Sandra Harris Writes

  SPARKING JOY (WITH MARIE KONDO): 2019. A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS.  © I’m coming late to the Marie Kondo party, and I was shocked to find out that her bestselling book, THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING-UP, has actually been out since 2011. I only heard of the diminutive Japanese organising consultant about two or three years ago, when my daughter suddenly started packing her favourite childhood toys and books into bin bags.   What are you doing, I asked her, not unreasonably, I think. I’m Marie Kondo-ing my room, she said, still continuing to frantically bundle her stuff into bags. She’s an expert on getting rid of clutter. She says I can only keep thirty books in total, she added, at which point my eyebrows shot up and disappeared into my hairline. Thirty books? The cheek of the woman! I keep thirty books on my nightstand in my to-be-read pile. I keep thirty books in the bathroom to read while in the bath. I take thirty books with me...

  A SUITABLE GIRL. (2017) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY FILM DIRECTED BY SARITA KHURANA AND SMRITI MUNDHRA. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I found this Netflix documentary on arranged marriages in modern-day India to be absolutely fascinating, even though there were definitely bits that made me angry and bits that shocked me. My kids and I watched it over Sunday evening dinner with our eyes bugging out at times, it must be said, at the occasionally disturbing content. It follows three young women living in Mumbai and Delhi as they negotiate the tricky world of finding a husband in India in the technological age. Some elements of the process have changed with time; other things remain the same. The women are all in their twenties, likeable, attractive and described as educated, financially stable and middle class. There’s a lot of pressure put on Indian women to get married once they reach a certain point in their lives. Usually, once they finish university or college, they’re fair game...

  9/11: WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE PLANES HIT THE TOWERS…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Have you ever been asked where you were when Elvis died? Or when JFK was assassinated? I was only a nipper for the first historical landmark, and not even alive when the second happened, but I do remember exactly where I was when the terrorist planes hit the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan. It was a Tuesday afternoon here for us Irish, as we’re about five hours ahead of the United States. I was walking through town on my way to meet my then-boyfriend for a couple of hours. I didn’t know it at the time- or maybe I did, deep down- but our long-term relationship was on its very last legs, and would only limp on for a matter of a few more weeks, before eventually dying out completely, like a car with a busted engine, on October 31 st , 2001. Breaking up on Halloween? That’s so me…! We had reached this horrible kind of end-game stage where we were meeting up for sex a couple of times a week, but nothing e...

TURNING POINT: 9/11 AND THE WAR ON TERROR. (2021) DIRECTED BY BRIAN KNAPPENBERGER. A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY REVIEWED BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I binge-watched this five-part Netflix series yesterday, in honour of the day that was in it: the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 th terrorist attacks, probably the biggest assault on America since Pearl Harbour.   For much of it, I was aware that I was practically holding my breath, it was so tense, especially the bits dealing with the lead-up to the attacks on the morning of Tuesday, the eleventh of September, 2001. Lower Manhattan was going about its business as usual on what has been described as a ‘beautiful Fall morning.’ Shortly before nine am, an ordinary commercial passenger plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre building, one of the legendary Twin Towers that formed such a familiar part of the skyline in New York. The building immediately caught fire. What was going on? Had the poor pilot had a heart attack ...

  AMANDA KNOX. (2016) A NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY BY ROD BLACKHURST AND BRIAN MCGINN. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © The murder of Meredith Kercher happened in 2007. The sensational and extensive news coverage largely passed me by at the time because I was a new mammy of a baby boy with special needs, otherwise I probably would have been all over that like everyone else. Murder, sex, intrigue, mystery, blood- what’s not to get excited about, as English journalist Nick Pisa who covered the case says in the film, though personally I think this guy was a little too over-enthusiastic about getting his juicy sex-murder headlines. The press jumped on this case like a swarm of hungry wolves. The headlines became more and more lurid, with the journalists leaping on wild murmurings about devil worshipping, cult murder and kinky sex. According to this documentary, the truth is a lot less fantastical and, sadly, more mundane, if you can use the word ‘mundane’ in connection with the death of a lovely, v...

  HE SHOOTS… HE SCORES!!! ANOTHER ACE-IN-THE-HOLE FOR CR7. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, Jaysis, Ireland, what are yiz like? Losing at football again. Last night, we lost to Portugal in a World Cup qualifier. Two-one. But all our pundits said that that was the best we’d been at losing in ages, so it’s all G. Meaning, we’re edging ever closer to, maybe, someday, actually nearly winning a game, or, at least, losing so well that it’s almost the same as winning. That’s hilarious and so typically Irish. We sometimes beat really piddly teams like, say, the Faroe Islands or Gibraltar, where the footballers’ main job is not footy at all but farming or bee-keeping or being a fisherman or something. Then we act all big and important for a bit but put us up against virtually any country with a decent team and we fall apart. Remember Italia ’90, our proudest footy moment ever? The song clearly said that we were going to ‘inflict our game’ on the opponents, and how many goals did we score? Two. Two? ...