Sathnam Sanghera – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Sathnam Sanghera is a journalist and author. He was born to Punjabi immigrant parents in Wolverhampton in 1976 and entered the education system unable to speak English. He went on to graduate from Christ’s College, Cambridge with a first-class degree in 1998 and has since been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards twice, for his memoir The Boy With the Topknot and his novel Marriage Material. He has also won numerous prizes for his journalism at the Financial Times and The Times. His third book, Empireland: How Imperialism Shaped Modern Britain became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on publication this year.

These are a few of his favourite things…

Writing

I’ve never found writing books easy. Indeed, I’ve long been of the view that a writer is someone who finds writing more difficult than most people. Moreover, a writer is someone who endures the agony of returning to the awfulness of a first draft and makes it better despite the agony and torment. It’s lonely, there’s no guarantee of good pay, it gets no easier with time, and there’s always someone doing it better than you. But in having to finish my third book, Empireland, in lockdown, I managed to, for the first time in my life, enjoy the experience. With no travel possible, my television set requisitioned by two twenty-something nieces who only ever seem to want to watch The Simpsons, and no social life to speak of, I began to appreciate what a privilege it is to communicate with strangers, and how amazing it is to be paid to self-educate yourself. I would have done the four years of research into British Empire, even if I didn’t have a contract to produce something. I grew up in a household with no books, I am the son of a man who was illiterate, I couldn’t speak English when I started school, and this year has made me appreciate that my professional life is a miracle.

Indoor plants

There have been few ways to derive real joy from one’s living quarters during this pandemic, short of moving somewhere entirely new and better. As fortunate as we are to have roofs over our heads, many of us have realised that there’s such a thing as too much quality time at home. But I’ve nevertheless managed to gain pleasure from packing my flat with as many plants as possible. I may not have a garden, and I may have once put so many plants on my roof terrace that the terrace itself sank (and cost £5,000 in repairs), but my green fingers finally have something to do. As I write, I have the company of no less than three plants in my study and in my living room there are eight; it’s a thrill to have something to care for. At least, something to care for that doesn’t speak back, roll its eyes and regularly accuse you of being a “Karen”. Perhaps it’s in my genes: after all, my father was a farmer in India, his father was a farmer in India, his father was a farmer…

London History

Let’s face it, lockdown walks have got progressively joyless over the past year. But I have managed to break up the tedium of walking around in circles by delving deeper and deeper into the history of the London streets I walk on. It has been wonderful, while making my way down Marylebone Lane, which runs from Oxford Street to Marylebone High Street, to appreciate how it owes its winding shape to the River Tyburn, which once ran alongside it. My repeated struggle up Swain’s Lane in north London, has been assisted by the revelation, from writer Gillian Tindall that “Swain’s” is actually “a piece of late 18th-century pastoral conceit”, the street being originally known as “Swine’s Lane” owing to the pig herders that used to drive animals down it from the hills around Highgate to Smithfield Market. In The Fields Beneath, Tindall talks about how the town is simply “disguised countryside”, how “main roads, some older than history itself, still bend to avoid long dried marshes, or veer off at an angle where the wall of a manor house once stood”, how “hills and valleys still remain”, and how “garden walls follow the line of hedgerows”. It has been exciting to see and feel what she means.

Travel

I’ve travelled a lot as a result of work, but have never been a massive fan. There was that three-week trip to Italy which I abandoned after just one week. Those five days in Paris that lasted 36 hours. That week-long romantic jaunt to Venice that petered out after two days. Holidays abroad, in my experience, are almost always too long, too boring, too expensive and too stressful.  In my student years, I forced myself to go on marathon inter-railing trips across Europe, bus rides across America and so on. And I spent a year of my twenties working in America – an experience that wasn’t enhanced by contracting a brain parasite that nearly killed me. But it has taken a year of not being able to travel to make me realise that I need it. If only because going away makes you appreciate your home more. Occasionally, you need to get food poisoning in Morocco for the thrill of seeing Heathrow Airport come into view on the flight back – I’ll never complain about going away ever again.

Taylor Swift

I’ve learned certain things from being locked down with my nieces. That I’m not as much of a loner as I thought I was, that you don’t need to screengrab Instagram to post stories; there’s an arrow on the screen that does it for you. That I can probably be a nag. The girls have kept a note of the things I have exclaimed in moments of impatience and they have apparently included, “If you were in the army, you’d be thrown out”; “If you were an animal, they’d put you down,” and “please put your sister out of her living misery.” Although perhaps more significant than all this has been my realisation that Taylor Swift is really good. I had her down as inane and whiny, and while she is not graced with Aretha Franklin’s voice, or Prince’s dancing abilities, she is a great musician, a fantastic lyricist, and Folklore is a sensational album. And, no, I have not been kidnapped.