Let the roaring Twenties begin – I’m so ready for it

After drinks with a fellow newcomer from New Zealand, Holly Baxter is feeling optimistic that a future of cocktails, socialising and normality could finally be on the horizon

No more masks and social-distancing? A girl can dream, right? (Getty)

New York is full of immigrants and transplants from other cities, but the usual deluge of residents determined to make their dreams a reality in the Big Apple has become more of a trickle during the pandemic. Because of the lack of tourists, my ears really perk up when I hear a British voice – I want to run over and ask them how long they’ve been here and whether they miss the motherland. Just a couple of days ago, I got misty-eyed over a packet of McVitie’s Digestives I found in a back shelf at my local bodega and proclaimed proudly to the owner that “these are from my country”.

Because vaccinations are being rolled out fast and businesses are getting back up and running, however, a bit of new blood has made it to the city in the past couple of weeks. A friend of a friend messaged me and asked me if I’d help someone from New Zealand acclimatise recently, and I was more than happy to oblige. A new person to socialise with outside of my husband and the five friends on rotation I’ve seen over the past 18 months? Count me in!

And so, on the weekend, I sat in a Lower East Side bistro in warm, rainy spring weather with a New Zealander who’d experienced 2020 in a very different way to me. She described a lockdown for six weeks then “huge parties”, followed by normality; sad scenes pouring in on their news screens from across the world; huge support for a competent prime minister who made her decisions according to science (“We really don’t have many political issues in New Zealand, apart from housing,” she said, as images of Trump recommending American citizens inject bleach and crowds storming into the Capitol earlier this year flooded my mind.) In December 2020, she was barbecuing on the beach with groups of friends and her extended family. She’d been to crowded football games, gigs and concerts, well-attended press briefings. Unmasked and unvaccinated, she’d been shoulder-to-shoulder with friends in bars and restaurants, confident in the knowledge that Covid hadn’t spread any further than a couple of airport hotels.

A low-key American is harder to find than a crumpet in a Walmart – but even we might find ourselves dancing in the streets if the pandemic really does recede this summer

“I have an abject terror of Covid,” she told me when she arrived, donning her N95 mask and armed with two bottles of hand sanitiser. We sat in the open air, socially distanced, and each ordered a cocktail. She was shocked to hear that I knew lots of people who had had Covid, and was pretty sure I had it myself in early 2020 when tests were only available to those in hospitals. She listened, wide-eyed, when I described convoys of ambulances thundering through the New York streets and weeks where we wore scarfs round our faces because of mask shortages. The next time I saw her, she’d brought me a couple of N95s in a linen bag as a gift.

The question on everyone’s lips when I mentioned my New Zealand friend was: why on earth would anyone move from there to here right now? I suppose her presence proves that life is slowly going back to normal. She moved here for a career opportunity and because she was bored of spending her time sequestered in the Antipodes, hiking the same nature routes every weekend and mixing with the same people. I told her, laughing, that this was the most out-there socialising I’d done in months. She said she chose now to come because she believed we’d be out of the pandemic soon, what with everyone in the US being offered vaccination by the end of May. And she was already surprised by what she’d seen and heard in New York: one of her flatmates had cried real tears when she’d described the situation back home, saying that it gave her “hope for the future and for the world”.

My New Zealander’s optimism buoyed me up. I’m not going to cry real tears about it, because in my heart I’m still a stiff-upper-lip British type, but I will allow myself to feel a quiet sort of glee. “I feel Brits and New Zealanders share a culture,” she told me, as we ordered ourselves another hot sake in Chinatown. “We’re a little bit more low-key.” She’s right, of course – a low-key American is harder to find than a crumpet in a Walmart – but even we might find ourselves dancing in the streets if the pandemic really does recede this summer.

“I’m ready for the roaring twenties,” I told my new friend.

She raised her glass and grinned. “Cheers to that.”