Sandra Harris Writes

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...

  C'MON DUBLIN... CLEAN UP YOUR ACT! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Don't get me wrong. I love Dublin. I love it more than anywhere else in the world. I can't ever imagine wanting to live somewhere different. It's the exact right city for me. But we're a year into the Covid-19 pandemic now, and there are a few things about our glorious capital that are niggling at me. School's back- for now!- and so yesterday, after doing my usual Mammy-errands, I decided to go for a walk, just for the sake of it. Not to go anywhere in particular or buy anything, but because I thought it would be 'nice' just to reconnect with my gorgeous neighbourhood. My wander took me into the area of Dublin known as the Liberties and, then, on up the hill to Christchurch and the surrounding environs. The first thing I noticed was that the streets are destroyed with dog muck. It's everywhere. If you took five steps with your eyes shut, you'd be nearly guaranteed to walk into a bi...

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...