New York: A Bit Cold...

Me and the Missus are in New York and it is winter. To be fair, it is quite cold and one of the days apparently breaks all sorts of records for winter in New York.

But I then remember that Americans love a statistic. Weather, sports, politics, telly viewing figures, money… The nation seems to be obsessed and everything seems to be chronicled and understood in numbers.

Added to this is the phrase 'Polar vortex', which all the news channels seem to have grabbed hold of and run with to describe the cold snap. New York is in the grip of a 'Polar Vortex: Disaster Imminent', etc. I also recall Americans love a bit of drama.

The problem with 24-hour rolling news channels is that the beast needs constant feeding. And, because New York is one of the major cities in the world, anything that happens there becomes major news. So the beast is fed then it feeds other beasts. It's a frenzy of mutual news masturbation.

Me and the Missus, of course, are seasoned hacks with a healthy cynicism for such news-based doom mongering, so we wrapped up warm and walked 30 blocks, taking in Central Park along the way, to visit the American Natural History Museum.

I'm remind myself I'm from Yorkshire. We sunbathe in weather worse than this. But not much worse...