Psychic Jim's Horoscopes for August 2017

This month you will drink gin. Why? Well, apparently it’s the current drink of choice for those who are inclined to partake in an alcoholic beverage or two. It’s on trend, and you like to be on trend. In some places, you can even get a platter of gins. On a wooden board no less. Even flipping Toby Carvery are getting in on the act! A place that serves roast dinners, now has a whole coalition of gin on offer. The problem is, you don’t really like gin. You prefer snowballs, or babycham. And you hope and dream for those drinks to suddenly become fashionable so you don’t feel awkward asking for them in bars. That time will come. You mark my words. That time will come.

A few months ago, you bought a coffee machine. You were obsessed with it for a while, churning out all kinds of caffeine filled treats as if you were Mr Starbucks himself. Now, you don’t really use it. Going off on a completely different tangent, August will be a month of ups and downs, mostly due to your almost daily visits to the new trampampolining place that’s opened in your neck of the woods. Give it time, and you’ll get bored of that too. Maybe you’ll break a part of your body beforehand, maybe you won’t, but the thought of bouncing on a stretched piece of elasticated fabric will go from making you damp with excitement to filling you with repulsion and disdain. Is disdain the right word for me to use there? Um, it’ll do.

According to the Anglo Saxons, August was known as Weod Monath, or Weed month. Why, I don’t know. That’s about as far as I could be bothered to go with my research into why August is called August. Hmmm, just realised that I still don’t know the answer, only that those damn Anglo Saxon immigrants who came to England to rob the land from the indigenous population, and steal their jobs, and impose their cultures and beliefs on them, apparently devoted a whole month to weed. Whether it was a whole month to smoking it or digging them up to keep their back gardens in order, I’m not too sure. Shall I find out? I might as well, seeing as I’m still trying to think up a prediction for you. Ooooh, crikey, apparently it was called weed month because it is the month when weeds grow most. Not the most imaginative of names for a month. Gee, they probably called January something like snow month. Hot dog! Turns out they kind of did. Frozen snow month it was called. And that is your prediction.

What’s that? I haven’t actually made a prediction? I have. It’s that, er, that this month you will spend a portion of your time learning about what people of olden times called the months of the year. See, it’s all there in the paragraph above. Do I have to spell everything out? That’s it, I’ve had enough. I quit! I can’t work under these conditions anymore.

Hi, welcome to your prediction for August, my old crabby friend. I’ve just been out to get some air. Clear my head and suchlike. I feel all the better for it too. You should try it. And while you’re at it, do a few stretches. In fact, just go for a full workout. What I’d recommend is that you do five reps of ten lunges, twenty star jumps, twenty bicycle crunches, and ten press-ups. And then some things that look like you're having some intimate time with a Swiss ball. You’ll have an eight pack and abs of steel within minutes. Who needs that curly-haired bloke with his recipe books and motivational videos when you have Psychic Jim available to keep you fit and healthy with his informative and informational horoscopes?

A couple of months ago, President Trump came up with an ingenious idea. That wall he’s going to build to keep the Mexicans out, he’s going to cover with solar panels. And he’ll be able to keep all of America’s lights on solely by the power of Greyskull. Sorry, he’ll keep them on by the power of sunlight. Not only will he solve his country’s immigration issue, he’ll also stop climate change in its tracks too. He’s a clever bloke. No wonder he’s in charge of such a major world power. You will think that it’s such a good idea that you’ll write to Theresa May, or whoever the Prime Minister is in August, and tell her/him that you’ve come up with an equally brilliant idea. You’ll stick solar panels against the white cliffs of Dover. That way, when Britain has Brexited, so bright will the light be that reflects from the solar panels, that anybody trying to get into the country will be blinded and turn back round to face the continent. And we’ll have so much spare power that we’ll be able to sell it to our new trade partners. Like Peru, and India, and Greenland.

While watching ITV2 one Saturday afternoon, you will happen across their weekly showing of one of the Back to the Future films. This will inspire you to build a time machine. Now, the problem is that you don’t have a Delorean, nor do you have a flux capacitor. Instead, you have an old Fiat Uno and a Fidget Spinner. And after wiring the latter to the former’s alternator, you’ll have created a pale imitation of Doc Brown’s time travelling vehicle. Rather than being able to go 30 years back in time, or 30 years forward, it can only go 30 minutes back and forward. This will be quite handy if you happen to get in late for The Chase as you can send yourself back in time to when it begins, or even fast forward yourself to the end to find out if the chaser loses, which really is the only reason to watch it anyway. It could be quite useful for gambling on sports events too, or for pretending that you have psychic powers and you can predict what’s going to happen in the very near future (imposter!) But, as you have little imagination and no way of thinking of clever ways of making the most out of your ability to travel through time, the novelty will wear off fairly quickly. You’ll exchange your Fiat Uno time machine for a coffee machine that somebody no longer wants and spend the rest of the month drinking hot beverages.
 

This month you will purchase a pair of cheap shoes. At first you will think that you’ve got the bargain of the century. That is until they start emitting a foul odour. Yes, they may be cheap, but they also cause your feet to pong. And just letting a bit of air out of them is enough to take out anyone and anything within a ten metre radius of you. Removing them at the end of the day involves you holding your breath, whipping them off your feet, throwing them as far away from your house as possible and quickly jumping into the shower to wash away the damp sweaty vinegary stench with bleach, TCP and Lynx Africa. But, being a Libra and therefore being stingy, you’ll refuse to discard them and to buy a new pair. Instead, the following day, you’ll reclaim them from wherever they landed, believing that fresh air will have deodourised them, put them on and go through the whole ordeal again. Day after day after day. You know what they say, a fool and his money is easily parted. No, that’s not actually relevant here, is it? It could be a foul and his money smells farty. That makes even less sense. Foul feet never won fair maid. Yes, that’ll do pig, that’ll do.

In your neverending quest to find true love and happiness, this month you will decide to stand in your local town centre and just approach complete strangers in the hope that at least one of them might be willing to accept your offer of a date. You read something recently that said that there’s no such thing as lucky people. People who appear lucky are just those that create more opportunities for themselves, thus giving themselves a greater chance of achieving success. It’s all a matter of probability. Wise words there. However, your tactic of approaching strangers and asking them for a quick chat or telling them that they look friendly will result in them keeping well away from you. Why, you don’t know. That is until a chugger approaches you to warn you to keep off their turf. Realising that people think you’re going to badger them to donate to a good cause, so avoid you instead, you’ll turn to plan B, whatever plan B is. Have you thought of a plan B? I haven’t. I’ll give it some thought and maybe follow this prediction up with it in a future prediction. It’ll be sometime within the next few years, so stay tuned.

Only four more horoscopes to go. I’m flying through them this month. It’s only taken me five hours to get this far! Speaking of five hours, that will be the precise length of time that you will spend separating your wheat from your chaff in August. What’s that? You don’t even know what chaff is, and why you need to separate wheat from it. Come to think of it, neither do I. I’ll come up with something else for you instead. Let me just give my crystal balls a shake. Ah! That’s better. So, as well as getting wheat from chaff this month, you’ll also make yourself a cup of tea. But you’ll look into the tea cup and notice that there appears to be a storm brewing in it, not tea. A storm in a teacup, as they say. With thunderbolts and lightening, very very frightening me. Galileo Galileo, Galileo Galileo, Galileo Figaro, Magnifico-o-o-o-o. That’s what happens when you decide to experiment with different teabags. You should just stick to PG Tips. Or Yorkshire Tea. Neither of those brands appear to produce weather systems in your cup. Not often anyway.

While waiting to get your hair cut recently, you picked up a newspaper and sat in shock and panic about an article you read. According to this reputable source, there will be 100 days of a scorching heatwave on its way. The country will be sizzling, scorching, melting, frying, and will generally be rather balmy. Now, you don’t particularly like being too warm, as you have cheap shoes that make your feet smell, so finding out that you’ve got a whole 100 days of extreme heat will cause you to take drastic action. You will book a trip to one of the poles. You’re not too fussed about whether it’s the north or south one, but you plan to travel to it and cling onto that pole until the 100 days are over. Now, I don’t like to throw about spurious claims that I can forecast the future, but I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 100 day heatwave. Maybe 100 days of things being a bit warmer than other times of the year. All I can say is don’t worry. The editors of the Daily Express went to a crap school that didn’t teach them about the seasons. They’ll panic when the weather suddenly gets cooler towards the end of the year, and publish an article predicting a big freeze, probably the biggest freeze since the ice age. And there will be pictures of cars trapped in snow.

When not at home, you like to keep an eye on your house. This August you will discover, ten years after everybody else did, that Google have designed a great tool called Street View. This is where you can plonk a little yellow man on your street and make him look at your house. Now, what confuses you is that the weather at your house always appears to be sunny when you’re not there. Even when you’re sitting in your neighbour’s and can see rain outside, your house is still sunny according to the view of it from the little yellow man standing outside it. You’ll also use evidence from Street View to prove that couriers haven’t even attempted to deliver things to your house as you were watching it all day while at work and didn’t even get one visitor. It’ll mystify you how the sorry you weren’t in cards get pushed through your door, but you’ll still trust the evidence presented before you on your computer or mobile phone screen. The camera never lies. It’ll only be when you paint your front door a different colour and see that the yellow man sees it as being the old colour that you’ll decide that something may be amiss. So you’ll write to Google and ask them to fix the camera, telling them that it appears to have frozen, or run out of tape, or something. You’re still waiting for somebody to come out to sort it. Until then, you’ve hired a person to sit outside your house and keep a log of all activity for you. They’re there now. Take a look outside your window. You’ll see them sitting there staring at your house.

Did you know that 95% of a cucumber is actually water? No? Well, you do now. And you’ll use this fantastic piece of wisdom to provide yourself with a new source of H20. Yes, rather than using the water that comes out of your tap, you’ll use the water from cucumbers instead. Now, I’m not sure how you’ll actually extract water from cucumbers. I don’t think they squeeze very easily, apart from when they’ve gone past their use by date and turn to mush. But, somehow you’ll find a way, and you’ll be delighted that you now have an alternative source of water. Your local supermarket will probably think you’ve got some sort of weird cucumber fetish seeing as you’re in and out of there almost every day picking up a bundle of them, but you do need a lot to get all the water you need out of them, especially when it’s bath night. I’m thirsty now. All this thinking about water and cucumbers has made me want a drink. I suppose then that this is as good a time as any to sign off and wish you a happy cucumber. Gesundheit! .