) when something bad has happened and their life has been flung up in the air. We are all in that boat at the moment, and as the weeks drag on into months, I see people getting more and more depressed as they realise they won’t be going to France this year, that there won’t be a sudden cure for all of this, and even worse, there are no new episodes of The Bold and The Beautiful to watch.

You can’t go back ever because even if you did, you aren’t the person you were once you’ve suffered a trauma, therefore your life can never be the same as it was. (But you can enjoy the best of The Bold and The Beautiful that plays on TV early evening, while sipping a gin and tonic. Who knew Brooke and Ridge had been married to so many different people, and so many times to each other!! They must be exhausted.)

It’s hard to sometimes believe we will come out of all of this one day, but we will. Like Ridge and Brooke reuniting yet again, and divorcing yet again, life goes up and down and round and round. And when it is all over, we will look back and be damn glad that you can only go forward. All great stories have big dramas, where you think the characters will never be able to be happy again, but in my experience, things usually work out for the best in the end.

So, on that note, I’m going to go and make myself a gin and tonic, and settle in for my nightly dose of drama. No, I’m not talking about the TV news. I’ll be watching The Bold and The Beautiful best of series. I wonder who will get married/divorced/killed/bought back from the dead tonight?

Wake me up when it’s all over…