New York Notebook

Orlena was not the kind of winter storm you pop out for a coffee in

This ‘brutal nor’easter’ was quite a bit more than I was used to in the UK, and so we congratulated ourselves that we managed remarkably well, writes Holly Baxter

Tuesday 02 February 2021 21:30 GMT
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<p>Hardy dog walkers were some of the few out and about as the storm hit</p>

Hardy dog walkers were some of the few out and about as the storm hit

On Monday, E and I were woken by the dulcet tones of the New York State of Emergency alarm. How they manage to do it is a mystery to me – I’m guessing it’s something-something-5G-something-something-George-Soros – but somehow, whenever a child has been kidnapped in Harlem or a tree has blown over in the Bronx, every phone in the city emits a piercing squeal and lights up at the same time. At 8am, as we enjoyed the last 10 minutes before we were due to get out of bed and back into the -8C reality of the New York winter, we were rudely awakened by this screaming pitch, amplified throughout the building by everyone else’s hijacked cellphone. The thump of someone falling out of bed in the apartment above and the tired yell of a woman next door added to the melee; two apartments over, the dog who barks if we so much as drop a fork in our own kitchen went crazy.

The cause of this emergency was what the world called Winter Storm Orlena and what the local news stations called an “especially brutal nor’easter”. San Francisco has its hurricane warning systems, and we have our snow-aversive phone tree. I opened our blinds to a swirling gale of white and a couple of poor dog owners shivering against the wind as their hardy Pekinese squatted over a snowdrift to do their morning business. Every 20 minutes over the next eight hours, the snow plough would come down the street, clear off the road, turn towards the adjacent neighbourhood, and then return 20 minutes later when the road was filled with 10in of snow again.

You’ve got to take the small victories, and living through a strong nor’easter comfortably counts as one, surely

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