New York was caught in a storm, and I was in my element

Memorial Day usually gifts Americans a long weekend of sun, but this year the storm clouds had other ideas – at least it gave us Brits a chance to talk about the weather

Big drip: Memorial Day plans were rained off (Getty Images)

American federal holidays and British bank holidays only line up twice a year: Christmas Day and Memorial Day (no, Easter isn’t a four-day weekend here in the US, despite the heavy involvement of evangelical Christians in Congress). Memorial Day falls on the final weekend of May, and it’s effectively the American equivalent of the UK’s Remembrance Day. But for from sombre reflections on war, poppy sales for veterans and wreaths being placed on memorials, Memorial Day weekend means barbecues and Black Friday-esque sales. Like on Independence Day, you’ll find few everyday Americans who have thought that hard about the meaning of the thing beyond “an extra day off in the sunshine”.

Across the States – where most people only get 10 days off a year – a long weekend like Memorial weekend also means travel. In fact, last Friday was recorded as the single highest travel day in passenger numbers since March 2020, just before the country went into lockdown – and with more and more people vaccinated and states opening up, this is understandable. A lot of people have taken the opportunity to see their families for the first time since Covid split everyone apart.

For E and I, though, a family visit isn’t a car ride away. We considered “going upstate”, as New Yorkers often do, but the car rental and Airbnb prices convinced us to stay at home in Brooklyn. And we couldn’t have been happier we did.

From a balmy 25C Friday emerged a freezing rainstorm that went on throughout the entire holiday weekend about the second we all logged out of work. In one of the coldest Memorial Days since records began, the usually blue skies turned dark grey with clouds and rain pelting down. The weekend before, we’d sat on the beach and burnt to a crisp underneath our factor-50 sun lotion. We’d had plans to spend the whole holiday up there at the Rockaways. Instead, we unpacked our packed-up winter clothes and pulled them back on in disbelief. That kind of weather behaviour is par for the course for Britain – and nigh-on predictable if it’s a long weekend or you’ve forgotten your umbrella – but when we moved to New York City, we thought we’d escaped it.

Americans (and everyone else in the world) say Brits are obsessed with the weather. In that way, E and I were left in our element. Everyone within six feet of us in New York City got to hear our lamentations about the storm, about the plummeting temperatures and about the traumas we’d been through being raised in a maritime climate. In a bar down the road, we joined a conversation with another table while we watched our local NBA team (the Brooklyn Nets) get slaughtered by their opponents (the Boston Celtics). “We’re just annoyed,” we said, “because we moved out here for the guaranteed sunshine!”

“I’m the opposite,” said a girl across the way. “I just moved here from California and this is what I expected. I said to my friends in Oakland: ‘Well, I’m off to New York, so I guess I’m saying goodbye to the sun’.”

It’s all relative, I suppose. Five months of guaranteed heat feels like paradise to Brits like us (especially me, as I was born and raised in Newcastle – or, as E likes to call it, Winterfell). For a Californian, that’s seven months of summer weather lost. But as my mother would say, that way they never feel the benefit.