AND FINALLY A message that’s good for the soul

DO YOU believe the universe can send you messages? I do.

At the beginning of 2004, when I had finally had to accept that my long first marriage was over, I wandered unhappily into the household department of John Lewis. There I was confronted by bright display signs proclaiming, Restore! Renew! Re-start! The intention was to encourage the purchase of a new ironing board or kettle, but I thought: ‘Yes, right — it is time to renew my life.’

At a time of real crisis months earlier, at the door of a mission in California I was handed a little religious card which said: ‘Always go forward, never turn back.’ The words meant so much I still have that card. Since then I’ve seen messages on the side of a bus or in a shaft of sunlight …

More encouragement came at the end of May this year, when I was feeling very down at the prospect of packing up all my mother’s possessions.

I was so cheered by a visit to my favourite museum, the Holburne, in beautiful Bath. We went to see the new exhibition of drawings by David Hockney (on until September 18) and there on the wall at the start of the show was the above message — a glorious shout of pink positivity, in Hockney’s own enlarged writing. Ping! It went straight into my soul, saying since life is so short, we must treasure it.

The simple words made my heart sing. Even without that pink message, the wonderful drawings (made between 1963 and 1977) themselves encapsulate the artist’s own joie de vivre. Brilliant Hockney is 85, still painting, seizing the time and displaying his own creative love in everything he does.

Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week. Write to Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, london W8 5TT, or email bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk. Names are changed to protect identities. Bel reads all letters but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.