Sandra Harris Writes

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...

ARE YOU GOING THROUGH A WRITING SLUMP? BY SANDRA HARRIS. © I’ve found myself writing a lot less lately and that’s unusual, as anyone who knows me well, even just from online, can confirm. I used to write nearly every day, opinion pieces, film reviews, works-in-progress, like novels and novellas, etcetera. I haven’t stopped writing altogether; I don’t think I could ever do that. But this year I’ve been writing a lot less, and I thought it might be helpful, not just to me but also to other writers, to explore some of the reasons why. It’s not so much a writer’s block, in which you have no idea what to write about next, it’s more of a writing slump in which I just don’t feel like writing much at the moment. Or, rather, I want to write, but the flesh is unwilling and the mind is weak too, lol. I’ve been writing consistently since 2009. I reached a milestone birthday and decided that, if I was going to be a writer as I’d always intended to be, I’d damn well better get a move on. I...

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...

  A TOXIC CULTURE IN FOOTBALL: A WOMAN SPEAKS OUT. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Okay, okay, I’m not a man. I don’t have a willy and balls, I have the other thing. But I’m the mother of a young man, so I think that might just give me the right to talk about one of the things normally seen as a mostly male preserve: football. Yes, in the past couple of years, women’s football has suddenly become a big thing and women are gaining recognition left, right and centre for it and other sports. There are female pundits on the television now and I think even women referees in actual football games where men are playing. Fair play to them all, especially the referees, because that would be scary, being the only woman on a field full of angry, sweaty men all barging into one another while you're trying to make note of who’s fouling whom, but don’t tell me that men don’t secretly still consider football to be their own personal stronghold and that ‘birds’ have no place in it. I’ve talked befor...