Sandra Harris Writes

  MISSING YOU ALREADY, WORLD CUP 2022…! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Aw. I feel bereft today. The 2022 World Cup ended yesterday, the eighteenth of December, and now all I have to look forward to is Christmas with its tons of great presents, the FATHER TED Christmas special on telly and more delicious grub than you could shake a stick at. As I said, aw…! The four weeks of exciting football and football excitement really took my mind off the pelting rain, the freezing cold, all the talk of future gas shortages and the sight of people on the News stocking up on little primus/camping stoves from the ‘outdoors’ and camping shops, just in case we’re facing into a new, Putin-led Armageddon. 2022 hasn’t exactly been the greatest year ever for good news, has it? It was the year Russia declared war on Ukraine, and we here in Ireland should know this because we’ve taken in about 65,000 Ukrainian refugees to date. We still have killer virus COVID-19 with us; I presume Monkeypox hasn’t gone awa...

TWENTY-ONE THINGS I’LL MISS ABOUT THE LOCKDOWNS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, so is that it, then? Two solid years of living in fear, wearing masks to cover our faces, sanitising the top layers of skin off our hands and poking people with a two-metre stick to make sure they didn’t breach our personal defences (or was that last bit just me, lol?) , and now suddenly it’s all over? Throw away your masks and your hand sanitisers and safety signs, and roll around in a big ball of humanity licking people all of a sudden? Okay, fair enough, the global coronavirus pandemic may be approaching end-game, but there are certain things about the various lockdowns- here in Ireland, we had three main ones- that will always make me feel nostalgic when I think about them. Note, by the way, that I’m not saying I’ll miss the pandemic that killed so many innocent people, every single one of them someone’s son, daughter, friend, sibling, parent or neighbour. It’s the lockdowns I’ll miss, and here are the...

  IN PRAISE OF BACON, AND A GOOD DAY… BUT MOSTLY BACON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Every now and then, you get a lovely day, don’t you? One that shuts your complaining trap for five minutes, lol, and makes you realise how lucky you actually are to be alive. Today was one such day. I had a nice walk in the sunshine with my son, who was off school for an appointment, which got cancelled and left us with some unexpected free time. I love it when that happens, when something just unexpectedly frees you up like that!   I took him for a haircut after we’d done our errands and shopping and such, and, while he was chatting away about football to his barber, I had a bizarre but highly enjoyable conversation with a total stranger, a college student who lives locally. It turns out that this young man, not a native Dubliner, hails from the same place where my mother’s family comes from. I named him all the places where my different aunties lived, he knew them all and furthermore informed...