These are the Fortunate Islands, Las Islas Afortunadas, where weather doesn't really happen. Not in the sense that it happens in, say, Oklahoma in the spring, when tornadoes hurl cars and cattle across the rooftops. Or in November's East of England, when freezing fog muffles the cries of shivering cats trying to find their cat flap, or summertime Aberdeen where, if ever the rain stops, people dance with joy in the streets to the wailing of soggy bagpipes.
No, we don't get any of that, but we do get a bit of wind. Mostly this takes the form of the gentle vientos alisios, or just alisios for short - the trade winds that blow from the north and, in more picturesque times, used to propel the empire-building sailing ships from Europe down the coast of West Africa and across the Atlantic (see Columbus and the countess, 13 September 2016).We like the alisios. They represent normality. In fact, the entire town of San Sebastián and its way of life are designed around them.
Oh, but surely...? No, no, it's true. To see this you only have to look at what's been going on for the last three weeks in which - and this is extraordinary - the winds have been blowing exclusively from the south. A southerly wind is expected occasionally, especially in winter, but only for a day or two. Three weeks of it is sheer thuggery.
Down on the beach this morning, Cirilo staggered from the water after his daily swim, complaining. Not about the temperature of the water - it's coolish now but perfectly bearable - but about the stones. 'This maldito wind sends them up higher. You can't walk into the water without hurting your feet.' The beaches of San Sebastián work brilliantly for the normal northerly winds, they are sheltered by the town and indeed by the entire island, but when the wind swings round to the south it sweeps in directly over the water, blowing spray into your face as you swim and raising big rolling waves that push those damned pebbles further up towards the tideline.
And worse, the southerly winds also have free passage into the streets behind the beach, where they whistle around the café tables, rumpling the hair and blowing the tops off our cheese-and-salad rolls. The more exposed of the bars and cafés have transparent screens they can roll out to shelter us from the winds - but from the alisios, not from these treacherous southern blows! The screens are all in the wrong places!
And the southern winds have an even meaner trick to play, which is to lift talcum-fine dust from the Sahara desert and puff it across the water to our Islas Afortunadas. This is the hated calima. It looks like mist but is insidiously different. Not moist, as mist should be, but dry and warm, which feels wrong. And when you look along the valleys, the hills no longer fade into delicate shades of green and blue but into sombre yellows and browns, ruining the photos of visiting tourists. 'Something wrong with this camera, Doris, the colours have come out funny.'The calima gets into your lungs too. It doesn't hurt them, it's only dust, but it can irritate if your lungs aren't too good anyway. 'Where's Víctor today?' we would ask our former neighbour, Isabel, in our early days here. 'Ah, he never comes out when there's calima. Stays indoors until it goes away.' Víctor's lungs were ruined from heavy smoking when he was younger, and now the African dust would tickle and twitch inside them, making him cough.
Something subtler happens, too, when this ethereal blanket settles over the island. It puts people off-colour in undefinable ways. It makes them nervous, uncomfortable. The world seems too quiet, as though something is about to happen, like rain or thunder or missiles from North Korea. People become less chirpy and cheerful, more inclined to moan, about the calima, Real Madrid, the state of their knee joints or their useless son-in-law. You catch them peering up at the sky, hoping to see a glimpse of blue. Gulls hardly bother to screech because the sound gets swallowed into the haze.
Sometimes this unwelcome visitor leaves with a bang when the wind swings round again on an Atlantic weather front and unleashes the threatened rain and thunder, which is wonderful: 'This'll clear the air for us!' And fill up the reservoirs and swell the growing potatoes and maize and bananas.
This time it didn't do that, it just went away. We woke up to a clear blue sky and the familiar waterfall of clouds pouring over the distant hilltops, an unmistakeable signal that the alisios were back on duty. Cycling to the supermarket for some morning shopping I was greeted by cheery smiles on every face: 'Mucho más fresco hoy!', much fresher today! All so much pleasantly fresher - the air, the sky, the hills, our neighbours, me, the world - with the sullen blanket lifted and our friendly northern winds wafting clean air across the sky. We like the alisios.
Notes for the serious student
The vientos alisios, the trade winds, happen because the Earth spins, which causes currents of air to flow in vast loops around the northern and southern hemispheres. And that's enough of that because it can get complicated, but a key point is that the alisios flow strongly in summer but tend to slacken in winter, sometimes allowing gusts from the south to ruin our swimming, or dust from Africa to drift across and ruin the views.
And where does that word alisios come from? After extensive research I can reveal that nobody seems to know. It's probably something to do with the Latin halitus which means breath - the Spanish word hálito also means breath but can mean a gentle breeze. On the other hand, the English 'halitosis' means smelly breath, so let's just forget I started this.
