A winter break snatched in Lanzarote in 1997 showed us that it really is posible to be warm during November and December without breaking the bank. My parents had the girls and we disappeared out of the cold, dark murk that is England during winter and we emerged blinking in to the African daytime that characterises the Canaries.

Quite why Spain has any territorial claim over The Canaries is anyone's guess: apart from the fact that the populace is almost entirely Spanish the whole kit and caboodle is much nearer Morocco than Spain. Why don't the Moroccans complain?

We stayed in the worst hotel either of us can recall: our room was ground floor, next to the pool table beside the swimming pool, and at midnight drunken horrors would shoot pool and fight outside. At 2am the Cockneys upstairs would try to kill each other until about 4am when we could finally get some sleep. Had we been older and a bit more assertive we would have ignored the Receptionist's repeated assertions that the Hotel was "full" (it clearly wasn't) and demanded to be moved to a quieter zone (of which there were plenty). However, being English we suffered in silence and spent most of the holiday out and about, swearing we would never go back. And thus far we haven't.

But Lanzarote is a very strange place: it's a volcano, basically. Most of the landscape was created by massive eruptions in the 1700s and as a result the island is mainly volcanic rock: incredibly abrasive, very stark and yet to be worn down by time and the elements.