I read my horoscope this morning, don’t know why. I don’t really hold much truck with them anyway and have a few theories of my own. I think they are usually cleverly written to be so generic that you can find significance in them even though there is no direct correlation to the prediction and your life. It is usually things like, “Take care when meeting new people today – things may not be quite as they seem” or “Your energy will build today but try to not do too much or you’ll end up tired”. Meaningless or just stating the bloody obvious. That isn’t to say I don’t think there could be some practitioners out there who are able to tap into deeper forces, but I doubt the newspaper predictions are anything more than random phrases generated by a computer! Take by way of example my reading for today: “You could easily slip into an old relationship pattern as the Moon in your 7th House of Partners conjoins the karmic South Node of the Moon” – Well I’m bloody glad I knew about THAT before I tucked into my boiled eggs!

Here’s a thought to run up your flagpole and see if it flies proud and erect or hangs limp and flaccid: I wonder if we’ve not made an error in one of the basic assumptions of astrology. We read our stars and make predictions based on the date and time of our birth. But it seems to me that the more relevant date (but harder to prove) is that of our conception. Stay with me – I’m trying to take a more scientific approach here. I was born in February, although I was premature and really should have made my grand entrance into the world in March, had I gone full term. I was probably conceived in June. The date I popped out was random, could have been influenced by many factors, Mother eating a particularly spicy radish, driving over a vicious pothole in the road, a funny episode of “The Liver Birds” or heaven forbid, Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell, Martha Longhurst and Hilda Ogden caught up in an edge-of-the-seat drama centring around a pint of milk stout and a pressing need to riddle clinkers and scythe pots! Anything could have set her off. But the date that I was conceived is absolute. Mr Sperm met Miss Egg at a fixed point in time (I’m assuming he brought champagne, flowers and at very least a box of Milk Tray, but knowing my father it was probably a couple of Dahlia heads he’d plucked in passing from mother’s garden – mother always kept her garden very tidy!! And maybe a half-eaten spam sandwich).

So, and here we come to the clever bit, I was conceived in June, in the Summer. Now that was way back in the days when we had proper summers, with knotted hankies, cricket on the green, sun loungers that would remove your leg as soon as look at you, knitted bathing costumes and a complete ineptitude for getting skin cancer no matter how hard we damned well tried. Hose pipe ban? Bahhh – it wasn’t summer unless the lawn had turned into a grassless, cracked expanse of compacted dirt more arid that depths of the Gobi Desert. So there’s this poor little embryo stuck inside my mother, suffering from the gestatory equivalent of boil-in-the-bag, being force fed the muffled tones of Dusty Springfield, Cliff Richard, The Mamas and The Papas and bloody Ken Diddy Men Dodd and a diet of cheese fondue, Prawn Cocktail and Babysham. Then, to add insult to injury, just as I’m starting to grow into a perfectly-formed mini-me and cognitive processes are starting to develop, BANG, it’s Winter, the temperature plummets and I go from par-boil to freeze-dried in less time than it takes to harvest a decent batch of stem cells! My point in all this is that the prevailing conditions, temperatures, pressure systems, socio-economic climate and so forth must all have had an impact on the embryonic me, and will have played some small part in governing the design of the resulting sproglet. Yes, we inherit much from our parents through genetics and behavioural models but surely the conditions of our gestation are influential too? And if that is the case, then our birth date is of less significance than our date of conception. A baby conceived in a torrid summer holiday romance and consequently being born in the winter will have undergone a different sequence of external conditions to a baby conceived at the office Christmas party. And yes, there ARE population peaks nine months after Christmas and the Summer Holidays (or similar vacations in other countries) - give people a few days off work, a couple of bottles of Tesco’s vin de plonk and hey presto, the human race has another statistic to ponder.

Maybe we should be paying more attention to the astrological significance of our conception dates and not our ‘wombic evacuation’ anniversary. In which case, by my reckoning, I was conceived round about 43 years ago to this very day. Why are you not singing “Happy Bonk Day To You”? Where’s my Bonkday cake? I expect a card!

Although, if I extrapolate just a step further, I guess that would make my star sign ironic in its predictive abilities and painfully appropriate. June 22 to July 22: Cancer!