Sandra Harris Writes

CHEERIO, SECOND LOCKDOWN... HELLO, CHRISTMAS! SANDRA HARRIS. © I'm guessing I wasn't the only Dublin person who woke up yesterday on the first of December and felt a huge sense of relief, as if a great weight was being lifted off me and chucked away. It was the day we Irish folks exited our second national lockdown, six weeks of doom and gloom unalleviated by even a flicker of hope and beset by worries over the approaching festive season. It was a strange creature, that Second Lockdown. While I'm not suggesting for a second that the first COVID-19 lockdown earlier in the year was fun or enjoyable, there were aspects of it that were. Spending extra time with loved ones, getting to properly re-watch your DVD collection or re-reading your best-loved books, your kids not getting in trouble at school because there was no school, that type of thing. This Second Lockdown, as I've suggested, was a horse of a different colour altogether. The kids still had to go to school, the...

HERE WE GO AGAIN... ANOTHER LOCKDOWN! OPINION PIECE BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Today was the most depressed I've felt in a while, and this has been by anyone's standards a pretty depressing year. It's because tomorrow Ireland goes back into national lockdown for six weeks, courtesy once more of our friend the global pandemic, caused by COVID-19, alias the coronavirus, the only international killer that's not wanted in countries all over the world. I came up with that last bit of witticism myself, so don't you journalists out there go stealing it, now. Anyway, even though we've been living with certain restrictions for months now and have adapted to them somewhat, it's going to be a real wrench watching our favourite shops and restaurants having to close again till December. They'll be losing some of the biggest weeks of the year, shopping-wise-and-footfall-wise, and the three and a half weeks they'll be allowed to open in December probably won't b...