Sandra Harris Writes

  HAVE A VERY IRISH CHRISTMAS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, it’s that time of year again. Christmas is just around the corner and, to celebrate, I thought I’d share with you all a list of my favourite festive traditions. Bear in mind, they might be traditions I remember from my own long-distant childhood or ones I’ve created with my own kids over the years, but, either way, there’ll be a lot in here you’ll probably recognise. That’s because there’s something very special and particular about an Irish Christmas that every Irish person understands. We have our own way of ‘doing’ Christmas that mightn’t be all that materially different to the way other countries do it, but which, with a few tweaks, will be instantly recognisable to native Irish people as being intrinsically Irish. If for some reason an Irish person can’t get back to Ireland in time for ‘the Christmas,’ his or her relatives will go to great lengths to make sure they get a little bit of Ireland in the post well in ad...

ARE YOU GOING THROUGH A WRITING SLUMP? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I’ve found myself writing a lot less lately and that’s unusual, as anyone who knows me well, even just from online, can confirm. I used to write nearly every day, opinion pieces, film reviews, works-in-progress, like novels and novellas, etcetera. I haven’t stopped writing altogether; I don’t think I could ever do that. But this year I’ve been writing a lot less, and I thought it might be helpful, not just to me but also to other writers, to explore some of the reasons why. It’s not so much a writer’s block, in which you have no idea what to write about next, it’s more of a writing slump in which I just don’t feel like writing much at the moment. Or, rather, I want to write, but the flesh is unwilling and the mind is weak too, lol. I’ve been writing consistently since 2009. I reached a milestone birthday and decided that, if I was going to be a writer as I’d always intended to be, I’d damn well better get a move on. I...

LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s been described as a ‘musical moon landing.’ It was certainly the defining musical moment for my generation, the way that, I don’t know, the Oasis reunion is probably the one for my son’s generation. Even then though, of course Live Aid was much bigger. Nothing before or since has ever come even remotely close. So, what was it exactly? Well, it was a pop-and-rock concert for famine relief in Africa, and it was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, former frontman of the Boomtown Rats. It was held in Wembley Stadium in London on the thirteenth of July, 1985, with a parallel concert taking place in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on the same day. It was shown in one hundred and fifty countries round the world, some of which were holding their own obviously much smaller Live Aid concerts, and it was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people, a good forty percent of the world’s population. Those are crazy numbers, lads. Over seventy artists ...

  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...

BONNIE BLUE AND THE DEATH OF FEMINISM. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What’s gone wrong in the world of women? This last week in particular hasn’t been a good one for feminism. Bonnie Blue, real name Tia Billinger, has received a permanent ban from subscription platform OnlyFans after the platform decided that her ‘extreme challenges’ were not permitted under their Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service. The twenty-six-year-old British woman ‘rose’ to ‘fame,’ or should that be infamy, after having sex with one-thousand-and-fifty-seven men in a twenty-four-hour period. Now, I still have difficulty believing that statement. Maybe, just maybe, it could be done if every guy in the queue was hard and ready to go- excuse my bluntness- but what about men who needed extra stimulation in the form of hand- or blow-jobs prior to actual penetration, as is often the case in real life? That would have slowed the whole process down by miles. Did she have someone else there ...

FREDDIE MERCURY’S ‘SECRET DAUGHTER?’ PULL THE OTHER ONE… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, so I’m delighted that the iconic Freddie Mercury, one of the greatest music frontmen of all time- who am I kidding, he’s the best- is still making newspaper headlines today, nearly thirty-four years after his agonising death from AIDS. However, M’lud, however, I find myself being deeply sceptical of claims in today’s newspapers that Freddie had a secret daughter no-one knew about, except for the child's mother and her husband, the other three members of the band QUEEN, Freddie’s parents and sister and Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and long-time friend, Mary Austin, and presumably her husband and the father of her own children. The revelations are due to be published in an upcoming book entitled LOVE, FREDDIE, penned by respected British rock biographer, Lesley-Ann Jones. I’ve read a couple of her other books about Freddie and Queen, and I’ve never known her to be anything but affectionate and respe...