Spending time in an Airbnb fit for a king changes the way you look at your own home

After we returned from our vacation upstate, our flat seems all that more ‘depressing’ and got me thinking about not being able to return to the UK for Christmas this year, writes Holly Baxter

Central Park at Christmas (Getty/iStock)

This week, E and I have returned from our trip upstate and are suffering from a case of the post-vacation blues. I suppose that staying in a millionaire’s summer cabin with floor-to-ceiling window views of the forest and our own private lake may have gone to our heads. When we stepped back inside our one-window Brooklyn apartment – with its ventilation system that backs straight onto next door’s bathroom and delivers the sounds and smells of said bathroom straight into our bedroom; its nine-to-five building works directly outside; its cat hair-covered amenities and its oven backing onto where we sleep – I couldn’t help but feel a little deflated.

“Do you think our apartment might be a bit… depressing?” I ventured, as I picked my way over the bag of cat litter and past the half-shredded shower curtain to the toilet.

“Not really,” said E, plunking himself down on an old sofa cushion we found on the street and refashioned as a seating area by balancing it on top of our laundry basket. He’s an optimist, but he didn’t exactly say it with conviction.

Spending the holiday season in our Brooklyn studio wasn’t on the to-do list, but we’ll get through it if we have to

The problem with renting an Airbnb fit for a king from people who spend most of their time in their mezzanine flat on the Upper East Side is that you get a taste for places with more than one room, washer-dryers which sit inside the kitchen rather than in a laundromat down the street, and large decks with Adirondack chairs where you can sip your artisan morning coffee and overlook the grounds. Coming back down to earth and realising that we are in fact not multi-millionaires with shares in Google was hard. Living in New York City as a normal person has its ups and downs, and the housing market is certainly one of its downs. The apartments in Manhattan – or even the nicer parts of Brooklyn or Queens – make London rental prices look like loose change.

Certainly, we believe that this is the best place in the world to be. Steps outside our apartment are our favourite bagel places, incredible pizza slice joints, enough hipster coffee shops to make any eye-rolling conservative burst into flames, and bars with cocktails so inventive that half of them don’t even resemble drinks. But now the world is going back into lockdown, I’m looking at it with the eyes of April and May once again, back when NYC was the epicentre of the virus and we were confined to our apartments. Even the basketball hoops in the locked-up courts opposite our building were unscrewed by city officials and taken away, lest anyone meet for a sneaky sports session during quarantine.

New York has done better than most states – and indeed most countries – considering where it started. Our rates of coronavirus transition are many times lower than the rates in any part of the UK or most of western Europe. Unfortunately, the seemingly out-of-control second spike in Britain means that we probably won’t get to see our families – who we haven’t seen since December 2019 – for Christmas. We have been waiting for an opportune moment to fly back for a visit, but the moment hasn’t come: not only would we be subject to quarantine measures at both ends, but we most likely wouldn’t be allowed to re-enter the US when we turned back around. With my father, E’s mother, my stepfather and my sister all shielding, we also have to consider whether travelling to see them is responsible or worth the risk.

I thought about the many, many people like us as we got off the train from the Hudson Valley at the beginning of this week. It was dark, there was a chill in the air, and it reminded me of so many trips back to Newcastle at Christmas, from university or on the last train out from London at the end of the last working day. Thousands across the world have been separated from their loved ones by the pandemic and will continue to be separated well into 2021. I began this year looking forward to a 90-person wedding and a once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon. Now my last ambitious plan for this year – to be able to see my mum and dad in person – seems to be going the same way as those.

Of course, we’re still incredibly lucky. We are documented immigrants, with passports and visas and safe housing and an extremely energetic, completely insane cat to keep us busy. We have friends and salaries and the privilege of being able to take a break upstate when things pile up. Spending the holiday season in our Brooklyn studio wasn’t on the to-do list, but we’ll get through it if we have to. And at least we know now, from bitter experience, that we have to order our Thanksgiving pie at least a month in advance.