Sandra Harris Writes

  WHY I’M NOT CRAZY ABOUT THIS POST-PANDEMIC WORLD OF OURS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © 1.       Firstly, we emerged out of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which a few million people, including many of our loved ones, died globally, into a world where Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was allowed to attack Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Ukraine, in a manner disturbingly similar to Hitler’s take-overs of various countries during World War Two. Didn’t we put measures in place at the end of that war to prevent this exact type of thing from ever happening again in mainland Europe? Someone somewhere must not have read the memo… 2.       Right. The shops are not as full of juicy goodness, useful gizmos and yummy treats as before. And, any time you ask the shop keeper or store manager what’s happened to your favourite chocolate bar with the picture of the lovely Alpine village on the wrapper or the blue kitchen roll that goes on forever, they just look apolog...

  WHEN PETS PASS AWAY… BY SANDRA HARRIS. © You’ll notice I didn’t title this piece COPING WITH THE PASSING OF A PET. I could no more tell you how to do that than I could advise you on stocks and shares. I can’t even bring myself to use the ‘D’ word in reference to the demise of a pet. It’s a topic I find very emotional, so I figured maybe it was time I wrote about it and tried to make sense of it. My kids and I kept hamsters from October 2017 to   October 2022. During this time, we constantly had hamsters living with us in the house. The Last Ham passed away in October 2022, leaving us pet-less for the first time in five years. This was a horrible shock to the system, I can tell you. My daughter told us- my son and I- that she didn’t feel able to care for any more pets for a while, certainly that side of Christmas. As she’s the one who typically does all the grunt work for the little critters, we had to respect this. We were all devastated, though. A Christmas withou...

  MISSING YOU ALREADY, WORLD CUP 2022…! BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Aw. I feel bereft today. The 2022 World Cup ended yesterday, the eighteenth of December, and now all I have to look forward to is Christmas with its tons of great presents, the FATHER TED Christmas special on telly and more delicious grub than you could shake a stick at. As I said, aw…! The four weeks of exciting football and football excitement really took my mind off the pelting rain, the freezing cold, all the talk of future gas shortages and the sight of people on the News stocking up on little primus/camping stoves from the ‘outdoors’ and camping shops, just in case we’re facing into a new, Putin-led Armageddon. 2022 hasn’t exactly been the greatest year ever for good news, has it? It was the year Russia declared war on Ukraine, and we here in Ireland should know this because we’ve taken in about 65,000 Ukrainian refugees to date. We still have killer virus COVID-19 with us; I presume Monkeypox hasn’t gone awa...

  OUT NOW … (THE) QUEEN’S GREATEST HITS! BY SANDRA HARRIS.  © Wow. I literally never thought I’d see the day, but it’s finally happened. After a whopping ninety-six years on earth (it makes me dizzy just thinking about it) , Queen Elizabeth the Second of England passed away yesterday at ‘one of her favourite houses,’ Balmoral Castle in Scotland. I just want to say that, if I owned a castle in Scotland myself, it would probably be one of my own personal favourite homes. Well, that and the chateau in France and the Alpine chalet, naturally. Oh, and, of course, the Spanish villa. But no matter, never mind my bitterness, that’s not what we’re here to discuss today. Today is the day after the day that the Queen slipped quietly away into the afterlife to be with her husband, of whom more later. For now, all we want to do is have a look at her greatest accomplishments, victories and triumphs. We’ll call them (The) QUEEN’S GREATEST HITS … 1.       In...

  HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © This is the time of year when school kids are traditionally required to pen the essay on what they did over their summer holidays. I myself had the best summer I’ve had in ages, not for any major, spectacular reasons but for a load of little bitty reasons, which are every bit as worthwhile. And I normally loathe summer too, for a myriad of reasons, which makes my enjoyment of this one all the more miraculous, and baffling. Here are some of the reasons why I normally hate summer; if I have to suffer through them, then you guys have to suffer through reading ‘em... 1.       I have goth leanings, and prefer to wear black and hibernate for the whole of the winter and much of spring. Summer is usually a horrible shock to the system. 2.       Summer makes my hair do a ‘Monica-from FRIENDS in the One Where the Gang go to Barbados.’ 3.       It also m...

  ALBA. (2021) BASED ON THE TURKISH DRAMA SERIES, FATMAGUL’UN SUCU NE? DIRECTED BY PABLO GUERRERO, CARLOTA MARTINEZ-PEREDA AND HUMBERTO MIRO. STARRING ELENA RIVERA, ERIC MASIP, CATERINA MENGS, ADRIANA OZORES, ALVARO RICO, POL HERMOSO, JASON FERNANDEZ, FRANKY MARTIN, CANDELA CRUZ AND ANTONIO GIL. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. © ‘Our power derives from denying theirs.’ There are almost too many twists and turns in this Spanish psychological drama-thriller, and it could have done without maybe three of its thirteen fifty-minute episodes, but I still really enjoyed this. It reminded me a lot of the English drama series LIAR , which in turn was based on the Spanish drama series LIES AND DECEIT , as drug-rape is the main topic in all three Netflix shows. The thing I’ve noticed with very long, multi-episode series is that they run out of steam a wee bit before the end and as a result get twistier and turnier until some of the twists are, frankly, incomprehensible. Such is the case ...

  LIVE AID, QUEEN, FREDDIE MERCURY AND AIDS. BY SANDRA HARRIS. © Do you remember where you were when LIVE AID happened? I do. I was just a kid, obsessed with pop and rock, glued to the television on which the biggest benefit concert the world had ever seen was about to kick off with British broadcaster Richard Skinner uttering the immortal words, ‘It’s twelve noon in London (also Ireland, where I was!), seven am in Philadelphia and, around the world, it’s time for LIVE AID.’ It was a gorgeous sunny Saturday in Ireland and I was super-excited about having a day of top quality pop and rock from some of the biggest stars on the planet to look forward to. The legendary concert, organised by rock musicians Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, happened on this day thirty-seven years ago, and it was conceived of after the BBC aired some horrific news reports by Michael Buerk on the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia. The initial Band Aid project saw the song performed by Various Artists, Do They K...