Poppy Folly: horoscope

YOUR STARS: IT COULD HAPPEN

If life is a comedy to those who think, it's a tragedy for those who think it's funny; there's nothing funny about the roiling, filthy pottage of decaying life, viral profusion and corrupt relationships that constitutes the Virgoan view of the world. That's why so many Virgoans become snooker players, and devote themselves to advanced, almost experimental forms of hygiene.

But hygiene has its own dangers: you can be so keen to be clean that you scrape off and incinerate your most obvious layer of humanity. No wonder you can be unfeeling. Virgoans count among their numbers more unpleasant teachers, sadists, scientists and Stalinists than any other sign.

You require order because you can't analyse chaos. But equally you need chaos because you need people - how else can you conduct your experiments? It's a paradox, isn't it? No, as a matter of fact, it isn't, but the point is as good.

Virgo: you are curious, but disgusted. The more you know about people the more you like ceramic figurines of shepherdesses. You observe, you dissect, you put on rubber gloves (and a gas mask when you want to get really close), and this can make you popular with a particular sort of specialist (Virgo is the most perverted sign of the zodiac); more, much more of this next week.

All Virgo wants is someone to admire, OK? Is that too much to ask? But the last place you find it is in the surgery of your marriage, with the sterile instruments and the asthmatic machinery and all the ferocious painkillers and cleaning agents.

And again, outside in the workaday, when someone of heroic proportions emerges, oh what a disappointment: they've got a skin problem, and they're wearing the wrong tie. Virgo, stop it! Why are you so difficult to please?

Get your private, free e-mail horoscope at http://www.hotmail.com