appy new year from the still-trapped expats of Brooklyn, who spent an uncharacteristically sedate Christmas at home in our apartment with presents round the Christmas cactus. Yes, some of the gifts got impounded at customs and only just arrived; yes, the plastic cactus lacked that classic piney smell of a real Douglas fir. But did we throw on Now That’s What I Call Christmas, a pair of themed pyjamas and a pan of mulled wine? You bet we did.
In those weird days between Christmas and New Year’s Day which are, by British law, supposed to blur into each other in an alcoholic haze, we packed up an offensively large SUV and headed up the highway to Vermont. We were craving an apartment with more than one room, open spaces that weren’t filled with people, a slight change of scene. Bordering the very tip of New York, Vermont is an adult Disneyland in Covid times: isolated cabins in the style of ski chalets look out across forests of evergreens, snow falls gently on the deserted hiking trails, and the biggest store in the town sells cheese, wine, fudge and a selection of kitschy Vermont-themed memorabilia and nothing else. And driving through New England is a weird and wonderful history lesson in itself, charting the order in which settlers arrived on the east coast of the US through its small town names: Sunderland bordering Manchester, which in turn borders Londonderry, which, confusingly, borders Berlin, Bromley and Peru.
I don’t like to boast, but there’s a traffic light directly outside our apartment in Brooklyn; in fact, truth be told, there are two
