As Christmas arrives, I’m truly starting to miss the UK

For Holly Baxter, the loneliness and monotony of pandemic living is starting to become apparent as the festive season begins. What she really needs is soaking weather and a cosy English pub

I’d do anything to spend a few days by a fireside, a scotch egg in one hand and a pint of Thatchers in the other (Getty)

I had to admit this week that I may have become desocialised due to the pandemic. The specific moment when I realised this was when a US government representative knocked on my door, lanyard round her neck, mask on her face and clipboard in her hand, and told me that our apartment had been selected for extra census questions.

“Census questions?” I said as I poked my head round the door, unbrushed hair furnishing my face in gravity-defying curls like the mane of a sad lion who’s gone mad in captivity.

“Yes, we’re here to ask if you’ve ever experienced crime in the area,” the census woman replied. “I just have a few extra questions.”

Back at the beginning of the year, it was mandatory for every household to fill in the US-wide census. Banners on schools and city halls promoted it; notices were stuck up inside every building. The census is controversial because it asks the immigration status of the people who fill it out, therefore potentially identifying illegal immigrants who would prefer to fly under the radar and who may live in sanctuary cities like New York. Its existence put those undocumented people in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation: on the one hand, people whose immigration status was in question could choose not to fill it out and therefore not to draw attention to themselves, but on the other hand, the Trump administration made it clear that it would take advantage of those missing people by potentially redrawing electoral boundaries with the excuse that there “aren’t that many people” living in an actually heavily populated area.

Yet we were the ones who had been selected in our building, and it turns out we had 100 questions to answer, including no less than 50 follow-ups when I said that we’d had a package stolen from the entryway last summer.

In any other year, this would have been a nuisance. I might have gone as far as to tap my foot or look meaningfully at my watch. This year, it couldn’t have been any different. I stood at the door enraptured with the endless census questions and, when the woman had wrapped up, only just stopped myself from asking her in for a cup of tea. “We’ve got so much in common, though!” I imagined myself yelling as I chased her through the building. “We both know my preferred contact phone number, my social security and my next of kin! Surely that’s enough to start a beautiful friendship?!”

It’s taken a while for loneliness to kick in during 2020 but I think it’s finally got me. Of course, I live with my fiancé and our mad cat, who bring separate but equal things to the table. I see the three friends I managed to make in New York before lockdown every so often. I FaceTime my parents and occasionally drink half a bottle of wine on Zoom with a friend or two on a Friday night. 

It’s on those days that I get genuine pangs of yearning for England, with its rainy days and its cracked pavements and its cosy pubs

But there’s something to be said for variety in human contact, and it seems that after just under a year is the point at which my brain starts yearning for some other kind of input from some other kind of person: the sort of input you might usually get from chatting with a barista while getting a morning coffee or with the doorman of the office building as you step into the elevator, but which is stripped away in a pandemic until there’s nothing left except your partner in the same pyjama bottoms he’s worn all week and your cat, who you have begun to psychoanalyse in a handwritten journal and have out-loud arguments with on Sundays.

Knowing that we will be away from our families for Christmas (the US still can’t guarantee re-entry for people on our visas) has exacerbated the feeling, and so has the transitional November weather of Brooklyn. Every few days now, we get grey, blustery weather where the clouds are low, the rain pelts down and the light level barely gets past “especially dingy basement”. 

It’s on those days that I get genuine pangs of yearning for England, with its rain and its cracked pavements and its cosy pubs. I miss rickety Victorian flats with warm orange lights inside and the comforting uniformity of northern council estates. I miss being by the Northumbrian coast with fish and chips in my freezing hands while the slate-coloured North Sea hurls itself against concrete barriers. I miss picking up a Pret sandwich at the train station in London on Christmas Eve before hopping onto an overcrowded train weighed down with presents on my way back to Newcastle for the week. I miss mulled wine and mulled cider and Christmas markets and proper gingerbread and discounted sticks of rock and Christingle and kids singing off-key renditions of “Little Donkey” in local halls. And God, I’d pay to hear a Geordie accent on the streets of Brooklyn right now.

I never miss England in the summer, when the sun is glittering on the Manhattan skyline and everything seems ablaze with possibility. I don’t even miss it in winter proper, when the snow covers New York City and the weather is sunny and crisp. But November? That’s when I really miss the UK. I’d do anything to spend a few days by a fireside, a scotch egg in one hand and a pint of Thatchers in the other.