when it's cold outside, I got the month of May

Wellington is once again living up to its reputation as a good city with bad weather. After a month of traveling around the North in generally good weather - warm and sunny more often than not - we have been getting a dose of winter here. Rain, wind and cold. Not the crisp cold of snow and ice, but the skin-chilling cold of air hovering just above the freezing point.
And for some reason, New Zealanders have decided they don't like easy methods of heating houses. Central heating is nearly unknown here. Even efforts to warm up with portable heaters are mostly useless - most people have radiant heaters without any fan to spread the air. This results mostly in warming the inch of so of air nearest the heater, and nothing else.

I asked a group of natives why they hate central heating, and got a vague answer involving macho posturing and suppressed masochism.
More fun was the response I got when I mentioned I hadn't seen a single dwelling with central heating, including our brand-new apartment building.
"There's central heating in Kelburn (a Wellington suburb)," one said.
"Parts of Thorndon," another added.
A few other areas of the city were mentioned, as were urban legend-type sightings: "My aunt's neighbor has central heating."
A comfortable indoor temperature, at least among the poor 20-something crowd in Wellington, inspires tales which sound like sailors swapping stories of mermaids a few hundred years back.
They didn't have central heating then, either, I suppose.