Inaction stations
Once a week these days I get on a couple of trains to go to Salford to record my Radio 3 show; I sit in a near-deserted carriage well away from other people. My mask is snug around my face. My headphones are in and I’m cut off from the world. I’m in a sensory deprivation unit on wheels. I gleam with sanitiser like, in the words of the great Welsh poet, a brilliantined trout. I wipe surfaces like I’m the captain of the England Surface Wiping Team.
I get off the train at Manchester Victoria and each week I’m amazed and saddened by how quiet the platforms are. The newsagent’s is shut. One coffee shop is open but you can go in only one at a time and then you have to take the coffee away. The stall that used to sell home-made cakes and pies is gone. I board a half-empty tram and make sure I’m nowhere near anybody else. My mask is snug. My headphones are in.
Of course this is the reality for everybody these days and of course this is the way to beat this pandemic but I have to say that, as a writer, I feel that one of my main sources of inspiration is being cut off. Some kind of language well is drying up. I miss the excitement of crowds, the jostling hordes that used to rush through stations and mingle across cityscapes, each person with a fascinating life to lead and an interesting tale to tell. I loved being a people-watcher in those far off days; I would sit in a cafe with an espresso and make up stories about the people sitting near me, the ones in the queue, the ones hurrying by. Faces would be full of emotion and life experiences; voices would be varied and languages from all over the world would dance in the crowded air. As a writer I would feel fed and nourished, replenished by my regular encounters and brief exchanges with teeming humanity. And by the cake I’d bought from that lovely stall.
These Covid days, though, I’m only seeing the top half of people’s faces; I know you can have expressive eyes, and over the years I’ve tried to train my luxurious eyebrows to convey emotion but when you’re presented with half the face you only get half the story. Just ask the Phantom of the Opera. I used to love to lean in and overhear conversations on trains; let’s face it, you often couldn’t help but hearing what your fellow passengers were saying because the sardine trains meant that if you had an itchy nose you had to ask somebody else to scratch it for you. Now, instead of being a teeming city overflowing with humanity, trains are like barelyinhabited Hebridean islands.
So what is the writer to do? Look inside for inspiration? We’ll soon have been doing that for a year. Try to live in the past? That’s never a good look. Imagine a better future and write stories about that? There’s an idea. That’s where I’ll start.
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera
The British Empire is a paradox, according to journalist and author Sathnam Sanghera. Although many see it as a distinctive force, it was in many ways a relatively incoherent, almost accidental phenomenon; more a coalition of commercial interests than a codified national project. At its door can be laid slavery, systemic racism, massacres and atrocities, yet it paved the way for the NHS and Britain’s modern multiculturalism. Notions of empire continue to haunt the British – and perhaps especially, the English – imagination to this day. Empireland is a wide-ranging survey of empire and its after-effects, with Sanghera contending we can really move on as a nation only when we learn to look our past squarely in the face. This is a book to challenge assumptions and ignite a thousand debates.