Poppy Folly Your Stars: It Could Happen

You can tell most of what you want to know about this unfortunate sign by looking them up in a rhyming dictionary: "Taurus: `bore us', `how pleased we are when they decide to ignore us', and `can't sing or dance particularly so put them well in the back of the chorus'." They cite, respectively, Terry Southern, Bianca Jagger and Bing Crosby and this shows how rhyming lexicographers are a third less accurate in their grasp of character than metropolitan astrologers.

Notwithstanding these slurs, Taureans can be important members of society, particularly during times of trench warfare. You're too slow to run away, too dull to complain and too stupid to do anything other than issue the most fatal of battle orders. Taurean Baron von Richthofen was only motivated in his endeavours by a promise to rejoin his engineering regiment 85 feet under France on the occasion of his 250th kill.

You Taureans are inclined to stand on your dignity (which is why no one else knows it's there), and you are most memorable when taking your leave: your backward parts are astonishing. Eva Peron (who committed that unforgivable crime with her accomplices in the Rice-Lloyd Webber gang) was only ever redeemed by her rump which was capable of subduing angry, hungry crowds if its contours were correctly exposed.

But let us not forget the monstrous frauds of Taurus. William Lilly, the 17th-century astrologer; Sigmund Freud, who invented the Freudian slit - that is the Freudian slip which my Freudian brother wears under his Freudian petticoat; and Karl Marx, who shelved his ridiculous Das Kapital unfinished because he realised it was all bollocks (it was published posthumously). And unbeatably, the demented American who did more to collapse the bourgeois capitalist value system than an armchair full of anarchists: the demonic Dr Spock.