WINTER is coming. Dark nights, new restrictions, life shrinking under the chill pall of the virus. There was a time there in the summer when it felt like we might be getting on top of it. The number of cases – and, more importantly, deaths – dropped. We were free to meet friends and family again (within reason).

Not now. Life has closed down again to a large degree. I’m now regretting not going to visit family in Northern Ireland in July or August out of caution. I’m also wondering when I’ll next get the chance.

What to do now but hunker down again and impotently yearn for a return to normality?

But then what is normal exactly? I’ve been thinking about that of late. I’ve been thinking back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when I would get up in the morning to go to school and look out of the window and see my late father, who, as well as a bricklayer, was a member of the security forces, check under the car to make sure no one had placed a bomb there overnight.

We lived in a relatively quiet part of Northern Ireland miles from the border or Belfast. The Troubles were noises off, for the most part. But not far enough off that it wasn’t a worry, not far enough off that I didn’t slightly flinch every time my dad turned the key in the ignition.

And yet, at the same time, I was listening to Radio 1, watching Blake’s Seven and Top of the Pops and moaning about history homework. Life was normal, even while the place I grew up in was going through a 30-year spasm of violence that wrecked thousands of lives.

It’s an obvious thing to say but normal is just about where we are and when we are. Always. That doesn’t mean you can’t want it to be different, to be better. (Hopefully, the citizens of America will take that chance next month and vote out the current toxic incumbent of the White House.)

But there is no base level to normal. It’s constantly in flux, in big and small ways.

Like everyone else I’d give anything to go to a gig again, to go to the cinema without worrying about who else is in the auditorium and what’s wrong with them. One day, all being well, we will all have that chance.

But right now, normal means life under a virus, one that is changing our patterns of behaviour, in the same way that Brexit will do in a few months, in the same way that climate change will in the years and decades to come.

The truth is, that somewhere in the world the water is always coming in, the flames are always getting closer. Winter is never far away. And in the meantime, we live in the space where we find ourselves. What else can we do?