Afternoon:
8°c
BARACK Obama is set for a tumultuous, relieved and heart-lifing welcome today, not least in New York where Time Out has a whole section devoted to where you can celebrate the end of the Bush years and the must-have gadget is a clock that counts down the seconds to the arrival of St Barack.
It won't be a warm one, though. I arrived here to a temperature at -11C, the kind of weather Tom Waits described as "colder than a well-digger's ass".
"Don't you want to borrow the airline blanket till you fly back?" said the stewardess, surveying my hatlessness with concern. So I shuffled through Manhattan, slipping, thanks to the wrong shoes, on ice and muffled by a bright red blanket, till I got to Filene's, the world's best bargain-basement store, and loaded up with snow boots and padded anoraks.
New Yorkers aren't easily defeated by mere weather. A magazine lists services to help ward off the misery of the big chill, including one that delivers sex toys to your home. Why did we not think of that? "It's basically food, sex or drink for comfort," says a friend. We choose food and set off to the Clinton Bakery (no relation), a tiny café on the Lower East Side, so perfect in its cosiness and execution that it's worth a trip across the Atlantic.
Alas, this best kept secret is that it isn't well kept at all: there are whole New York blogs about how difficult it is to get in. We shiver outside for 15 minutes before it opens. Half the Lower East Side has had the same idea. Peerless fried eggs on artichokes with truffle sauce is our reward.
"I love that really big scarf of yours," says the waitress. I tell her airline blankets are very in this year in Blighty.
* One of the (many) reasons Obama rocks politically is that he won the culture wars hands down. He has Sting, Bono and Beyoncé serenading his coronation. Stevie Wonder's bouncy Signed, Sealed, Delivered is his unofficial anthem. The eternal Mr Wonder is a beneficiary of Obama's rise, rescued from golden oldie status to born-again hip at the age of 58. The Virgin store in Washington has a huge pile of his Greatest Hits CDs on offer for $5. I grabbed one to get in the mood for inauguration day. Half the queue had done the same thing. But please, oh please, spare us Ebony and Ivory.
* Before taking the Amtrak to history in Washington, I squeeze into the new production of Uncle Vanya at the Classic Stage Company, New York's Donmar. Maggie Gyllenhaal, queen of indie movies. captures the sensuous, bored Yelena, subtly wreaking havoc on Vanya's rotting estate. Only one aspect jars - Miss Gyllenhaal's lipstick is very red indeed for the middle of Russian nowhere in the 19th century. Her eyebrows are plucked to a contemporary east coast perfection. Let yourself go a bit, Maggie.
