Danny's World of Stuff

Horoscopes for the discerning masochist

Aries: In an interesting new cost-cutting measure, the Royal Mail will entirely abandon the concept of delivering unprofitable post such as letters to their intended recipient, instead putting the whole lot through your letter box. You personally. Every day you will be increasingly trapped in your home, first by the endless queue of Royal Mail lorries filling your street, and then by the ever-growing drifts of other people’s gas bills, bank statements and embarrassing letters from the hospital about that problem with their arse that they really don’t like people to know about. Within a few days, you have to claw your way through your own roof to escape a postvalanche. As your flailing arm reaches through the hole, you desperately claw for any purchase, and all you find is a postman handing you a Wickes catalogue.

Taurus: Your luck this year will take the form of a sine wave consisting of dizzying highs and crushing lows. The frequency and amplitude of the luck wave will gradually increase over the course of the year. In January, you will find a £20 note you previously believed lost at a time it is extremely convenient to do so, and will then have to spend a slightly irritating afternoon replacing all the bulbs in your car. By December, you will be alternating on an hourly basis between such events as being nominated for an OBE for services to sex and falling down a 30-storey spiral staircase. In hindsight, you shouldn’t have annoyed that particle physicist, they had a very odd look in their eye.

Gemini: You will stub your toe on a piece of wooden furniture. You believed the furniture was of higher quality than it in fact is, so the inch long splinter that drives itself under your toenail comes as a great surprise. Unable to remove the splinter without passing out from the pain, you take an Uber to the hospital. After waiting 14 hours with no sign of treatment, you catch salmonella from a WHSmith’s prawn sandwich. The hospital declares your undercarriage a biological hazard and has it condemned.

Cancer: Due to an incident of mistaken identity you will be put on the sex offenders register, the no-fly list, several anti terror watch lists, and will have your assets frozen under the Magnitsky Act. You will be initially successful in arranging to speak directly to the new Home Secretary, who will apologise profusely and promise to resolve the situation promptly. Hopefully you return home and, initially at least, they make good on their word. Unfortunately, due to one final bureaucratic mishap you are put on the Dangerous Dogs Act list of banned breeds, and are microchipped and neutered before the mix-up can be resolved.

Leo: You will meet one of your heroes. Someone who you truly respect and admire. You will take a chance and approach them to make some heartfelt expression of gratitude or ask an unusually incisive question. As you approach and make eye contact they see you, realise your intent and begin to smile warmly. However, due to circumstances beyond your control you will simultaneously sneeze directly into their right eye, trip over flinging a boiling hot coffee or soup over them, and piss yourself. Three members of the public will tackle you to the ground until police arrive to arrest you for harassment, assault, and public indecency. The three bystanders will receive a medal for bravery, and you will receive a three-month suspended sentence, six months community service and fines totalling not less than £300. You will also be shunned by this person’s fan base or community after video of the incident goes viral, and your face is plastered over page 7 of a tabloid newspaper. Your mum thinks it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened, and you suspect she might be right.

Virgo: The squirrels will have vengeance. 🐿️ You know what you did. 🐿️

Libra: Your family and friends will have a year of creative satisfaction, good financial fortune and general good luck. You will not. To be clear, you will not be unusually unlucky… you will just remain at a completely normal baseline level of luck while everyone around you has the low-key best year of their lives. You will start out genuinely happy for them. By the end of the year you will be a seethingly bitter wreck, impotently plotting the downfall of your nearest and dearest, only to see all of your plans come to nothing due to them all simultaneously winning holidays, being taken on a surprise night out to see a favourite musician or being given the day off work for no real reason.

Scorpio: Over the course of the year your employer subjects you to increasingly bizarre and nonsensical policies, directives, emails and meetings, causing you to slowly lose your grasp on objective reality. It begins with things you could simply dismiss as incompetence or carelessness, such as conflicting instructions or incomprehensible emails delivered with the urgent flag at 4:38 on Friday afternoon. Soon it devolves to conference calls conducted in Simlish, and “bring your great-great-grandparent’s skeletons to work day”. By the summer, you haven’t seen a coworker not wearing either a full mascot costume or a worryingly accurate rubber mask of your own face in weeks. The year will end with a ritual in which you ascend to a higher state of existence untethered from the petty constraints of cause and effect. Or someone put something in the water cooler again, you aren’t sure which. Either way, you get “Employee of the Year”.

Sagittarius: You decide to treat yourself to a weekly lottery ticket. You make the mistake, however, of choosing set numbers, meaning you are never again able to stop or skip a week for fear of the giant foam hand of fate bitch slapping you through a plate glass window and bringing your numbers up the one draw you skip. To make things worse, every single week you “win” a prize smaller than the price of the ticket causing you to receive an email telling you that you’ve won the lottery, but not saying how much, and not allowing you to log in to the website to check until the next morning (yes this is a real thing). This backfires and causes you to develop a fetish for extreme edging followed by crushing disappointment. Your junk’s never been so confused and disappointed at the same time.

Capricorn: That weird coworker/uncle/neighbour/friend you are no longer quite comfortable around (delete as appropriate) turns out to be bang on the money on one very specific thing. The government ARE putting chemicals in the water in your area to turn the frogs gay. But not just gay. Semi offensive nineties sitcom stereotype gay. Britain’s waterways become 300% more tastefully decorated almost overnight, and Instagram becomes full of bi people posting pictures of little gay frog couples (even bi people don’t know why bi memes are so full of frogs, but they are. Google it). The only downside is the six hours of 90s club hits blaring out of every pond all summer.

Aquarius: You will discover that someone you have known and trusted for many years is in fact your handler. In response to some unknown event this year, they will read a code phrase to you, activating you and causing your true identity and memories to resurface. You will briefly experience a surge of elation as you are subsumed by your true identity. Are you a secret agent? An assassin? A super soldier? Your last moment of existence is crushed by the horrifying realisation that you are in fact a sleeper ticket inspector for National Express coaches.

Pisces: You will begin work on a new creative project this year. It will take up a great deal of your time and attention, but you will find it greatly rewarding. You will become convinced this can be turned into a marketable product. You will never be more proud of something that isn’t one of your children than the day you put this product on sale. Unfortunately you will then discover due to an oversight in your market research caused by the sheer joy of creation, you are in fact selling an almost 1:1 copy of an existing patented, copyright protected and trademarked product. The crushing disappointment you experience comes second only in horror to the series of lawsuits which leave you living on a wooden pallet, ratchet strapped to the scaffolding holding up Hammersmith Bridge. You have three mortgages on the pallet and live in constant fear of a bailiff confiscating your ratchet straps and sending you plunging into the Thames below.

Dr Danny provides no assurances as to the accuracy of the above, nor does he take responsibility for any consequences should they come about. Dr Danny is also not a doctor.

A fiction piece I wrote upon waking up in the middle of the night, giggling like a child.

…

You awake and look to your watch. It’s 4:27 PM. Your last memory is of opening your seventh magnum of champagne and screaming at the waiter that “no, sir doesn’t want another 11 glasses, this is all for me” before trying to aggressively fuck a cheeseboard that someone put a lot of time, effort and expense into.

What happened between then and now, and why there is Fortnum and Masons Green Tomato Chutney smeared across your tits, is a mystery very much secondary to the fact you appear to be upside down in a vending machine. A fact brought home to you by the angry traveller repeatedly pressing “D5” causing the whirring machine to attempt to corkscrew 3 cans of monster energy up your arse.

Your overtaxed bladder releases and the stream of hot, and somehow still fizzy, piss cuts through the grime on the glass of the vending machine to reveal two things. The first is a crowd of people gathered around a massive video ad screen, which has been repurposed to show news footage of a new viral video. The video appears to be you, attempting to check in to an open vending machine believing it to be a capsule hotel, generously tipping the attendant refilling it, climbing inside and closing yourself in. The view counter currently stands at 2.4 billion. The second thing is the unmistakable, albeit inverted, outline of the Mirai Tower.

You do not have a visa for travel to Nagoya, or indeed any part of Japan, so this is concerning.  Gathering your strength you inhale deeply, clench your entire self, and erupt through the glass of the vending machine, brutally lacerating the vendee and launching a can of monster at near hypersonic speeds into the head of an innocent bystander who (were it not for this event) would have made the developments in material science necessary for the creation of a functioning cold fusion reactor.

As three security guards, a member of the royal Canadian mounted police, and Hachimaru (mascot of the city of Nagoya) chase you, trousers-less, down the street, you consider your predicament. Air travel will be difficult in your current condition.

You escape your pursuers by causing a tanker full of industrial lubricant to overturn, rendering everything within 130 feet “thoroughly lubricated” and thus unsuitable for high speed pursuit.

Sprinting through the city streets to the nearest dockyard, you hide yourself in a shipping container bound for England. For six weeks you subsist on only dry noodle bricks, snorted flavour sachets and rainwater. You wile away the time fashioning an impeccably tasteful suit out of the foil noodle wrappers.

You arrive just in time for London Fashion Week, where you win several awards, before being hospitalised due to a case of constipation so severe that the tattered remains of your anus go on to grace the cover of the British Medical Journal.

So begins 2024.