Sandra Harris Writes

LIVE AID: FORTY YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s been described as a ‘musical moon landing.’ It was certainly the defining musical moment for my generation, the way that, I don’t know, the Oasis reunion is probably the one for my son’s generation. Even then though, of course Live Aid was much bigger. Nothing before or since has ever come even remotely close. So, what was it exactly? Well, it was a pop-and-rock concert for famine relief in Africa, and it was the brainchild of Bob Geldof, former frontman of the Boomtown Rats. It was held in Wembley Stadium in London on the thirteenth of July, 1985, with a parallel concert taking place in JFK Stadium in Philadelphia on the same day. It was shown in one hundred and fifty countries round the world, some of which were holding their own obviously much smaller Live Aid concerts, and it was watched by an estimated 1.9 billion people, a good forty percent of the world’s population. Those are crazy numbers, lads. Over seventy artists ...

  HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, AMERICA!  BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Ah, the Fourth of July! It’s a day to celebrate all things American, and my own personal way of commemorating it is to watch a typically American fillum or read something by an American author. This year, I went to see a screening of INDEPENDENCE DAY (1996), one of the most American movies ever made, in a local library. It’s the story of an extra-terrestrial attack on the land of the free and the home of the brave in the run-up to the Fourth of July, culminating on the Big Day itself, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to be able to see it on the big screen, as the smaller one doesn’t really do it justice. The scenes showing the massive spaceship are extra-impressive on the big screen. I brought my adult son along to enjoy it with me, but he wandered off to the toilet early on and missed some of the best scenes in the whole thing: the gigantic spaceship casting an ominous shadow over various American landmark...

BONNIE BLUE AND THE DEATH OF FEMINISM. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Jesus, Mary and Joseph. What’s gone wrong in the world of women? This last week in particular hasn’t been a good one for feminism. Bonnie Blue, real name Tia Billinger, has received a permanent ban from subscription platform OnlyFans after the platform decided that her ‘extreme challenges’ were not permitted under their Acceptable Use Policy and Terms of Service. The twenty-six-year-old British woman ‘rose’ to ‘fame,’ or should that be infamy, after having sex with one-thousand-and-fifty-seven men in a twenty-four-hour period. Now, I still have difficulty believing that statement. Maybe, just maybe, it could be done if every guy in the queue was hard and ready to go- excuse my bluntness- but what about men who needed extra stimulation in the form of hand- or blow-jobs prior to actual penetration, as is often the case in real life? That would have slowed the whole process down by miles. Did she have someone else there ...

FREDDIE MERCURY’S ‘SECRET DAUGHTER?’ PULL THE OTHER ONE… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, so I’m delighted that the iconic Freddie Mercury, one of the greatest music frontmen of all time- who am I kidding, he’s the best- is still making newspaper headlines today, nearly thirty-four years after his agonising death from AIDS. However, M’lud, however, I find myself being deeply sceptical of claims in today’s newspapers that Freddie had a secret daughter no-one knew about, except for the child's mother and her husband, the other three members of the band QUEEN, Freddie’s parents and sister and Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and long-time friend, Mary Austin, and presumably her husband and the father of her own children. The revelations are due to be published in an upcoming book entitled LOVE, FREDDIE, penned by respected British rock biographer, Lesley-Ann Jones. I’ve read a couple of her other books about Freddie and Queen, and I’ve never known her to be anything but affectionate and respe...

  WHEN CELEBRITIES GO TO HEAVEN… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s always sad when anyone we know dies, but when celebrities die, even if we’ve never met them in the flesh, it gives us a special kind of shock. It’s usually because they’ve played such a big part in our lives, maybe even in those all-important formative years. We’ve bought their records and listened to their music and pondered over their lyrics during hard times and difficult years. We’ve been to see their movies in the cinema, then watched them again on television and later bought the DVD, which we then watched until it fell apart. When someone mentions a specific year, we’ll often be immediately transported back to that magical period in time when we listened to So-and-So’s album to death, or went to see So-and-So’s movie on that fabulous summer’s night when we lost our virginity down by the lake to the girl with the strawberry blonde hair and the braces on her teeth. I remember being devastated when Christopher L...

NO SEX PLEASE, WE’RE… TRAUMATISED…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Last year, Ann Summers Ireland Ltd. reduced the number of shops it operates in Ireland from three to two. Also last year, sales from the Irish arm of this UK company’s adult sex toys and lingerie retailers nose-dived by a whopping forty-five percent, from 3.34 million euros to 1.82 million. So, what gives? Are the Irish having less sex and, if so, why? Well, there might be a couple of theories to explain this extraordinary state of affairs. For one, it might have had its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, which was well underway by this time five years ago. Can you even believe it’s been five years? It’s mad how fast time flies. During this pandemic, if you were lucky enough to live with your spouse or significant other, you could have as much sex as you liked, because you weren’t required to socially distance or isolate yourself from people you lived with, unless you or they actually contracted the virus. In fact, people pro...

ADOLESCENCE. (2025) CREATED AND WRITTEN BY JACK THORNE AND STEPHEN GRAHAM. DIRECTED BY PHILIP BARANTINI. STARRING STEPHEN GRAHAM, OWEN COOPER, CHRISTINE TREMARCO, ERIN DOHERTY, ASHLEY WALTERS AND FAYE MARSAY. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s about six in the morning and a little housing estate somewhere in England is still slumbering peacefully. Suddenly, a convoy of police cars and vans pull up outside one of the houses. A cohort of masked, heavily armed men dressed in black and toting huge guns emerge from one of the vans and start to break down the front door with a battering ram. The family of four inside are terrified as they are shouted at to stay still or get on the floor. Upstairs, a thirteen-year-old boy who looks much younger is revealed as the reason for this early morning raid. He’s told he’s being arrested on suspicion of murder, though he’s not told of whom and strangely, no-one in his family thinks to ask. It’s a shocking opening to a well-plotted and well-act...

COVID-19, FIVE YEARS ON. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Was it really five years ago today that our government announced the closure of all schools for two weeks because a virus called COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, had travelled here from China? It was better to be safe than sorry, we were told, little knowing that the two weeks off school would turn into five and a half months and that those months in lockdown would turn out to be some of the strangest and most surreal and bizarre we’d ever experienced as a country.   I remember where I was when the school closures were announced. In a record shop, looking at CDs. I was convinced, I suppose, like many other people, that it would be a storm in a teacup and over before we knew it. Boy, was my face red. The school closure thing turned out to be a blessing in disguise. My son, still coming to terms with an autism diagnosis, wasn’t having an easy time of it in school and the break was a huge relief to both himself and myself....

  AND NOW FOR SANDRA HARRIS’S DIARY… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © One of the inescapable things about being a writer is the urge to unburden yourself of your doings, thoughts and feelings on a regular basis to your public, by which I mean the handful of people who might be kind enough to read your blog. Enjoy my free unbosomings pertaining to the month of February of which we are, thankfully, about to take our leave. I hate February, and normally view it with the distaste which one might normally reserve for, say, a persistent itch on the sweaty underside of Satan’s ball-bag, or something equally odious. (And I’m not even gonna mention Valentine’s Day  and the Bridget Jones’s Diary film series coming to an end forever.) For one thing, the weather was diabolical, or Dia-bollock-le, if we keep with the theme of the Devil’s genitals. For about ten days, there wasn’t so much as a ray of sunshine. Now, I normally consider myself a Goth who lives only for the short, dark days of wint...

  ‘BYE ‘BYE, BRIDGET JONES…? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © It’s always sad when something good ends. It’s even sadder when it’s something like the Bridget Jones’s Diary series of films, based on the books by British author, Helen Fielding. The film series kicked off in the year 2000 with the wonderful BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY , starring the American (odd choice?) actress Renee Zellweger as British thirty-something, Bridget Jones. Bridget’s fed up of being single, of drinking, smoking and eating too much and being less than perfect overall. She buys a new diary to document her attempt to attain perfection and a zen-like state of calm contentedness in everything. The problem is that Bridget is endearingly funny, one hundred percent human and as far from perfect as you can get, which is why people love her. She’s a lovable mess, rather than a prim and proper Little Miss Perfect type, which would be unbearable. No-one likes a po-faced saint, lol. Her adventures as she goes in search of her ...