Spring is the perfect time for social distancing in New York

For those bemoaning missing out on the beautiful spring weather in New York, there is no such thing, says Holly Baxter. March and April bring black clouds, strong winds, hail and thunderstorms, making the Big Apple seem all the more apocalyptic

Dark clouds, hail and thunderstorms make the Big Apple seem all the more apocalyptic (Getty)

Whenever someone from the UK wants to visit me in New York, they always want to come in the spring. “I’ll come for the weather while it’s still cold in Europe,” they tell me. “March or April would be ideal.”

These people have clearly never yet visited the east coast of the United States at the beginning of springtime, although they probably have read all the guidebooks which, for some mind-bending reason, continue to pretend that March and April are excellent months in which to plan a trip to the big city.

Perhaps this is all some kind of ploy to fill the hotels, or perhaps people really do enjoy being lifted off their feet by a near-hurricane while simultaneously being battered with freezing hail. But just in case that isn’t your own personal fetish, I’m here to tell you (as a PSA for future years, since of course no one is doing any travelling to or from the Big Apple in the next couple of months) that March and April in New York are downright miserable. We have beautiful weather from May to October; guaranteed sunshine all summer long; warm nights and surprisingly idyllic beaches; heck, we even have picturesque winters, with an abundance of blue skies, snow and festivities like nowhere else. But you know what we don’t have? Well, you will if you’ve been listening.

This morning, my fiance and I took our one daily walk to the grocery store in 70mph gale-force winds. We had to walk down the street backwards to avoid being lifted up by them. When we came back into our apartment, we were soaked to the bone, even through our waterproofs, and had to change every single item of clothing we were wearing. You might have heard about hurricane season in the Caribbean and the southern states. We don’t get our houses destroyed by twisters or our roofs blown to smithereens, but what we get is the tail-end of that weather pattern: black clouds, strong winds, hail and thunderstorms throughout the beginning of spring, which come on often quite literally out of the blue with little to no warning. And yes I know it’s been 24C in England, thanks for reminding me.

All of this means that the current situation in New York feels even more apocalyptic than it should during a global pandemic. As a case in point, I went on a socially distanced walk through Prospect Park with my friend a few days ago (he has taken to turning up outside our apartment building every so often and shouting ’til we open our window, just in case either of us is bored enough to venture out with him) and we were enjoying tromping through the woods, one behind the other, and shouting back or forwards every so often. Obviously, the topic of sporadic conversation was the coronavirus, just like everybody else’s is these days.

“It feels like the end times,” I joked from the top of a muddy hill interspersed with the exposed roots of surrounding trees.

“It’s probably going to get even worse,” my (perennially optimistic) friend replied, “and change the way the world works forever.”

As he said it, a black cloud almost instantly appeared above us, plunging the park into semi-darkness.

“How unnerving,” I said, laughing. Then buckets of frozen hail began pelting down on top of us. It was at that moment that I also realised my phone had somehow slipped out of my pocket en route, and I had no way to communicate with anyone else outside the woods we’d walked for 20 minutes into. Was I living in the first five minutes of a horror movie?

Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t, as I lived to tell the tale and am now able to tell you this story from the confines of my studio flat. I even managed to find my phone, with the help of my friend, his PhD in geography and the helpful Find my iPhone app. But I won’t be venturing out the house much this week – and it’s not just because of coronavirus. The only good thing about a pandemic happening now is that New York’s horrible springtime weather makes it easy to comply with those “shelter in place” orders. And it adds a bit of pathetic fallacy to the whole situation, too.