Sandra Harris Writes

  LIAM PAYNE, ONE DIRECTION AND THE X FACTOR: END OF AN ERA… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Liam Payne, pop star, X FACTOR alumnus , big football and wrestling fan and father of one, has died in Argentina, where he was on holiday with his girlfriend Kate Cassidy. He fell – or jumped, we don’t know- from a hotel balcony shortly after hotel staff had called the police, saying that an aggressive man under the influence of drugs and alcohol was wrecking the place. He was only thirty-one. I have a son of nineteen who is champing at the bit for fame and fortune. No matter how many times I tell him that those things aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, nothing sinks in. He’s adamant. In a way, I can hardly blame him. He was born in 2005, in an era when Simon Cowell’s smash hit TV talent show-slash-factory assembly line  THE X FACTOR , then in its infancy, was convincing kids all over England and Ireland that they too could be the next big music star. He grew up watching this and other ...

  IT COMES TO US ALL… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I recently discovered that a man I knew slightly but really liked and was looking forward to getting to know better- we’ll call him Dave- had died, just two days after I last saw him. I did that thing that pretty much everyone does when they hear that someone they know has died. I said to the person imparting the news: Oh, but how can he be gone? I’d only just seen him and talked to him two days earlier…! As if that could somehow make someone immune from death. I was stunned at the news and really, really sad at the loss to the world of such a decent, gentle kind-hearted soul, someone who adored animals and wildlife, music and poetry (he’d written countless poems himself) and chatting to people and having a laugh. He’d been cut down in his prime as well, having not even reached his fiftieth birthday. I’ll say it again, it just made me so sad, thinking about how he might have had plans left undone and wishes and dreams left unfulfill...

THE ONE WHERE CHANDLER CHECKS OUT…                                                              BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I never got around to writing something about the FRIENDS’ Reunion in 2021. Ah shure, I’ll write something next time they’re in the news, I said to myself. Sadly, the next time the cast of FRIENDS made the news headlines was just last weekend when Matthew Perry, aka Chandler Bing, one of the most popular cast members, was found dead in the hot tub/jacuzzi of his six-million-dollar California home. There was no-one else on the property at the time and any autopsies have so far proven inconclusive. That’s so sad. But just look at Robin Williams, one of the world’s funniest comedians on the outside, and on the inside he suffered like crazy and eventually took his own life because he couldn’t go on. I’m not saying that...