Ugh, will it EVER get light today?

Answer, No, if the weather forecast is anything to go by. We are set in for a day of 8/8 cloud cover and day-long drizzle. Should be fun walking the dog in this...

Like many people in the northern hemisphere, I suffer from SAD - Seasonal Affective Disorder. You may know already if you've got this  because it means you basically want to hibernate all winter - you can't wake up, you can't keep your eyes open, you can't get enough sleep no matter how much you sleep, you eat lots and gain weight, and you generally feel low and depressed. Uncontrollable, reasonless weeping is another clue. February is about the worst month, but December and January are no picnic either.

It was my doctor, some 12 years ago, who noticed the connection between my depression and winter. As, once again, I sat in his office, weeping and sniffling, he looked thoughtful and started tapping into his computer. "Do you realise?" he said, "that you come in for your anti-depressants every year between September 15th and October 15th? It's like clockwork. When do you stop taking them?"

"April," I said. "Come to think of it, it's April every year."

On that occasion, I departed from his office with a prescription for MAOIs - the old-fashioned type with which you couldn't eat yeast and red wine and Twiglets, but the connection with winter was too strong to ignore so I decided to buy a lightbox. Like many people, I'd heard about them but been put off by the price - even then they cost over £300 and good ones haven't gotten a deal cheaper, considering all it is, is a box full of daylight-spectrum bulbs. But just a few days of using it and I was feeling like a different person.

Since then, I've managed without anti-depressants in winter but instead chosen to deal with my SAD by other means. Firstly there is the lightbox, to which I am glued like Linus with his blanket all winter, and even on dull days in summer. For years, it was set on timer to come on at 5.45 in the morning, right behind my head as I lay in bed, and I would then sit and read till about 7.30, then get up and go about my day - leaving for work at 8.00 or 8.30. This was enough light to keep me going throughout the working day, but now that I work from home, so I have my lightbox set up on near my workstation and it's on all day, but set a little further away.

The cats love this thing - in fact I've lost one to a cat snuggling up to it and pushing it off the desk.

In case you've never seen one, a lightbox gives out 'full spectrum' light that imitates daylight. It's a bright white light that is very strong - usually about 10,000 lux - and you have to sit within about 18 inches to get the full benefit. The further away you sit, the longer you must use it.

Our second mode of attack is to have daylight fluorescents all over the house, particularly in the office, where there's a bank of five of them. Daylight fluorescents aren't full spectrum but they're a good blue light that makes you feel like you're in the open, as opposed to the greenish pall of normal fluorescents.

Nowadays, to rid myself of that sluggish got-to-hibernate feeling in the mornings, I also have a Lumie Body Clock. This comes on gradually, like dawn, over the course of 90 minutes and the theory is that by the time the alarm actually rings, you're properly awake. It is a hell of a lot better than being woken by the alarm - you wake up gradually and naturally, as if being woken by the sun. Like the lightbox, it gets the feline seal of approval and half the time my view of it is blocked by a cat, soaking up the false dawn. If you live in the US, there are daylight alarms by Hammacher Schlemmer that even wake you up with nice smells, but sadly these aren't available in Europe.

One further trick for banishing winter is kind of corny, but it also works - birdsong on a CD. I keep this playing all day long in winter, and so cozy and bright is our office, with its yellow blinds, tweeting birds and brilliant lighting, that it can be a real shock to walk out onto the landing and find it's a dark winter day outside.

The final tip, if you have an IPhone, is to download a background sounds app. Rather than an alarm clock, these days we're awoken by 45 minutes of dawn chorus that sounds totally genuine, followed, at 8.00, by the sound of a Japanese wooden flute. A better way to greet the day... 

Came across a concept here that I find kind of strange - 'gaining'. People who want to gain as much weight as possible.

Rather like trying to lose as much weight at possible, this seems rather unhealthy to me. I would imagine that it's better to stay at a stable, natural weight for your height and level of activity rather than beating yourself up one way or the other. And surely deliberately making yourself obese will kill you in the long run?

Still, interesting reading, especially for anyone who's ever felt browbeaten by the diet brigade - so many women diet down to 7-10 pounds lower than they're really happy with, and some gainers, it would seem, eat very healthily, just too much of it.

Weight, though, is one of those things that is always a question of balance. For instance, I gained about seven pounds over Christmas. This is normal - I gain at least this much every year, then shed it again in the spring. But this year I kept an eye on it because last year I gained 27 pounds, due to the winter being very cold - and I didn't manage to shift it all.

A modest amount of winter weight gain, I always feel, is a natural process, and one that I observe with my animals, who all plump up quite deliciously in the winter months, then get skinny again as soon as the weather gets warmer. 

But only when the weather is crying out for salads and gazpacho will losing weight be a natural process, not a starvation diet. And the kinds of 7km walk I did last Sunday also help it to drop off fairly easily.

For me, the balancing act is that I look my absolute best at 8st 3lb (optimum weight for my height), but can't be arsed because that means watching every damn thing I eat. At 8st 12lb I can eat everything I like, but feel a bit too flabby. Maybe 8st 7lb will be a good compromise this summer - and the good news on that is that suddenly a whole raft of my clothes that didn't get worn last year would become available again as if they were new. 

The UN has warned that AIDS is now the biggest killer worldwide of women of reproductive age.

One reason is that the majority of women worldwide - some 70 per cent - have at some point been forced to have unprotected sex. Fundamentally, new research shows, it is men's violence against women that is leading to the rise in AIDS. 

A bigger argument for the empowerment of women could scarcely be thought of. Women throughout history have been subject to violence and rape at the hands of men, and now that can lead not only to injury, unwanted pregnancy and psychological trauma, but also to death at an early age.

It is sometimes easy for us to forget this in the West, where we kid ourselves that we're 'equal', but in much of the world, women cannot even control the most basic matters about their own lives such as their reproductive rights, who they have sex with, whom they marry, how they work or whether they can own property.  

In South Africa - one of the most 'macho' nations in the world - HIV infection is three times more common in young women than in young men, partly due to the prevalence of rape in that society. And in sub-Saharan Africa, the biggest risk factors for AIDS are not to be gay, promiscuous or an intravenous drug user but to be a young married woman. Marriage effectively makes a woman a chattel of her husband in many societies, and their subordinate position makes it impossible for women to insist on safe sex.

In the light of this new research, the UN says it will now incorporate action against violence against women into its worldwide programme to conquer HIV.

Yesterday was the anniversary of the introduction of food rationing in the UK, and what a shock to find that Marguerite Patten, doyenne of cookery writers, is still alive and kicking. I've got a couple of her cookery books.

My parents both served in the war, but for those in civilian life, food rationing is one of the things they remember with the least fondness. Bad enough having bombs dropped on you, your kids sent away for safety, your spouse training in some army camp, without food itself being difficult to obtain. 

Well, that's the received opinion, but in my family, it's taken with a pinch of salt. One reason that food rationing was introduced, let us remember, was that when the general mobilisation took place, so many men were found to be unfit for service due to malnutrition.

The pale, spavined, rickety product of a 10-year economic depression - a time when many people suffered from anaemia due to lack of meat, there was no NHS so ailments went untreated, and most people did grinding manual labour - came as a shock to the authorities.

They instantly instituted a rationing programme to bring Britain UP to standard, as well as prevent waste and food hoarding. For my family, as for many other working families, they had never eaten so WELL.

Certainly the diet was boring. Without our massive empire to exploit, Britons suddenly had to grow our own food instead of nicking it from people we'd conquered, and we'd halfway forgotten how to do it. We learned quickly, though, and God bless the Ministry of Food's efficiency in ensuring its fair distribution and that the population didn't starve to death.

I searched online for articles about the subject yesterday and found a few of those gosh-wow-how-DID-they-manage-without-microwaves? type features so beloved of the tabloids as if we all slept on swansdown. In this kind of feature, people follow the wartime diet for a week, suffer the ghastly pangs of Diet Coke withdrawal and end by wondering how on earth people coped without mooli and garangal.

Well, they didn't all live on powdered egg and Spam, I tell you what. A lot of them did what my family did: they poached, they kept chickens on any spare bit of ground, or a pig out the back; they planted potatoes; they learned to stretch meat; they grew their own herbs, they made bread pudding and Poor Knights of Windsor. In fact, that's how I grew up too, in the 60s and 70s, eating pheasant full of buckshot, jugged hare poached by my dad's workmates and fish caught by the local Jehovah's Witnesses (don't ask me why - they had their own boat).

One writer, eating a Woolton pie (a kind of shepherd's pie with root veg instead of meat, shown at top left) proclaimed it as tasting like cheesy slime. No it bloody doesn't. A properly cooked Woolton pie is really tasty, but you have to know how to cook, not just take the top off an M&S ready meal. Ye gods. Have Britons really turned into such a bunch of wimps? Two rashers of bacon a week? A bar of chocolate a week? That's all we eat in this house to this day. 

Oh well, enough rant. It seems a far cry from then to Good New Days of today, when we chuck a third of our food in bins and leave it to rot.  So much cleverer than our ancestors, drowning in a sea of our own plenty...

If you do even the most cursory study into what you, personally, can do to save the planet and benefit your health at the same time, it becomes uncomfortably apparent that you should probably give up meat.

All in all, meat is a pretty bad idea. Animal fats are the biggest cause of coronary heart disease in the west. Cows and pigs bred for meat use up a huge amount of land that could be put to agricultural use. Obtaining meat involves slaughtering the animal, to its inevitable suffering. Acres of Brazilian rainforest are lost every day in order to put land to meat production - mainly for populations that are already obese. 

Well, we all know the math. 

The problem for the average Brit is that our whole cuisine is founded on meat. And most of us enjoy meat. There is something about getting your gnashers round a nice juicy steak that a carrot burger just can't match. But at the same time, most of us don't relish the idea of the animal suffering so that we can eat it. So we do that fancy mental two-step that enables us to carry on doing something we know at heart is morally reprehensible.

Our Christian heritage is also a problem. Unlike some other religions, there has never been a moral imperative in Christianity to avoid meat in the modern era. Fish on Fridays is an idea long-gone, and for many centuries, access to meat for many people was so rare in any case that choosing to avoid it was not an issue. People ate meat whenever they could get their hands on it.

That situation is markedly different in other parts of the world. Jains in India, for instance, abstain from all meat and fish on the principles of non-violence. They also don't eat eggs; honey; any vegetable that 'bleeds' like blood when it's cut; root vegetables, in case insects are killed when they're harvested; or after sunset - in case insects are fatally drawn to the lamplight. One way or another, I sometimes wonder what Jains actually have left to live on. 

However, the rich tradition of vegetarianism that results from these strictures, and is found elsewhere in the East, particularly wherever there is a Buddhist tradition, results in a fabulous vegetarian cuisine - something we lack in the west. Eating veggie meals becomes positively enticing when a big Thali is laid out before you.

I would therefore advise anyone who wants to cut down their meat consumption to look to other cuisines for vegetarian inspiration, especially Indian. And if not Indian, then Mexican, or Spanish, or French, or Italian - all of these traditions have excellent veggie meals, such as pizza, ratatouille, chilli, guacamole etc, which are eaten simply as part of the cuisine, not as poor substitutes for meat-based meals, as so much British vegetarian cuisine seems to be. 

You could start by having one veggie day a week. In this house, it's usually Wednesday - the mid-week meal - and we'll generally have something like a ratatouille or a non-meat chilli, or a chickpea curry.

Even if you never progress further than this and remain a meat-eater the rest of the week, you have just dramatically reduced your carbon footprint - and that's something worth aiming for.