Your Horoscopes for January 2012

Inspired by the recent reunion and comeback of Steps, Psychic Jim is hoping to emulate the success of his favourite pop group by re-emerging from wherever it is he's been hiding for the last few years and bringing his amazingly accurate predictions back to the world. Below are his horoscopes for January 2012. Prepare to be astounded as the Psychic One informs you of what the stars and planets have told him will happen during the month.

ARIES (21st March - 20th April)
You know what really gets your goat? Geoffery, you local goat whisperer, that’s what, or who, to be grammatically correct. Geoffery, who also likes to be known as Geoff, is one of the few people who really understands your goat. On the other hand, you just don’t understand your goat at all. Take the other week for example. You may recall your goat telling a joke. It went something like this, and I quote: “There was this bloke in court and the judge says to him, ‘Before I pass sentence, is there anything you want to say?’ And the bloke says, ‘Bugger all, judge.’ And then the judge turns to the clerk and says, ‘What did he just say?’ And the clerk says, ‘He said “Bugger all” your honour.’ And the judge says, ‘That’s funny. I was sure I saw his lips move.’” After hearing your goat’s joke, Geoff laughed so hard that he literally wet himself. However, you just stood there looking confused. You just simply don’t get your goat. So your horoscope for this month is to make an effort to understand your goat. Am I speaking metaphorically? Nope, I really mean that you need to try harder with your goat. Don’t have a goat? Well, you’d better get one or else you won’t have anything to, er, get.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Speaking in a high-pitched voice for a day just to annoy people will backfire when you forget what pitch you usually speak in and begin talking out of tune while trying to figure it out.

TAURUS (21st April - 21st May)
After a rather indulgent Christmas, you will find that you enter 2012 a few pounds heavier than you would like to be. Your first aim for the new year will be to lose some of the festive fat. However, the global financial crisis has left everybody a bit hard up, so instead of purchasing a full-price mini-gym from Argos, you will purchase a dodgy one from an eBay seller based in the far east. And for some bizarre reason, although you will successfully lose the pounds that you gained, you will lose it from obscure parts of your body, such as your nose, your teeth, your toes and your elbow, not from you bum, belly and chin as intended. This of course will leave you rather embarrassed to leave the house, and you will spend most of January in isolation from the real world. What caused the problem? Well, one of the guarantees you get from places like Argos is that the mini-gym will help you lose weight as part of a balanced diet. The mini-gym from Hong Kong required you to eat an unbalanced diet. This would be something like a pie made out of chicken and melon, or a lard and kiwi sandwich, or a jelly and paella pizza. Completely unbalanced and not exactly healthy or tasty, but by eating the above while making use of your cheapo mini-gym, the pounds will soon fall off. The lesson of this prediction? Always read the small print.

THE SMALL PRINT: Psychic Jim accepts no responsibility if you actually follow his advice. He thinks that people who allow horoscopes to dictate their life are a bit stupid and lacking a few marbles and that if an unfortunate fate befalls you if you do what he suggests you do, then really, you only have yourself to blame. However, he would still like to thank you for reading his horoscopes as, if it wasn’t for the dumb people of this planet, astrologers would be out of work. Or appear on Strictly Come Dancing.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Booking a day off to attend Pat Butcher's funeral will not go down well with your boss.

GEMINI (22nd May - 22nd June)
I’m just watching Willy Wonka at the moment, the original 70s masterpiece and not the more recent version. And I’ve just noticed that the TV that Mike TV gets transported into is widescreen. That’s quite impressive. It’s not got anything to do with your prediction, but I thought I’d mention it seeing as I don’t actually know what your prediction for January 2012 is going to be. Actually, yes, I do. It does have something to do with Willy Wonka’s 1970s widescreen TV set. In January 2012, you will purchase a widescreen TV. It’ll be full 1080p HD 3D digital ready. Unfortunately, being technologically challenged, you’ve never bothered to get a TV aerial installed, or satellite or cable. So, all you can pick up on your super-duper TV is snow and fuzz and white noise. Although this is an improvement on what ITV1 usually offer, it won’t interest you for very long, and you’ll soon get bored of television and go back to what you usually do to keep yourself occupied, such as painting grains of rice, comparing the taste and temperature of your tap water at different times of the day and driving around at night looking for faulty street lights and reporting them to the council - the latter you do because it’s actually your job. You’ll leave your television on just in case something more exciting than snow gets shown on it, but you’ll simply spend January not understanding the obsession that the rest of the world has with television.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Rah-rah-ah-ah-ah-ah! Roma-roma-mamaa! Ga-ga-ooh-la-la! Want your bad romance.

CANCER (23rd June - 23rd July)
It’s January and that means Dancing on Ice is back! Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, Holly Willoughby isn’t back this year, so the programme is unlikely to be getting watched much in the Psychic Jim household this winter. However, unlike the Psychic One, you enjoy watching the show for the ice-skating rather than just to stare the presenter’s chest, and the programme this year will inspire you to take up the sport. Or is it an art? Who knows? (or really cares?). You will set up a subscription to The Art of Making Sequiney Outfits, which comes with a free binder with part two, a free sequin each week and will only set you back £376 if you manage to complete the collection. I remember really wanting to get The Art of Fishing back in the 1990s. Not sure why - I’ve never had an interest or desire to go fishing. Maybe the advert was good. Yes, you’ll begin making yourself a tight-fitting and revealing sparkly outfit, buy yourself a set of ice-skates from your local ice-skates shop (before Asda took over Netto, they were the kinds of random things you’d find in the middle of the shop, along with obsolete satellite dishes, barbecues and solar lights). And when you feel ready, you’ll step outside your front door, ready to do a spot of dancing on the ice. Unfortunately, you’re not likely to feel ready until July. And, unless climate change succeeds in messing up the world’s weather, there isn’t likely to be much ice for you to go skating on in July. And you’ll also look quite silly too. Still, you know what they say. It’s betting to be skating on no ice than skating on thin ice. And you’d be well-advised to take heed of that oh-so-well-known saying.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
A cross-eyed donkey will freak you out this month. Largely because it will be making breakfast while wearing one of your spare pyjama tops in your kitchen after a "messy" night out.

LEO (24th July - 23rd August)
The start of the year is always a great time to take up a new hobby. As you’re a perv like Psychic Jim, you won’t bother watching Dancing on Ice this year as Holly Willoughby isn’t on it anymore, so it won’t inspire you to take up ice-skating like your Cancerean friend above. Instead, you will decide to take up that most ancient and civilized of hobbies: stamp collecting. However, being a Leo and therefore being characterised as impatient, you will get bored of cutting stamps off envelopes (or I could say “off of envelopes” as it sounds so Radio 1 and is therefore cool and, like, awesome). After having acquired five stamps and placed them in no particular order in a photo album, you will decide that your stamp collection needs completing sooner rather than later before you lose interest. To do so, you will decide to buy a book of stamps. Not a book of stamps that you can buy from WHSmiths in a little tiny book with 4 stamps in it. Oh no. You’ll want one of those big books that post offices have which have page after page after page of stamps of all denominations. But where do you get them from? Your local post office won’t sell their massive book to you, nor will they tell you where to get them from as this breaches Rule Number 243, section 7b of The Sacred Code of Post Masters and Post Mistresses. Also nobody appears to have any up for sale on any online auction sites. You could try Yahoo! Answers but you’re more likely to find the correct answer on the moon than on that site. Not being able to get what you want immediately will greatly anger you, so much so that you will set your stamp collection on fire and promise yourself that you will never, ever buy a stamp again. After which, the site of a stamp will cause your blood to boil, and you will find that whenever you notice a stamped letter on your door mat when you get in from work, you will thump the nearest person in the face. So, if I were you, I’d probably not take up stamp collecting this month. Sound advice from the Psychic Jim, I think you’ll agree.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
It's time to get serious. So frown a lot and don't smile.

VIRGO (24th August - 23rd September)
Sometime this month, you will go for a walk. Now, you’ve been for many walks before, and I’m sure you’ll go for many walks in the future, but, this walk will be different. This will be because you had some new walking shoes for Christmas. Now, these aren’t just any walking shoes. These are special walking shoes. But what is so special about these walking shoes, I hear you ask (I’m sure there should be a question mark somewhere there, but I don’t know where, so I’ll just leave it out and hope you don’t notice). Well, I’ll tell you. You see, these walking shoes are made out of a special kind of Scandinavian suede. Now anybody who knows anything about walking knows that walking shoes made out of Scandinavian suede are the best. And what makes them the best? Well, put simply, it’s because Scandinavian suede is the best. Is this prediction actually going anywhere? Of course it is. Where, I don’t know. Basically, walking around in your new shoes made out of Scandinavian suede is a pleasure and an experience and a feeling so overwhelmingly amazing that it really will be the most special walk you’ve ever taken. That will be until you tread in some dog muck and decide to throw them away rather than clean them. Oh well, it was good while it lasted.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Ronald McDonald is the scariest, most freakiest and hideous thing ever created. If you ever see him, give him a good slapping.

LIBRA (24th September - 23rd October)
So, it’s finally 2012. And, according to the Mayans, it’s also the final year ever. Yep, apparently the world is going to end sometime in 2012. But, is this correct? According to my crystal balls, it isn’t. But then again, my mystical nads have given me some dodgy advice in the past, quite often when their owner has had one or two too many glasses of sherry, so I wouldn’t actually trust what they say. So, let’s assume that the world is going to end this year. It’s something that you will need to prepare for. And how? Well, you can start by not paying any bills. After all, there isn’t much point. The world will have imploded, or exploded, or whatever, by the time anybody gets around to chasing you for money. You might as well eat all the junk and trash that you like throughout the year. It’ll greatly shorten your life expectancy, but, does it really matter if we’re all doomed? While you’re at it, you should also cheat on your partner, loot a few electronics stores, experiment with mind-bending narcotics, and give your boss a piece or two of your mind. And, after doing all of this, you’d better hope and pray that the Mayans were telling the truth and that your calendar doesn’t one day read 1st January 2013. If it does, you may have some explaining to do. And you can’t blame me as I’m just a sad lonely psychic who makes up a bunch of horoscopes in the hope that people visit my website.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
You'll have the weight of the world on your shoulders this month. It's all that working out you've been doing. Well done!

SCORPIO (24th October - 22nd November)
This month, you will be quite surprised to receive an email from a wealthy dignitary from some country you didn’t know existed. By some remarkable coincidence, you have the same surname as his wife did before she married him. Sadly, she recently passed away. However, it turns out that she has a vast fortune, but, even though he was married to this woman, the dignitary who sent you the email doesn’t appear to be able to access it as the account holding the money is under his wife’s maiden name. What he can do though is get the money paid into your bank account because you share the same surname as his recently expired wife had. Of course, you’d need to pay the money back to him, all one hundred trillion million billion dollars of it, but he’ll allow you to keep 10% as a thank you for the use of your bank account. Now, this is an offer you’d be stupid to refuse. What can go wrong? All you need to do is provide your bank account details to this random wealthy dignitary who happens to have figured out your email address. This is just so he can transfer the money to you, but to make sure you can transfer it back to him, all he’ll need you to do is transfer a small amount to him, say £20. You may need to transfer a bit more shortly afterwards, like £100, to cover some administrative costs, and there may be a bit more, approximately £500, to get around some complex international laws. You may also be asked to transfer about £2000 to him to ensure that you don’t get taxed on your 10% of the one hundred trillion million billion dollars when you receive it. Oh yes, it’s a win-win situation. Just, whatever you do, don’t delete the email. Make sure you keep it and flag it as important. Respond to it as soon as you can, and follow whatever instructions you get given. Before you know it, you’ll have more money than you know what to do with. You may get extremely lucky this month and receive an email about increasing the size of your body parts to impress your partner. Again, keep hold of it, as these kinds of offers don’t come around often.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
Phoning DFS to ask them if they’ve got a sale on is a waste of your inclusive minutes and time.

SAGITTARIUS (23rd November - 21st December)
Venus, this month, will be a Planet of Oriental Appearance. What this means is that it will be dressed up as a Chinese person. Why? Well, just for the hell of it basically. Venus is quite a spontaneous planet and does crazy and wacky things simply because it can. And, as Venus will be entering your astrological arena this month, it will cause you to also act spontaneously. You will get up one morning, throw your toaster through the kitchen window and have a crap on your living room table. You’ll then go to work in your pyjamas, spend your day on Facebook befriending every single person on it with your surname just on the off-chance that you may be related, order a plain vegetarian Big Mac for your dinner (a bun, basically), and propose to the office’s bog-eyed cleaner. You will also download a fart app for your smartphone of choice and spend an entire meeting with senior management and company shareholders setting it off, laughing hysterically as important-looking men in suits try to figure out who keeps passing wind. On the way home, you’ll stop at Comet and hide in a fridge, waiting patiently to jump out on anybody who happens to open it. You’ll get home, order a pizza and post it, slice by slice, through your neighbour’s letterbox (you never did get on with them). Even though they catch you doing it, you’ll still deny it. A bit hungry later on, you’ll knock on their door and ask them if you can have your pizza back for your tea. You’ll then set up multiple Twitter accounts and spread rumours about footballers having affairs with random celebrities, just to cause chaos. Oh yes, at the start of the day, you didn’t even know what a hashtag was. Now you’re the world’s number one abuser of them. Finally, you’ll phone up an ex, tell them how much you want them back and that you’ll never love anybody as much as you loved them and state that you’re going to do whatever you can to get them back, regardless of whether or not it means breaking up families and whatnot. You’ll then phone them back a few minutes later and say, “Whoops! Sorry, wrong ex!” Oh, it’ll be an interesting day. The following day, Venus will have left your astrological arena and you’ll be back to your normal self, believing the antics of the previous day to be a dream. That is until you notice a turd on your table.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
A storm in a teacup will flood your kitchen.

CAPRICORN (22nd December - 20th January)
This month your annuity will mature and from sale of stock you will earn a large amount of money. I really should stop playing online Monopoly. I'm getting a bit obsessed with it. With this money, you'll decide to set up your own TV channel. However, the television market is just about saturated now with virtually every kind of genre catered for. Regardless, you'll gather together a group of people who will help run the channel and have a brainstorming session. Yep, basically you'll all sit around a table, think of random words and hope that a concept for a televisual entertainment service will blossom from one of them. It's kind of how I think up these horoscopes. What's that? Oh sorry, I use the stars and planets to inspire me. Um, anyway, after a couple of hours of brainstorming, and a week or two of doing whatever it is that people who make TV channels do, you'll be ready to begin transmitting. And the name of your brand new TV channel? Red Hot Poker. Oh yes. People will subscribe to your channel in their thousands, expecting to see X-rated card games on launch night. But no, that kind of immoral filth is completely against your principals. Porn is bad enough, but gambling is simply evil. Instead your Red Hot Poker channel will be about red hot pokers. Yep, it'll feature programmes such as How Clean is your Poker? which will contain hints and tips on how to clean your favourite fireplace accessory. There will be Poker Swap in which two members of the public exchange pokers for a week and then report back on how it's changed the ways they stoke their fires and shuffle their coals at the end of the swap. Strictly Come Poking (known as Poking with the Stars overseas) will feature celebrities dancing with their pokers. Top Poke will put the latest pokers to the test. Poke in the Wall will be a Saturday evening light entertainment show in which pokers have to get themselves in weird positions to get through a hole in a wall. The list of programmes is endless. However, shortly after launching your channel, Rupert Mudoch will come along and launch a channel in direct competition. Sky Poker it will be called. And since Sky have a monopoly on the pay-TV market, your channel will last about as long as a Spice Girls comeback. It will be back to the drawing board for you and your TV channel brainstomers. They have ideas for a channel called Dirty Housewives. Apparently it features programmes featuring women who haven't washed for months doing the laundry and washing dishes. Exciting!

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
You will have difficulties synchronising the days of your bin collections with the days chosen by your council. You will be surrounded by rubbish.

AQUARIUS (21st January - 19th February)
A few years ago, before the recession put everybody out of work, people were too busy making money that the country didn’t actually have that to spend time going on dates and doing things properly. And so, speed dating became popular. Basically, a bunch of single people looking for a quickie love, gathered together at a venue. The idea was that you would have a date with each person for five minutes, before moving onto the next. This was meant to allow you to see if you clicked with anybody enough to want to go on a proper real date with them. Now, you’re a single person, or, if you’re not, you’re a person with loose morals, so you’re quite interested in finding love quick. So, during January, you will decide to go along to a speed dating event. You’ll turn up, wearing your favourite bright orange top, always a hit with members of the opposite sex, and hope that, not only will you find romance, but romance will find you. Hmmm, that’s quite a good marketing slogan. I think I might organise a speed dating event just to use it. However, you’re not really a very picky person and will go with just about anybody. This makes you either a slut or a stud depending on your gender. After spending an hour or two speedily dating a number of fellow singles, you’ll decide that you’d date all of them, and tell the organiser this. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that you spent most of your speed dates drooling onto the table, flicking dandruff at your potential partner (you read somewhere that running your fingers through your hair is meant to be flirty), and getting distracted by other suitors so not paying attention to your current one, you will find that not one person was impressed enough by you to want to take things further. Nope, not one. You will find this news unbelievable and demand a recount. This will come back with the same response. So, you will demand that the event is held again, claiming that there must be some discrepancies. Threatening to call in your lawyers, the organiser will reluctantly reorganise the event. But, the end result will still be the same - in fact, it’ll be worse as a lot of the people at the event will decide to get restraining orders against you so they don’t have to meet you again. Like Gordon Brown, you will stubbornly have to accept defeat and give up. By the end of January, you will come to the conclusion that speed dating is a crap idea and that it’s no wonder it was a fad that hardly anybody does nowadays. Yes, denial. That’s your favourite state of mind and one that you’ll insist on staying in for the remainder of January and the entire month of February too.

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
After learning that the calendar repeats itself every 400 years, you will go on the lookout for a calendar from 1612 to save you having to buy a new one. You won't see any irony.

PISCES (20th February - 20th March)
Am I on my last horoscope already? My goodness gracious me, that came quick! So, Pisces, what does January 2012 have in store? According to Mars, it’s going to be a lonely month. So, why not purchase some companionship in the form of an animal? Being a bit hard-up owing to the recession and the credit crunch and the downturn and the Eurozone crisis, you won’t want to pay full price for a pet. Nope, instead, you’ll go to your local animal shelter to rescue an animal that some heartless soul received for Christmas and decided they didn’t want. Now, although you don’t believe that anybody should ever give up an animal, you will kind of understand their decisions after seeing some of the animals on offer at the shelter. First up, there’s a racist parrot. Now, I can’t repeat what it says here - if you want racism on the internet, you’ll have to visit Diane Abbot’s Twitter feed. Or read the comments below pretty much any YouTube video. So, if you don’t want to offend any of your visitors, you’re probably best leaving that parrot for somebody else. Another rejected animal is a piano-playing cat. Now, these are all the rage on home video shows and suchlike, but, there’s only so many times you can listen to a cat pressing random piano keys whenever it feels like it before you have to slam the piano lid on its paws and lock it outside and hope it finds some birds or mice or some other animal parts to bring in and leave at the bottom of your bed like a normal cat. There’s also a big butch Staffordshire Bull Terrier. The problem is, it has a bit of a camp bark. Now, your typical Staffie owner would never live it down if he was standing outside his local Lidl, Cash Convertors, Poundland, Weatherspoons or William Hill, and Rizla let out a bark that sounds like he’s a canine Dale Winton. Nope, Rizla would be best left for somebody else, hopefully somebody wearing a Burberry cap, white Adidas trainers and some oversized bling. And probably called Gaz, or Shane, or Kyle. Or Mercedes. Or Chantelle. The final “reject” will be the animal for you. It will be a mouse. Quiet, easy to look after, not too messy, and fairly cheap to keep. You’ll take it. But why was it given back? Well Mickey, for that is the name that you will bestow on your mouse (you’re not very original when it comes to names), is actually a pyromaniac. You become suspicious after finding that each cage you buy for Mickey appears to spontaneously combust, and matches keep going missing from your kitchen cupboard. Despite attempting to hide the matches in different places, Mickey will always find them. You know he’s been there due to the little droppings he leaves behind. After coming home one night and smelling gas in the kitchen, and spotting Mickey standing on the hob with a match in one mousehand and the box in the other, you will fear that this is it. Mickey will end everything for the two of you. You will leap from your position to grab Mickey, all in slow motion and everything for dramatic effect. Will you succeed in stopping Mickey’s dastardly deed, or will it all come to an explosive end? You’ll find out next month. If you have a horoscope to read, you’ll know you survived. If there’s no prediction for Pisces, it looks like Mickey got away with committing his ultimate crime. Wow! Ending my horoscopes on a cliffhanger. That’s a first!

MESSAGE OF THE MONTH
You probably haven't fallen down the toilet since you were 7 years old, but the possibility of it happening still worries you each time you sit on one.