Politics in the land of the inalienably free

Boston in winter is the sort of cold that hurts your teeth. The wind gnaws the paint off house fronts and the snow entombs SUVs whole. If I had been in the harbour in December 1773 I would have tried to boil the tea instead.

My nose turns pink and peels on day two, and on day three I sit at a bus stop submerging my corpse-blue fingertips in a takeaway clam chowder. I want to be indignant about the weather to someone but the beaming gloveless keep telling me it’s a pretty mild winter this year. It’s not, but then this is the city that endured six smallpox outbreaks, an earthquake and a fire before it even thought about igniting the American Revolution. This is the city where people ran 26 miles in the 2013 Boston Marathon, watched a bomb go off at the finish line, and then kept running to Massachusetts General Hospital to give blood. This is not a city cowed by mere weather.