Americans go large on leisure and should get credit for it

Holly Baxter has hung up her British drinking hat and discovered a world of weekend activities, including indoor archery and late-night hip hop spinning classes

Outdoor spin class in Times Square: most New Yorkers will spend weekends at activities like this (Alamy)

It’s common knowledge that everything is bigger in America: desserts (ice cream cookie cake with extra sprinkles, anyone?), vehicles (SUVs and 18-wheeler trucks barrel down central Manhattan roads as standard, and everyone bounces around on the pavements without even raising a well-plucked eyebrow), high-rises (a 20-floor apartment building is “cute”), and coffee (a medium cup from any coffee or cart on a morning will be enough to leave you jittering and paranoid for days.) But what Americans don’t get enough credit for is the fact that they also go large on their leisure activities.

This is a non-exhaustive list of some of the weekend activities I’ve been invited to with friends in New York City in the past six months: indoor archery, shuffleboard, axe-throwing, upstate hiking, salt cave meditation, and bouldering. The bouldering happened last weekend, and is the reason why my fingers typing this are set into the shape of claws. Did you know you could get muscle pain in your finger joints? Now you do!

In London, most of my favourite weekend and post-work activities could be charitably summarised as “socialising” and realistically summarised as “drinking”. A sunny day calls for beers in the park. A cold day calls for beers in the pub. A weekend calls for celebratory drinking. A Monday calls for commiseration drinking. A birthday means drinking. Even a funeral means a lot of drinking.