Chicago Notebook | 7 February 2019

One of the few pleasures of advancing age is that, no matter how awful some looming catastrophe may be, you can always remember a time that was worse. On hearing the polar vortex was headed for Chicago last week, my wife and I smugly reminisced about having survived the coldest night in the city’s history — 20 January 1985 — when the mercury fell to -27ºF, or -33ºC. (Temperature scales are a nuisance in accounts of this sort — more on that below.) Spurning the temptation to huddle beneath blankets, we went out for deep-dish pizza, thinking we’d have the joint to ourselves. On the contrary, it was packed. We had to stand in line, mercifully in the unheated vestibule rather than the sidewalk. We had a blast. ‘Let’s see if they can top that,’ I said to my wife this time around. They didn’t. The temperature bottomed out last Wednesday at -23ºF (-31ºC). Still, I acknowledge, this is brisk. The North and South Poles were reportedly warmer. Most schools cancelled classes; businesses closed for the day. My wife and I went out only to walk the dog, bundling up in multiple layers of technologically advanced insulating materials beforehand. Even so, our eyes came close to freezing in their sockets after a hundred yards. (OK, 91 metres.) Thursday was modestly better. The low was -21ºF, and that was at O’Hare Airport, out on the industrial prairie. By Lake Michigan, where we are, it was a comparatively sizzling -11ºF, and by midday it had warmed up to maybe -2ºF.

Here I must pause. The US is one of the few countries on earth still using the Fahrenheit scale, on which the freezing point is quaintly set at 32. The others — this is the complete list — are the Bahamas, Belize, the Cayman Islands, and Palau.