By any measure, we didn't have a summer this year. Since early May we have never had more than two consecutive days of sunshine, at least in our northern half of Britain - and our southern neighbours didn't fare much better.

That lack of sunshine has had an immense effect on us. We are used to reading about SAD - seasonal affective disorder. This is supposed to hit us in the dark days of January, when the lack of daylight lowers our general mood, and can even cause depression in susceptible people.

I must admit to having been a bit sceptical about SAD - until this year. Now we are seeing far more cases of depression than usual for a summer month - and I'm sure it's due to our constantly overcast skies. Gloomy skies, it seems, makes for gloomy people, regardless of the time of year.

So what's the answer? A good one would be to take a sunshine holiday - but that's possible only for the few who can afford it, and who haven't got children back at school. Most of us have to make the best of things here.

Plenty of light around us is the best answer. It's LIGHT, not ultraviolet (as in sunbeds), or heat, that matters, if you want to raise your mood. So make sure that there's plenty of light in your home and where you work. Draw back the curtains and open the blinds as wide as possible. If you can, redecorate with lightness in mind - bright lights and light wall coverings and furnishings in your main living room are good substitutes for sunshine.

But the best treatment is to get out into the daylight as much as possible. Because even the light that falls on your skin on a cloudy day will lift your spirits.

Follow that with a determination to get fit. Because taking exercise not only gets you fitter physically, it improves your mental state, too. Proof of that came in a study of more than 2,000 healthy Norwegian men aged from 40 to 60 followed for 22 years.

Anyone with heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, lung problems or any other serious illness was ruled out before the start, so that they would all have considered themselves healthy. The doctors then divided them up into four groups - based on how fit they were on exercise tests. They were then followed every few years, and their fitness measured each time.

Maybe because they had entered the study, and an interest was being taken in them, quite a few of the men improved their fitness over the years, moving up from lower to higher groups. After 22 years, the numbers of deaths in the four final fitness groups were compared.

The results were astonishing - there were far more deaths in the group who had remained relatively unfit (who performed worst in the exercise tests) than in the other three groups. And there were far fewer deaths (less than half) in the fittest group.

There are several lessons to be learned here. The first is that you can change from being a couch potato into a fit person without becoming a freak or fanatic. The second is that if you do it, you will not only feel much better, you cut your chances of an early death from heart disease and strokes by more than half.

The third is that improving your physical fitness is a better way to improve anyone's health than drugs and medicines. The fourth is that keeping fit wards off depression and low moods.

How did these men improve their fitness status? Remember these were Norwegians - with much less sunlight than we have. They walked, ski-ed, jogged, swam, rode cycles - whatever they enjoyed most.

On midsummer's day 1996, I stood at the North Cape, in the northernmost part of Norway, and saw the sun for about ten minutes. The locals were overjoyed - it was the first sunshine they had seen THAT YEAR!

Believe me, the only way they could keep happy was to be super-fit!

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.