Cold! You call that cold?!

Moving from cold, wet London to sunny, dry Lanzarote was one of my best moves ever. All my adult life I never dealt too well with the typically damp British weather, and when in 2004 I decided to live somewhere other than London, returning to my equally wet home town Hanover in Northern Germany did not even enter the equation.

So after selling my flat in East London and buying a beautiful first floor apartment in Puerto del Carmen, I packed my suitcases, my computer and my two cats Spider & Lugosi (+ thousands of other things in about 30 boxes!) and moved to paradise.

Lanzarote has the most wonderful, warm and sunny climate all year round, but let me warn you: once you are acclimatised you will feel the cold during the winter months of January and February in particular.

Our winters can be an interesting mix of changeable weather, with temperatures anything between 15C and 25C degrees, a lot of wind, bits of rain here and there and the odd day of Calima (a warm breeze bringing fine dust from the African Sahara desert) with temperatures as high as 30C degrees and very low humidity, even in January. On cold, windy days it amuses me mightily when I run around in a quilted jacket, boots and a scarf (sometimes gloves too, but not often) and get looked at strangely by the tourists who are in their touristy summer best (that is meant as sarcasm). 20C degrees with a hefty amount of windchill factor on top might as well be like 8C degrees to me.

Lanzarote winter night temps can dip as low as 10C degrees – and even colder out in the country – with the humidity rising to around 90% most nights.  And don´t tell me you wouldn´t switch your heating on then! Problem is, central heating doesn´t exist here, so you either buy a portable radiator, get an aircon/heating combo installed… or freeze.

Of course, suffering from fibromyalgia, I do feel the cold much worse. One of its many symptoms is the body´s failure to regulate temperature, and I can get cold (i.e. sitting in a draft even on a warm day) or hot (i.e. direct sunshine for 10 mins) very quickly, and feel it to the extreme. However, I can deal with heat much better than cold because, obviously, with both fibro and rheumatoid arthritis, heat is wonderfully soothing and beneficial to the constant aches, whereas cold/damp adds to my pains in a major way.

For the last few days it has been a balmy 30C and nights around 18C, which for me is just perfect and I am loving it. It will get much hotter still come July and August, but my body handles 40C degrees so much better than it does 14C degrees, so unlike a lot of other locals, I am not dreading summer at all!

In conclusion, after living on a tropical island I could never live in a cold climate again. I would probably wilt like a flower and die, cold and miserably…