It is New Year’s Day and I am trying my best to ignore the growing pile of newspapers rising up like some latter-day Tower of Babel just to the left of where I like to slump on the sofa after a hard day of journalisting.

The reasons for this are two-fold: Firstly, if I am spotted looking at the newspapers, I will be asked why I am not doing something about them. The short answer to this is that the recycling bin is full and it will take brainpower and innovation, neither of which I am currently feeling that I hold in spades, to come up with an agreeable solution.

The second reason is that the newspaper supplements are full to bursting with astrological predictions for the year ahead, and I don’t want to get sucked into reading them.

I’m not saying I don’t believe in the ability of those huge, flaming balls of gas millions of light years away from us to have an effect on our lives. After all, cast your eyes upwards and to the left of this column and you’ll see the daily horoscope, a very well-read part of any newspaper.

But I’m worried because I accidentally read one projection and it seemed to be almost unbearably optimistic. I’m a Capricorn, you see, and apparently this is going to be a very good year for Capricorns. Why, I’ve no idea. It just is.

By tea-time on New Year’s Day, I give in and start to rifle through the magazines, growing hungrier and hungrier for the excellent news that each astrologer gives me.

This is the year when all my plans come to fruition, they say. Good news? It’s going to be coming out of my ears. I have to be careful, though... how much brilliant news can one person take? I must be wary, lest I pop with the brilliance that 2011 will bring.

Now I’ve done it. I’ve gorged myself on good news. Even the occasional note of warning (“Don’t walk under any falling pianos on the 25th of March”) can’t dull my enthusiasm.

Suddenly, I am a paid-up member of the astrology club. How can it possibly not all be true?

Mentally, I start making plans. There’ll be foreign travel, promise my new astrologer friends. My love life will blossom as never before. I will look good in a pair of jeans and might possibly spend a goodly portion of my time lounging on a yacht in the gulf of St Tropez (well, it didn’t actually say that, but, y’know...)

I start to feel jaunty. I go back to work, waiting for something to happen. It doesn’t. Still, early days, eh? All those astrologers can’t be wrong, after all. Something great and big and wonderful is going to happen. I just wonder what? From where will I get the news?

And then, just now, as I was typing this, I read my prediction up there on the left. It says: “Give me a ring for an important message from Uranus.” Hmm. Somebody trying to tell me something?