I will never forget the moment I realised I had packed three pairs of flip-flops but somehow managed to leave my actual suitcase on the coach at Gran Canaria airport. There I stood in the arrivals hall, clutching a duty-free bag of almonds and wearing the same jeans I had flown in, watching my luggage disappear towards who knows where with a cheerful Spanish pensioner who had nabbed my seat by mistake. Welcome to San Bartolome de Tirajana in late November, where the sun still blazes but your dignity might not survive the journey intact.

The drive up from the airport took us through a landscape that felt almost deliberately confusing. One minute we were winding past banana plantations heavy with fruit, the next we were climbing into pine-scented hills where locals walked dogs in puffer jackets. November in Gran Canaria does this to you. It cannot decide if it is summer having a last laugh or winter tiptoeing in early. My partner kept checking her phone for the temperature, convinced the hire car dashboard was broken. Twenty-four degrees, it insisted, stubborn as a mule.

Our villa sat perched on a slope above the town, and I will be honest, my first thought was that someone had played a practical joke with the architecture. The place seemed to grow out of the hillside itself, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roofs stacked like a childs building blocks. The garden was simultaneously glorious and slightly tragic. Hibiscus still flared red and orange, defiant against the season, but the bougainvillea had begun its autumn sulk, dropping papery flowers across the patio like natures own confetti after a party that ended too soon. A single almond tree stood nearly bare, its branches scratching at the blue sky, and I found myself staring at it longer than I should have. There was something almost embarrassingly honest about its nakedness. I am not normally one for poetic musings about trees, but something in that late-autumn light gets under your skin.

The pool, naturally, was the first thing I tested. The water was not cold exactly, but it had that particular quality of November water, where your body says yes and your nerve endings say absolutely not. I did two lengths before retreating to a sun lounger with the theatrical exhaustion of a man who has swum the Channel. The cushion was warm, properly warm, which still surprises me about Gran Canaria in late autumn. You expect Mediterranean warmth, but this was different, gentler, like the island is easing you into winter rather than shocking you with summer heat.

By four oclock the light had shifted completely. Shadows stretched long across the terrace, and suddenly you remembered it was nearly December. I found myself putting on a jumper to sit outside, not because I was cold but because the quality of the air had changed, become thinner somehow. The locals seemed to feel it too. From our vantage point we could see San Bartolome below, and the evening dog walkers had multiplied, everyone making the most of that golden hour before the sun dropped behind the mountains.

Dinner was simple, bought from the small supermarket in town where the cashier seemed genuinely baffled by my attempts at Spanish. November tomatoes still tasted of something, which is more than you can say for British supermarket fare in high summer. We ate on the terrace as the sky turned that particular violet you only seem to get in the Canaries, watching the lights of Maspalomas flicker on in the distance, not visiting, just observing from our hillside perch.

That first evening, sitting there with my supermarket wine and my still-missing luggage, I felt something I had not expected. The season had caught me somehow, this in-between time when the island is neither one thing nor another. It makes you pause. You cannot charge about in November Gran Canaria the way you might in July. The heat will not let you, or rather, the lack of it will not let you pretend. You slow down. You notice the almond tree. You laugh at your own stupidity with the suitcase. You realise that sometimes arriving slightly broken, slightly ridiculous, is exactly the right way to begin.