Sandra Harris Writes

HABEMUS PAPAM: WE HAVE A POPE! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘I have to go to Rome, for an audience with the Holy Father.’ ‘Don’t worry, Len, they repeat those shows all the time.’ ‘An Audience with Lily Savage, that was good as well.’ Bishop Len Brennan in conversation with Father Dougal Maguire in sitcom FATHER TED. I never normally post about religion, but it’s not every day we elect a Pope to be the new head of the Catholic church, a church with roughly 1.406 billion members worldwide. The previous pope, Pope Francis, passed away on the twenty-first of April this year, Easter Monday of all days. A nice day to die if you’re a Pope, I think, because, in the Catholic Church, Easter is seen as even more of an important celebration than Christmas. I found this fact very strange when I was younger. Easter is great and all that, but you don’t get presents at Easter, only chocolate eggs, unlike Christmas, where you could technically come in for all manner of goodies, including chocol...

  ONLY SAY GOOD THINGS: SURVIVING PLAYBOY AND FINDING MYSELF BY CRYSTAL HEFNER. (2024) PUBLISHED BY EBURY SPOTLIGHT: AN IMPRINT OF EBURY PUBLISHING. BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This memoir is a fascinating read. In 2008, Crystal Harris, then aged twenty-one, was an American beauty who didn’t know in what direction she should be heading in life. Her beloved father Ray, a musician, had died when she was a teenager and she felt lost without him for years afterwards. She was close to her mother, who remarried shortly after her husband Ray’s death, but she was conscious of having to make a life for herself, independent of family. In 2008, that fateful year, while working as a model, she was invited to a snazzy Halloween costume party at the Playboy Mansion in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, California, an exclusive address for the super-rich. At the Mansion, she met Mr. Playboy himself, Hugh Hefner, who had founded the Playboy magazine in 1953 with a loan from his mother. The ...

  WHEN CELEBRITIES GO TO HEAVEN… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s always sad when anyone we know dies, but when celebrities die, even if we’ve never met them in the flesh, it gives us a special kind of shock. It’s usually because they’ve played such a big part in our lives, maybe even in those all-important formative years. We’ve bought their records and listened to their music and pondered over their lyrics during hard times and difficult years. We’ve been to see their movies in the cinema, then watched them again on television and later bought the DVD, which we then watched until it fell apart. When someone mentions a specific year, we’ll often be immediately transported back to that magical period in time when we listened to So-and-So’s album to death, or went to see So-and-So’s movie on that fabulous summer’s night when we lost our virginity down by the lake to the girl with the strawberry blonde hair and the braces on her teeth. I remember being devastated when Christopher L...

NO SEX PLEASE, WE’RE… TRAUMATISED…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Last year, Ann Summers Ireland Ltd. reduced the number of shops it operates in Ireland from three to two. Also last year, sales from the Irish arm of this UK company’s adult sex toys and lingerie retailers nose-dived by a whopping forty-five percent, from 3.34 million euros to 1.82 million. So, what gives? Are the Irish having less sex and, if so, why? Well, there might be a couple of theories to explain this extraordinary state of affairs. For one, it might have had its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, which was well underway by this time five years ago. Can you even believe it’s been five years? It’s mad how fast time flies. During this pandemic, if you were lucky enough to live with your spouse or significant other, you could have as much sex as you liked, because you weren’t required to socially distance or isolate yourself from people you lived with, unless you or they actually contracted the virus. In fact, people pro...

ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM. DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI. STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram. The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask. It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-act...

COVID-19, FIVE YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Was it really five years ago today that our government announced the closure of all schools for two weeks because a virus called COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, had travelled here from China? It was better to be safe than sorry, we were told, little knowing that the two weeks off school would turn into five and a half months and that those months in lockdown would turn out to be some of the strangest and most surreal and bizarre we’d ever experienced as a country.   I remember where I was when the school closures were announced. In a record shop, looking at CDs. I was convinced, I suppose, like many other people, that it would be a storm in a teacup and over before we knew it. Boy, was my face red. The school closure thing turned out to be a blessing in disguise. My son, still coming to terms with an autism diagnosis, wasn’t having an easy time of it in school and the break was a huge relief to both himself and myself....