Sandra Harris Writes

  LOVE ON THE BOX. BY SANDRA HARRIS. Oh. My. God. I'm down a right rabbit hole now and no mistake. And, this time, it's not an Internet rabbit hole but a Netflix one. Let me explain. I watched Love Island UK as usual this summer, as I have done for the last few years. This summer in particular, it helped take my mind off the unbearable heat that seemed to go on forever. I was genuinely scared at one point that it was never going to rain again; here in Ireland, two months without rain is unthinkable and has literally never happened before. If it happens again, and keeps happening, I don't see how we all can survive it. I'm not even a climate alarmist, by the way, truly I'm not. It's just you've no idea how much Ireland and rain go together, like bacon and eggs, like Cagney & Lacey, like spice-bag and a few cans of Guinness. To have two months without rain as an Irish person was like living through the end of days. Anyway, where was I? O...

WE’RE HAVING A HEATWAVE… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I know I’m going to come across as grumpy and ungrateful now but I’m really not enjoying this heatwave. Ah, don’t be such an auld buzzkill, you might say. Surely be to God you’re happy for the first daycent (Oirish pronunciation) bit of sunshine we’ve had all year, you might say. Surely you don’t begrudge people a bit of relief from the unrelenting misery that’s been 2026 so far, with constant wars, spiralling grocery and electricity prices and the general breakdown of society that seemed to start with bloody COVID and will surely end with an apocalyptic style flood/earthquake/tsunami that sets us back about a bazillion years and forces us all into a hard reset for mankind, you might say. Well, of course I don’t begrudge people a bit of relief from the unrelenting misery that’s been 2026 so far, etc., etc. I know kids have been having a ball with their paddling pools, ice-creams and spontaneous, unscheduled trips to the beach instead...

LIFE LESSONS FROM LOVE ISLAND, or, THE JOEY ESSEX EFFECT. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Oh God, I love LOVE ISLAND. I love watching it, discussing it with my kids afterwards, thinking about it when I go to bed and then going on Twitter when I wake up to see what the millions of fans thought about the previous night’s episode. It’s not even my guilty pleasure any more; I’m quite open about that the fact that I practically live for it during the months of June and July.  We’ve reached the halfway mark in the show and it’s making me reflect on the morals and ethics (and carnal forebearance?) of some of the contestants. Well, one of the contestants in particular, a tanned, muscular thirty-three-year-old bloke called Joey Essex. Sound familiar? That’s because he is familiar. He’s been a reality television star since 2011, when he appeared on popular television show, THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX. Since then, he’s been on pretty much every reality television show except THE X FACTOR . He has his o...

LOVIN’ LOVE ISLAND: MY GUILTY PLEASURE. (2015- THE PRESENT DAY) ORIGINAL TELEVISION NETWORK: ITV2. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Well, I can’t be highbrow all the time, can I, watching subtitled black-and-white Eastern European films about the meaning of life and death? Sometimes, even an intellectual like myself likes to kick back of an evening and watch a bunch of girls falling out of their bikinis in an effort to attract the attention of a group of (mainly) dunder-headed blokes with washboard abs. I’ve only started watching it properly this summer, but I’m as hooked as a fish on a… well, on a hook, I guess. What’s it all about, anyway, Dougal? Well, Ted, it doesn’t really have a story as such, it’s just about football and that. Oh, you mean, what’s Love Island all about? Well, you see, Ted, it’s like this… It’s basically a British game-show about romance and dating, right, the only kind of game-show I could physically tolerate. It’s been going on for a few years now and it has somethi...