‘The grass is always greener’: Surviving a New York heatwave

As Britons turn the heating on, New York boils: it has ever been thus. And as we enter a heatwave in New York City – small fry compared to the much larger heatwave battering cities in the Pacific northwest like Portland, Oregon, where temperatures are hitting 42C – it feels strange to scroll through my Twitter timeline and see friends moaning about grey skies and a washout June. Strangely familiar photos pop up on my Instagram feed of friends in jumpers at cold picnics, smiling through the clouds with the help of raincoats and plastic cups of champagne; meanwhile, in Brooklyn, we dig through our closets to find the lightest T-shirts and shorts we possibly can when we need to head down to the bodega for milk.

The first summer I spent in New York, I hadn’t acclimatised at all and it showed. Rather than hit the frozen wine (yes, you heard me right) and kick back in flimsy cotton shorts, I sheltered inside next to the AC box, hoping for relief. When I flew back to the UK for three weeks in the middle of August and it rained the entire month, I was overjoyed. Every goosebump caused by an unseasonably chilly afternoon was a wonder. How, I thought, could I ever go back to a city where 29C was something that happened in the early hours of the morning and counted as the coolest part of the day?

But then, of course, my body chemistry shifted and I became someone who wears sweaters when the mercury dips below 25. Years earlier, a friend had moved from London to Singapore and returned to visit us with a vastly different view of what counted as “hot”. Having lived 18 months in dependably tropical weather, she shivered on the bed we made up for her and asked us to bring down a 13-tog duvet from storage when we were sunbathing on the balcony and celebrating a good British summer. Being Brits, we of course teased her mercilessly – especially because she’d grown up on snowy mountains in Austria.

Now, as I spray myself with mosquito repellant in order to leave the house and use wet wipes on my arms and legs to scrape off the humidified dirt that stuck to me from a 20-minute walk round the city, I do sometimes wonder why I spent 30 years in the UK praying for hot weather. Yes, you can go to the beach every weekend, but no one talks about the tropical thunderstorms that appear out of nowhere during a nice session of tapas and wine and leaves your bruschetta floating down the street while a waitress shrugs. And yes, you can get a golden tan if you’re so inclined – but not if, like me, you’re a luminescent ginger whose body’s main defence system is freckles. If you share in my genetic misfortune, you’ll simply find that 90 per cent of your pay-cheque gets rerouted into the “sun care” aisle for spray-on factor 50.

“The grass is always greener,” I said to myself this morning, as people in my apartment block packed up their suitcases to escape the heat for the Fourth of July weekend upstate, and friends in the UK texted about ruined holidays to Portugal to get away from the rain. Personally, I’m staying put. I’ve learnt through long seasons in Newcastle that if you move around, you’re just asking for the fates to send bad weather your way. So, yes, I’m just as obsessed as everyone else – but I’m superstitious, too.