Your Horoscopes
Aries - You've had a run of terrible luck recently, haven't you? Car trouble, house repairs, poorly cut fingernails which keep getting caught on your sweater. Worst of all has been the marital difficulties you and your heavily pregnant wife have been going through. Do not worry. All of these problems will come to an end when your wife unexpectedly gives birth to a large talking owl, thus providing you and your family with unimaginable wealth. Your days are passed in expensive restaurants, lavish hotel rooms, and highly exclusive nightclubs whilst the owl - whose personality seems to be some sort of winning combination of Stephen Fry, David Attenborough and Michael Palin - makes countless appearances on chat shows. Tragedy is never far away, however, and you will die, three days from now, when you will make an ill-fated attempt to recreate the well-known 'falling through the bar' gag, made famous in the 'Yuppy Love' episode of Only Fools and Horse, in a bid to impress a waitress, skewering yourself through the eye with shards of a champagne flute. The owl will read at your funeral and pronounce your name incorrectly.
Taurus - 'Aargh! Oh my god! Aaargh!' That's you, isn't it? The churning routine of your day-to-day existence is causing you to feel trapped and panicky. But fear not. Adventure awaits! In an act of defiance against this grinding and lonely tedium which so marks your life you will decide to give yourself over to the sea. You join the commercial navy, set sail for the Indies and swiftly make your way up the ranks. Your crew love you, regularly toast their wassail in your honour and compose shanties in which you feature as a hero-figure. This will come to a sudden halt when a joke you make - about being 'shipshape' - creates a moment of silence so awkward that the crew are left with no alternative but to sling you into the hold, cut off your arms, legs and one of your buttocks, and take turns urinating on you, or, as they call it, 'hosing out the shame'. You will survive however, and you make a new life for yourself on dry land as a celebrity survivor. Sadly, this too comes to an end when you die in front of millions, three days from now, when Adrian Chiles allows guest co-presenter Sue Pollard to attempt her infamous 'William Tell trick' on you live on the One Show. She then performs a vigorous song and dance routine over the closing credits with your bleeding corpse in the foreground. No-one rings in to complain.
Gemini - Family, eh? They're a miserable bunch of thieving cretins, their resemblance to you non-existent, and the love and generosity you show them rarely reciprocated. They're usually best avoided. However, whilst walking your dog and musing on how incredibly unhappy you are you will see a minibus pass by in which both your parents are naked, cackling hysterically and smearing themselves with mincemeat. This will set off a chain of long-repressed memories in which you recall that your parents regularly behaved in this way and, until fairly recently, you considered it normal. Is this the key to all your worldly sufferings? You resolve that from now on you too will regularly and unashamedly slather yourself with pie-filling and, as a consequence, your life will be one of joy and liberation. Sadly it doesn't work and you will die, three days from now, from cardiac failure, alone, hunched at the bottom of your stairs, covered in the syrup from a can of pear-halves so cheap even your dog won't lick you clean. All of the paramedics will laugh when they find you and one of them will pose next to your glazed and withered corpse for a photograph which he will then post onto Facebook so that all the world can join in on the joke that is you.
Cancer - Hey, misery-balls! Don't you think it's time you turned that frown upside down? After a period of suicidal thoughts inducing money woes, things are finally about to begin to look up. A surprise meeting with ITV heads of production will result in you being commissioned to compose a new theme tune for an upcoming gameshow entitled 'Paul Ross's They Think It's All Over... There's Dogs On The Pitch!' the set-up for which is that Paul Ross referees a full length game of football but, after an hour, thirty excited dogs are let loose onto the pitch. Your glory will be short-lived however, and you'll die, three days from now, when you attend the filming of the gameshow and Quentin Letts, one of the celebrity contestants, has one of his characteristic hissy-strops and kicks an enormous doberman, sending it flailing angrily in your direction. The music you have thus far composed will be performed at your funeral on a Casio by Letts. The dog will also die during the fracas and more people will attend its funeral than yours.
Leo - Take a deep, beautiful breath of this rose-scented world, my friend - is that love is in the air? After a recent string of depressingly squalid and meaningless one-night stands you will take a stroll past the docks to the Tipsy Toad off-licence in order to buy some cheap rum with which you plan to dowse your raging self-loathing whilst spending the evening alone, eating some out-of-date Special K you got cheap from the corner shop, watching repeats of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, weeping, and tossing yourself raw. It will be just like any other weekday evening. Or will it? No, it will not. Fate will intervene and your plans will be disrupted when you find yourself set upon by a band of young tracksuited girls who surround you, demand your phone and, when you hand it over to them, then use it to make videos of themselves kicking you repeatedly in the groin and calling you 'a paedo gay'. This will go on for well over half an hour. Finally they'll grow bored and disperse, taking your phone and your rum with them. You trudge home. When you get there you find the footage of your assault is already a YouTube sensation. Depressed beyond belief, you find an abandoned multistorey car-park and hang yourself, three days from now, but not before taking your pants off and sticking a wedge of orange into your mouth in order to make your demise look, to whoever finds you and has to cut you down, less like the dismal end of a drab and disappointing existence it truly is and more some kind of fatal wanking mishap.
Virgo - Is it maybe time to go for that career change you've been thinking about? Yesterday someone stapled a crudely drawn picture of some breasts to your tie so that it hung in front of your chest, making them look like real breasts. You didn't even notice till three o'clock. You thought everyone was smiling at you because they liked you and thought you were a nice guy. But no, they were laughing at you. At your cartoon tits. And then today you had to call for help after you tried to change the toner ribbon on the fax machine and accidentally got the crotch of your trousers caught up in the sheet-feed, didn't you? Everyone came in to look at you and laugh. Tomorrow you will spill coffee down your shirt, making your nipple stick out visibly through the fabric. And you will hear a rumour, which has apparently been doing the rounds for months, that you have a gynaecological freakism, specifically one testicle beneath your penis and one above. Your nickname will be 'Burger Cock'. Things will culminate when you sign for a large consignment of office stationery which is being delivered and which then tumbles onto you, pinning you to the floor. Again you call for help, but people only come to laugh at you, stamp their heels into your one protruding hand, and to occasionally defecate joylessly between the gaps in the rubble of stationery which covers you. You pass away, about three days from now, probably from malnutrition and spinal injuries, but the coroner doesn't bother finding out for sure. At your funeral the eulogising minister accidentally refers to you as 'Burger Cock' and everyone laughs. Even your parents.
Libra - Beware the apparent good-will of others, especially in the workplace. Willie Harrison - he seems nice enough, doesn't he? He gave you a Tic-Tac this morning and laughed at your impression of Rolf Harris even though it was completely rubbish. What a nice guy! Not that nice, my fine feathered friend. He's actually stealing pound coins from your coat pocket when you go to the toilet. He uses the money he accrues to buy the very Tic-Tacs he then offers you. And remember when you found all those damp tissues in your hood that one time? That was him. What about Angela Lewis? She likes you, maybe even has a bit of a crush on you. She's even been round to your house once. She must be okay. Wrong again. Her names for you are 'prick-stoat', 'smeg-gums' and 'dog-fister' . She was only round at your place as a dare to see how long she could stomach your halitosis-pit of an abode before running out the door barfing all over the place. Her boyfriend was even outside with a stop-watch. Both of them had a night of sweaty, animalistic sex later that night whilst laughing into each other's faces at how much of a loser they both thought you were. 'Okay, okay!' I hear you screech, 'What about Dave Pope? Seems okay, maybe a bit weird but basically a decent guy?' Wrong again, smeg-gums. Remember when he took a photo of you once when you were at work? You thought it was odd at the time - why would anyone want a photo of you sat at your desk, eating Malteasers with the sun in your eyes? - but he didn't explain himself and you forgot about it pretty quickly. You thought: he probably has a good enough reason for doing that. But that blurred picture of your squinty-eyed, chocolate-and-honeycomb-crammed face has been blown up to life-size proportions by Dave Pope at home. He's sellotaped it on top of a life-size photo of a naked lady on his wardrobe. He spends his evenings holding intense candlelit 'conversations' in the nude with this mock-up of a lady-you. Worst of all, he's hacked into the spreadsheets you're supposed to be showing in a presentation to the board on Tuesday. When you load up your Powerpoint slides, instead of presenting an Excel graph detailing your estimates for next year's like-for-like fiscal depreciation figures, you'll find yourself projecting crudely photoshopped images of yourself sucking off a pony whilst Dave Pope - or, more specifically, Dave Pope's head on a horse's body - stands watching in a nearby paddock. You will immediately challenge Pope and die, three days from now, when he corners you in the stationery cupboard and spends his lunch-hour hammering broken glass into your prostate. You final thought will be: 'This is not as painful as I would have imagined.' Nevertheless, it will obviously be very very painful.
Scorpio - The tension between you and a loved one will soon be resolved. After months of bad-tempered awkwardness between you and your wife, you will finally learn the truth when you return home from work early. Your wife will not be in the house as you expect her to be. Surprised, but not yet alarmed, you will turn on the television to see that ITV have resurrected Supermarket Sweep, replacing original host Dale Winton with Neil and Christine Hamilton both dressed in horn-adorned PVC gimp-nurse outfits, and altering the location from some Co-Op in Nottingham to a place called 'Herr Bushell's Dildo Emporium' in Tiger Bay. You watch in astonishment as the Hamiltons introduce your wife and a young man who's with her as contestants; in horror as they dash round the shelves, gathering a mountain of docking harnesses, anal beads, and ben wah balls in their trolley; and in nightmarish disbelief as they dramatically discard their collection of items, so caught up are they in the lust-inducing surroundings, and begin rutting feverishly at the checkout, goaded on by the Hamiltons and the clapping-along-to-the-music audience. In a state of shocked delirium you totter back out of your house, across the busy A road which your garden backs out onto, over the electrified train-lines at the corner, and out into the dark, wolves-ridden Moors. You've decided you're turning your back on our modern society. Civilization, you think, has entered its end-stages. Your horribly mangled relationship is merely a microcosm of this sad, undeniable truth. In this primitive, primordial landscape you will, you're certain, meet like-minded souls, intent on rebuilding humanity. Sadly, all you meet are a few intrepid Morlocks who flay your skin off with their mandibles, feast messily on your internal organs and drag your bones down to their underground lair to be used as tokens with which to barter with the Mole People. And all in three days time.
Sagittarius - Prepare to de-tune your sex-radio from 'Self FM' and get ready to set your brain-stick to 'lady-love'. At a party you will find yourself talking to a beautiful young woman. She seems a little out of your league but somehow you've managed to keep her just about interested. However, a brief lag in the conversation causes you to panic and, without knowing what you're saying, you tell her, in a hushed voice, that you're Bowie Simpipe, the world-renowned masked souspahone player whose true identity is one of the most well-kept and most sought-after secrets in the entire sousaphone-entertainment industry. High on the sense of almighty power this lie - and the subsequent tissue of further lies it engenders - leads you to ask her back to your flat. Panic again strikes when you arrive and realise that, although you have a sousaphone resting in the corner of your bedroom, its purpose is entirely decorative and you've not once attempted to play the thing. The girl, of course, is eager to hear some of Simpipe's univerally-recognized melodies. Not only this, she wants to see the iconic mask Simpipe is recognised by: a one-of-a-kind affair which can only be described as 'a horse trying to eat a whistle-shaped loaf of raisin-bread'. Your attempts at diluting her sense of impending wonder by saying things like 'I burned my main pumping-finger' and 'My lips aren't really the right kind of lips at the moment' will only work for so long. Eventually, you'll find yourself picking the sousaphone up, clamping your eyes shut and making the sort of 'musical' gestures you've seen the real Simpipe do when playing. Incredibly, you'll find not only is your sousaphone-playing credibly half-decent, it's actually amazing. You're playing the fucking thing! You're even better than that toss-skid Simpipe! Your playing is so fantastic, you notice, that the girl literally begins to swoon. Within minutes she's passed out on your carpet, her wine spilled across your Yomut rug, her hair trailing in the little bowl of Pringles you'd put out. To your dismay you learn, later when you're at the hospital, that the swooning wasn't due to your soul-tapping harmonies, but due to chronic asthma which your choice of heavily salted snack had exacerbated to the point of her semi-instant death. You'll be arrested, charged, found guilty of murder and, in a politically motivated sentence, three days from now, eaten alive by an armoured Hazel Blears, a trussed-up Jon Cruddas and a naked Hilary Benn. The one who manages to ingest the most of your body tissue will be declared 'emperor' and will be given a crown made from your veins.
Aquarius - Fizz! Plop! Splurt! Hear that? Sound like a bunch of affable, childlike noises, don't they? Do not be fooled, however. In reality, what you're hearing is the sound of pure, misery-pissing evil raking its long yellowing fingernails-of-fate down the blackboard that is your very soul. A dark secret from your past, one which you've been keeping nestled in the blackest crevice-hole of your heart, tethered there by rope fashioned from steely denial and rusty manacles forged from molten secret shame, will writhe itself loose and come staggering out into the daylight of the innocuous life you've built for yourself, waggling its grimy, tattered limb-stumps all over your nice clean kitchen counter-tops, belching its black fart-clouds of vomit-gas across your curtains, thwacking its sweaty, scaly member up and down your banister leaving big cock-shaped grease-marks for all to see. This is both a metaphor for what is going to happen and the literal reality. That's right: the hideous mutant twin brother who you've kept tied to the immersion heater in the loft will grow tired of the nightly bucketloads of leftovers-and-water slurry you've secretly been providing him with when the rest of your family are in bed, tired of the radio you keep up there constantly tuned to Radio 3 in attempt to 'civilize' the beast, and, most of all, tired of the hours of scalding pain being perpetually chained against a family-home's immersion heater involves. Maurice, for that is the name he has chosen for himself, will wriggle free and descend from his airless dust-tomb, rifle through your wardrobe to find something more suitable to wear than the Def Leppard t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, the humiliatingly giant nappy and the ludicrously varied selection of hats you gave him when you first locked him away all those years ago, and then appear - hunched, dribbling, but looking now rather dapper - in your living-room doorway whilst you're sitting with your family, sharing a battenberg, watching The Bill and maybe playing with the dog (that bit's somewhat cloudy - it could be a hairy pig you're playing with). A violent, scatological fray will then break out, your freakish double pursuing you around the room, tossing furniture against walls and puking bile down his front; you simultaneously attempting to make a heartfelt explanation-cum-confession to your wife and children whilst noisily soiling yourself in terror. Although your children will seem angry, unimaginably disturbed and sickened - not to mention even facially scarred by the Maurice-beast's acid barf-spray - your wife will appear more forgiving. She'll instruct your children, mid-rampage, to restrain your brother. They'll lash him to the piano stool by his eye-stalks, his sweat instantly dissolving the silk upholstery and the brocade manchette, his thrashing pincer-hands further ruining their innocent faces, and his intermittent vomiting now yielding only chunks of organ amid a black dribble of blood. Your wife will take off one of her shoes and proceed to batter Maurice repeatedly, occasionally shriek hoarsely to you and the kids to join in. You will all take off your shoes and take turns hitting Maurice with them until his head will begin to look like a limp and bruised flesh-flannel draped over a neck-stump. You'll all stop and look at one another, wild-eyed and breathless. You'll think: yes, yes! This ritual-esque group-murder we've committed together will, from now on, give us all a new bond, make us a stronger family unit: after this we can do anything! Later, when you've all managed to stop yourselves from cackling manically and, alternately, weeping and shivering inconsolably at what you've done, and you're all helping to dig Maurice's grave in the back garden, these feelings will give way to an intensely clarified sense of remorse, guilt and shame, all of which will become clarified even further when you look at your children, now so horribly deformed, both inside and out, that they resemble Maurice more than they ever will yourself. You'll think: who was the real monster here? Late that night, after everyone's talked things over a bit, agreed to keep the frenzied execution that went on a family secret, and had some calming fish and chips (you will also have mushy peas but will be unable to finish them due to their resemblance to your late twin), you'll creep out of bed, silently leave the house and begin walk the streets in search of solace. After much wandering, soul-searching and weeping you'll come to a small church on a street corner, its windows dimly lit by soft candlelight. You'll enter, make your way down the aisle and sit down in the confession box where you'll blurt out the whole story - the chaining-up, the years of deception, the grisly murder - at the end of which you'll feel much better. Your relief is short-lived, however, as the kindly priest whose outline you thought was nodding sagely behind the grille turns out to actually be a hideous mutant-creature himself who was not nodding at all but writhing about in mutant-ecstasy at the horrible things he's planning to do to you. You'll die, three days from now, when he tears through the thin lattice-wall, turns you, screaming for mercy, upside down to suck all your organs through your anus and then toys with your desiccated puppet-like corpse á la Weekend At Bernie's, making you repeatedly hit yourself in the face for hours on end. He'll then pull your head off and sprint off into the night to show it off to his other mutant-friends and use it to do a string of hilarious 'glove puppet' gags, after which he'll be declared 'King Chud'. In the morning your wife and kids will decide your disappearance should also be kept a family secret and will celebrate by going to McDonalds for apple pies, you complete bastard.
Taurus - 'Aargh! Oh my god! Aaargh!' That's you, isn't it? The churning routine of your day-to-day existence is causing you to feel trapped and panicky. But fear not. Adventure awaits! In an act of defiance against this grinding and lonely tedium which so marks your life you will decide to give yourself over to the sea. You join the commercial navy, set sail for the Indies and swiftly make your way up the ranks. Your crew love you, regularly toast their wassail in your honour and compose shanties in which you feature as a hero-figure. This will come to a sudden halt when a joke you make - about being 'shipshape' - creates a moment of silence so awkward that the crew are left with no alternative but to sling you into the hold, cut off your arms, legs and one of your buttocks, and take turns urinating on you, or, as they call it, 'hosing out the shame'. You will survive however, and you make a new life for yourself on dry land as a celebrity survivor. Sadly, this too comes to an end when you die in front of millions, three days from now, when Adrian Chiles allows guest co-presenter Sue Pollard to attempt her infamous 'William Tell trick' on you live on the One Show. She then performs a vigorous song and dance routine over the closing credits with your bleeding corpse in the foreground. No-one rings in to complain.
Gemini - Family, eh? They're a miserable bunch of thieving cretins, their resemblance to you non-existent, and the love and generosity you show them rarely reciprocated. They're usually best avoided. However, whilst walking your dog and musing on how incredibly unhappy you are you will see a minibus pass by in which both your parents are naked, cackling hysterically and smearing themselves with mincemeat. This will set off a chain of long-repressed memories in which you recall that your parents regularly behaved in this way and, until fairly recently, you considered it normal. Is this the key to all your worldly sufferings? You resolve that from now on you too will regularly and unashamedly slather yourself with pie-filling and, as a consequence, your life will be one of joy and liberation. Sadly it doesn't work and you will die, three days from now, from cardiac failure, alone, hunched at the bottom of your stairs, covered in the syrup from a can of pear-halves so cheap even your dog won't lick you clean. All of the paramedics will laugh when they find you and one of them will pose next to your glazed and withered corpse for a photograph which he will then post onto Facebook so that all the world can join in on the joke that is you.
Cancer - Hey, misery-balls! Don't you think it's time you turned that frown upside down? After a period of suicidal thoughts inducing money woes, things are finally about to begin to look up. A surprise meeting with ITV heads of production will result in you being commissioned to compose a new theme tune for an upcoming gameshow entitled 'Paul Ross's They Think It's All Over... There's Dogs On The Pitch!' the set-up for which is that Paul Ross referees a full length game of football but, after an hour, thirty excited dogs are let loose onto the pitch. Your glory will be short-lived however, and you'll die, three days from now, when you attend the filming of the gameshow and Quentin Letts, one of the celebrity contestants, has one of his characteristic hissy-strops and kicks an enormous doberman, sending it flailing angrily in your direction. The music you have thus far composed will be performed at your funeral on a Casio by Letts. The dog will also die during the fracas and more people will attend its funeral than yours.
Leo - Take a deep, beautiful breath of this rose-scented world, my friend - is that love is in the air? After a recent string of depressingly squalid and meaningless one-night stands you will take a stroll past the docks to the Tipsy Toad off-licence in order to buy some cheap rum with which you plan to dowse your raging self-loathing whilst spending the evening alone, eating some out-of-date Special K you got cheap from the corner shop, watching repeats of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, weeping, and tossing yourself raw. It will be just like any other weekday evening. Or will it? No, it will not. Fate will intervene and your plans will be disrupted when you find yourself set upon by a band of young tracksuited girls who surround you, demand your phone and, when you hand it over to them, then use it to make videos of themselves kicking you repeatedly in the groin and calling you 'a paedo gay'. This will go on for well over half an hour. Finally they'll grow bored and disperse, taking your phone and your rum with them. You trudge home. When you get there you find the footage of your assault is already a YouTube sensation. Depressed beyond belief, you find an abandoned multistorey car-park and hang yourself, three days from now, but not before taking your pants off and sticking a wedge of orange into your mouth in order to make your demise look, to whoever finds you and has to cut you down, less like the dismal end of a drab and disappointing existence it truly is and more some kind of fatal wanking mishap.
Virgo - Is it maybe time to go for that career change you've been thinking about? Yesterday someone stapled a crudely drawn picture of some breasts to your tie so that it hung in front of your chest, making them look like real breasts. You didn't even notice till three o'clock. You thought everyone was smiling at you because they liked you and thought you were a nice guy. But no, they were laughing at you. At your cartoon tits. And then today you had to call for help after you tried to change the toner ribbon on the fax machine and accidentally got the crotch of your trousers caught up in the sheet-feed, didn't you? Everyone came in to look at you and laugh. Tomorrow you will spill coffee down your shirt, making your nipple stick out visibly through the fabric. And you will hear a rumour, which has apparently been doing the rounds for months, that you have a gynaecological freakism, specifically one testicle beneath your penis and one above. Your nickname will be 'Burger Cock'. Things will culminate when you sign for a large consignment of office stationery which is being delivered and which then tumbles onto you, pinning you to the floor. Again you call for help, but people only come to laugh at you, stamp their heels into your one protruding hand, and to occasionally defecate joylessly between the gaps in the rubble of stationery which covers you. You pass away, about three days from now, probably from malnutrition and spinal injuries, but the coroner doesn't bother finding out for sure. At your funeral the eulogising minister accidentally refers to you as 'Burger Cock' and everyone laughs. Even your parents.
Libra - Beware the apparent good-will of others, especially in the workplace. Willie Harrison - he seems nice enough, doesn't he? He gave you a Tic-Tac this morning and laughed at your impression of Rolf Harris even though it was completely rubbish. What a nice guy! Not that nice, my fine feathered friend. He's actually stealing pound coins from your coat pocket when you go to the toilet. He uses the money he accrues to buy the very Tic-Tacs he then offers you. And remember when you found all those damp tissues in your hood that one time? That was him. What about Angela Lewis? She likes you, maybe even has a bit of a crush on you. She's even been round to your house once. She must be okay. Wrong again. Her names for you are 'prick-stoat', 'smeg-gums' and 'dog-fister' . She was only round at your place as a dare to see how long she could stomach your halitosis-pit of an abode before running out the door barfing all over the place. Her boyfriend was even outside with a stop-watch. Both of them had a night of sweaty, animalistic sex later that night whilst laughing into each other's faces at how much of a loser they both thought you were. 'Okay, okay!' I hear you screech, 'What about Dave Pope? Seems okay, maybe a bit weird but basically a decent guy?' Wrong again, smeg-gums. Remember when he took a photo of you once when you were at work? You thought it was odd at the time - why would anyone want a photo of you sat at your desk, eating Malteasers with the sun in your eyes? - but he didn't explain himself and you forgot about it pretty quickly. You thought: he probably has a good enough reason for doing that. But that blurred picture of your squinty-eyed, chocolate-and-honeycomb-crammed face has been blown up to life-size proportions by Dave Pope at home. He's sellotaped it on top of a life-size photo of a naked lady on his wardrobe. He spends his evenings holding intense candlelit 'conversations' in the nude with this mock-up of a lady-you. Worst of all, he's hacked into the spreadsheets you're supposed to be showing in a presentation to the board on Tuesday. When you load up your Powerpoint slides, instead of presenting an Excel graph detailing your estimates for next year's like-for-like fiscal depreciation figures, you'll find yourself projecting crudely photoshopped images of yourself sucking off a pony whilst Dave Pope - or, more specifically, Dave Pope's head on a horse's body - stands watching in a nearby paddock. You will immediately challenge Pope and die, three days from now, when he corners you in the stationery cupboard and spends his lunch-hour hammering broken glass into your prostate. You final thought will be: 'This is not as painful as I would have imagined.' Nevertheless, it will obviously be very very painful.
Scorpio - The tension between you and a loved one will soon be resolved. After months of bad-tempered awkwardness between you and your wife, you will finally learn the truth when you return home from work early. Your wife will not be in the house as you expect her to be. Surprised, but not yet alarmed, you will turn on the television to see that ITV have resurrected Supermarket Sweep, replacing original host Dale Winton with Neil and Christine Hamilton both dressed in horn-adorned PVC gimp-nurse outfits, and altering the location from some Co-Op in Nottingham to a place called 'Herr Bushell's Dildo Emporium' in Tiger Bay. You watch in astonishment as the Hamiltons introduce your wife and a young man who's with her as contestants; in horror as they dash round the shelves, gathering a mountain of docking harnesses, anal beads, and ben wah balls in their trolley; and in nightmarish disbelief as they dramatically discard their collection of items, so caught up are they in the lust-inducing surroundings, and begin rutting feverishly at the checkout, goaded on by the Hamiltons and the clapping-along-to-the-music audience. In a state of shocked delirium you totter back out of your house, across the busy A road which your garden backs out onto, over the electrified train-lines at the corner, and out into the dark, wolves-ridden Moors. You've decided you're turning your back on our modern society. Civilization, you think, has entered its end-stages. Your horribly mangled relationship is merely a microcosm of this sad, undeniable truth. In this primitive, primordial landscape you will, you're certain, meet like-minded souls, intent on rebuilding humanity. Sadly, all you meet are a few intrepid Morlocks who flay your skin off with their mandibles, feast messily on your internal organs and drag your bones down to their underground lair to be used as tokens with which to barter with the Mole People. And all in three days time.
Sagittarius - Prepare to de-tune your sex-radio from 'Self FM' and get ready to set your brain-stick to 'lady-love'. At a party you will find yourself talking to a beautiful young woman. She seems a little out of your league but somehow you've managed to keep her just about interested. However, a brief lag in the conversation causes you to panic and, without knowing what you're saying, you tell her, in a hushed voice, that you're Bowie Simpipe, the world-renowned masked souspahone player whose true identity is one of the most well-kept and most sought-after secrets in the entire sousaphone-entertainment industry. High on the sense of almighty power this lie - and the subsequent tissue of further lies it engenders - leads you to ask her back to your flat. Panic again strikes when you arrive and realise that, although you have a sousaphone resting in the corner of your bedroom, its purpose is entirely decorative and you've not once attempted to play the thing. The girl, of course, is eager to hear some of Simpipe's univerally-recognized melodies. Not only this, she wants to see the iconic mask Simpipe is recognised by: a one-of-a-kind affair which can only be described as 'a horse trying to eat a whistle-shaped loaf of raisin-bread'. Your attempts at diluting her sense of impending wonder by saying things like 'I burned my main pumping-finger' and 'My lips aren't really the right kind of lips at the moment' will only work for so long. Eventually, you'll find yourself picking the sousaphone up, clamping your eyes shut and making the sort of 'musical' gestures you've seen the real Simpipe do when playing. Incredibly, you'll find not only is your sousaphone-playing credibly half-decent, it's actually amazing. You're playing the fucking thing! You're even better than that toss-skid Simpipe! Your playing is so fantastic, you notice, that the girl literally begins to swoon. Within minutes she's passed out on your carpet, her wine spilled across your Yomut rug, her hair trailing in the little bowl of Pringles you'd put out. To your dismay you learn, later when you're at the hospital, that the swooning wasn't due to your soul-tapping harmonies, but due to chronic asthma which your choice of heavily salted snack had exacerbated to the point of her semi-instant death. You'll be arrested, charged, found guilty of murder and, in a politically motivated sentence, three days from now, eaten alive by an armoured Hazel Blears, a trussed-up Jon Cruddas and a naked Hilary Benn. The one who manages to ingest the most of your body tissue will be declared 'emperor' and will be given a crown made from your veins.
Aquarius - Fizz! Plop! Splurt! Hear that? Sound like a bunch of affable, childlike noises, don't they? Do not be fooled, however. In reality, what you're hearing is the sound of pure, misery-pissing evil raking its long yellowing fingernails-of-fate down the blackboard that is your very soul. A dark secret from your past, one which you've been keeping nestled in the blackest crevice-hole of your heart, tethered there by rope fashioned from steely denial and rusty manacles forged from molten secret shame, will writhe itself loose and come staggering out into the daylight of the innocuous life you've built for yourself, waggling its grimy, tattered limb-stumps all over your nice clean kitchen counter-tops, belching its black fart-clouds of vomit-gas across your curtains, thwacking its sweaty, scaly member up and down your banister leaving big cock-shaped grease-marks for all to see. This is both a metaphor for what is going to happen and the literal reality. That's right: the hideous mutant twin brother who you've kept tied to the immersion heater in the loft will grow tired of the nightly bucketloads of leftovers-and-water slurry you've secretly been providing him with when the rest of your family are in bed, tired of the radio you keep up there constantly tuned to Radio 3 in attempt to 'civilize' the beast, and, most of all, tired of the hours of scalding pain being perpetually chained against a family-home's immersion heater involves. Maurice, for that is the name he has chosen for himself, will wriggle free and descend from his airless dust-tomb, rifle through your wardrobe to find something more suitable to wear than the Def Leppard t-shirt with the sleeves torn off, the humiliatingly giant nappy and the ludicrously varied selection of hats you gave him when you first locked him away all those years ago, and then appear - hunched, dribbling, but looking now rather dapper - in your living-room doorway whilst you're sitting with your family, sharing a battenberg, watching The Bill and maybe playing with the dog (that bit's somewhat cloudy - it could be a hairy pig you're playing with). A violent, scatological fray will then break out, your freakish double pursuing you around the room, tossing furniture against walls and puking bile down his front; you simultaneously attempting to make a heartfelt explanation-cum-confession to your wife and children whilst noisily soiling yourself in terror. Although your children will seem angry, unimaginably disturbed and sickened - not to mention even facially scarred by the Maurice-beast's acid barf-spray - your wife will appear more forgiving. She'll instruct your children, mid-rampage, to restrain your brother. They'll lash him to the piano stool by his eye-stalks, his sweat instantly dissolving the silk upholstery and the brocade manchette, his thrashing pincer-hands further ruining their innocent faces, and his intermittent vomiting now yielding only chunks of organ amid a black dribble of blood. Your wife will take off one of her shoes and proceed to batter Maurice repeatedly, occasionally shriek hoarsely to you and the kids to join in. You will all take off your shoes and take turns hitting Maurice with them until his head will begin to look like a limp and bruised flesh-flannel draped over a neck-stump. You'll all stop and look at one another, wild-eyed and breathless. You'll think: yes, yes! This ritual-esque group-murder we've committed together will, from now on, give us all a new bond, make us a stronger family unit: after this we can do anything! Later, when you've all managed to stop yourselves from cackling manically and, alternately, weeping and shivering inconsolably at what you've done, and you're all helping to dig Maurice's grave in the back garden, these feelings will give way to an intensely clarified sense of remorse, guilt and shame, all of which will become clarified even further when you look at your children, now so horribly deformed, both inside and out, that they resemble Maurice more than they ever will yourself. You'll think: who was the real monster here? Late that night, after everyone's talked things over a bit, agreed to keep the frenzied execution that went on a family secret, and had some calming fish and chips (you will also have mushy peas but will be unable to finish them due to their resemblance to your late twin), you'll creep out of bed, silently leave the house and begin walk the streets in search of solace. After much wandering, soul-searching and weeping you'll come to a small church on a street corner, its windows dimly lit by soft candlelight. You'll enter, make your way down the aisle and sit down in the confession box where you'll blurt out the whole story - the chaining-up, the years of deception, the grisly murder - at the end of which you'll feel much better. Your relief is short-lived, however, as the kindly priest whose outline you thought was nodding sagely behind the grille turns out to actually be a hideous mutant-creature himself who was not nodding at all but writhing about in mutant-ecstasy at the horrible things he's planning to do to you. You'll die, three days from now, when he tears through the thin lattice-wall, turns you, screaming for mercy, upside down to suck all your organs through your anus and then toys with your desiccated puppet-like corpse á la Weekend At Bernie's, making you repeatedly hit yourself in the face for hours on end. He'll then pull your head off and sprint off into the night to show it off to his other mutant-friends and use it to do a string of hilarious 'glove puppet' gags, after which he'll be declared 'King Chud'. In the morning your wife and kids will decide your disappearance should also be kept a family secret and will celebrate by going to McDonalds for apple pies, you complete bastard.
