If life was a soap opera

Headline: If Life was a Soap Opera...

Stand-first: Could anyone have predicted that our beloved Celtic Tiger would go as far as to eat us up? Now that the feisty tiger has begun to bite back, it is becoming increasingly apparent that for some, we are at the end of the road and got nowhere to go!

Over the past few weeks, people in general have been on a serious downer, as the fat cats of our local area file for bankruptcy and those who we perceived as the height of success, have called for liquidators to come and assess their assets. Nobody realised that those who were held up so high, were sitting on such a breakable thread!

I find it utterly disheartening to watch my friends lose their jobs, watch family leave the country in the hope of a better future down under and to look around at all the shut up shops and businesses, who have failed to survive the beginning of the credit crunch. It is truly a sad state of affairs to see this nation, which was a Mecca for the X-generation, suddenly become fallow. We have started to move from weekly shopping in Marks and Spencers, to settling for a cheap can of beans from Aldi. The economy seems to be sinking to new lows and the worst news of all, is that we have not scraped the bottom of the barrel just yet!

In light of all this doom and gloom, the increasing number of my friends who are comparing their suddenly altered lives to a Soap Opera, is a tad over the top. Trust me, just because your home town has no chain stores or restaurants and they are owned by your family and friends, does not mean you live in a soap opera!

After all, if life really was like a soap opera, we would be in a much worse position. After all the poor residents of Erinsborough or Summer Bay have been putting up with the most tragic and surreal events for years. If life was like a soap opera, we could die and then miraculously resurface months later. If this happened in real life, where we witnessed someone die, attended the funeral and then the person re-emerged months later, you would be spooked. Yet in the land of the Soaps, there is always a valid excuse; “I was under witness protection” or “It was my twin brother”.
If you were in a soap opera, you would have been convicted of numerous crimes already, and if you happened to commit one, you would probably attend prison for a few weeks but sit a retrial and walk away scott free. Isn't it ironic that Morag Bellingham in Home and Away never loses a single legal case?

If your life was a soap opera, you would probably be dating your best-friends ex boyfriend and would proclaim your love just weeks after meeting each other. You and your neghbours would be drop dead gorgeous (Lets not complain about that!) You would have children show up at your door, looking to be fostered or worse informing you they are your long lost daughter!
Friends and relatives would be allowed to stand outside the operating room, looking through the window as they surgeon is in process of carrying out the operation. Your village would be hit by storms, fires, earthquakes and landslides within months of the other, and more people would die in the village in the space of one year than the number that are born. And lest the soap runs out of people, there is always a multitude of new people arriving, solely to wreak havoc!

So do you really think your life is comparable to a soap opera? We are all in this economic mess together and as tough as we are going to get it, we will recover. It just may not be today, tomorrow or even next year, but like all good soaps, there will and always be a happy ending.