But his seventies chart version of Bill Withers’ ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’, is a warning that ‘it nuh good to stay in a cold country too long’. Especially in the winter. And now even the Government agrees.

The New Year message from the Department of Health is that our health is seriously at risk when there ‘ain’t no sunshine’.

It’s all about Vitamin D – it comes from the sun. Black people 20-30 times more sunlight than white folk to get the required amount, but the further you live from the equator, the less likely it is that you’ll get it. Ergo: it nuh good to stay in a cold country too long.

You only have to look about you this January, as the freezing cold bites, to see that we are 20-30 times more miserable than white folk during this season. We are 20-30 times less likely to leave our homes to go raving in a snowstorm, and 20-30 times grumpier when we have to get out of our beds to go to work on a dark and icy morning.

We are also, arguably, 20-30 times more likely to develop rickets, deformities in bones, poor teeth formation, have stunted growth, and even prostate cancer than our white counterparts.

So why do we stay? We must need our heads tested. This might explain the latest report by the Healthcare Commission, which has once again highlighted the disproportionate number of people from black communities who are in-patients in mental health institutions.

We make up just two per cent of the UK population, but almost nine per cent of the population of mental health in-patients. The rates of referral from the criminal justice system is partly to blame, it's sheer ‘institutional racism’. Then, of course, there is the general racism in society, which does your head in anyway. But we can't forget the effect of lack of sunshine.

Of course, English people have been telling us in sly little ways for years that we need to go back to our ‘own country’, only we didn’t realise it was for our own good. Back in the seventies they took every opportunity to steal a surreptitious rub of our curly hair for good luck. And we got even more cheesed off when they called us ‘Sunshine’. How were we to know that they were actually advising us to go ‘back home’ for our own health?

White people of course prefer a happy, smiling negro to a miserable and grumpy, angry black Brit. So it’s no surprise that Barbados has become the world’s number one billion dollar hot spot for celebrities who are looking for some of that ‘sunshine vitamin’ and to get away from us all at this time of the year.

Mick Jagger, Sting, the Beckhams and the Blairs are regular visitors to the island. Maybe we need to take this ‘sun chasing’ thing a lot more seriously!