Hard labour cures the January blues

LORD knows, January is dreary enough without having to humour all the self-loathers who binged over Christmas. Come the first of the month they ostentatiously renounce alcohol, fat and sugar and sign up for a gym. As the days go by they become more and more bad-tempered and an absolute pain to be around, but does it ever occur to them not to gorge their way through December in the first place? Not a bit of it.

Their new-found asceticism is particularly tiresome because a few jolly suppers and lunches with family and friends (well, maybe not family - we saw quite enough of them over Christmas) could make January much more fun, but self-loathers either refuse all invites or accept them and then ruin the atmosphere by glumly toying with a lettuce leaf and drinking sparkling water.

If they could just grasp that all they have to do to lose their festive pounds is knuckle down to some challenging physical labour, all our lives would be transformed.

You don't see many overweight professional gardeners, not among the ones who do their own hard graft anyway, and having just spent several hours helping to create the new rose garden at Kew Gardens, I know why. Marking out, cutting and rolling turf, wheelbarrowing the rolls and offcuts to the skips, edging the new beds and using a lifting iron to remove the surplus uses up hundreds of calories. My body was begging for a reprieve after four hours; in fact I was secretly relieved to be able to peel off and head for my day job.

This new area, just one of many projects to celebrate the gardens' 250th anniversary, is behind the Palm House; the previous, rather dull roses that lived there were removed a while back and the beds grassed over.

The new beds have been cut to an 1848 design by William Nesfield, the landscape gardener who, among other things, was responsible for the stupendous vistas that radiate out from the Palm House, and there's one small circular bed in particular that I feel quite proprietorial about

Planting up the parterre in front of the Palm House last autumn used up quite a lot of calories too. The summer bedding plants and grasses had to be whipped out and perennials potted up before the spring plants and bulbs could go in. At the end of an eight-hour day I could hardly climb on to my bike to cycle home. It was only the thought of a calorific vat of wine and barrel of peanuts that kept me going.

That and the smug certainty that none of those calories would end up on my hips.