ARIES: You have this recurring nightmare that you are Sammy Davis Junior in drag, and that you are trapped in a lift with Richard Dawkins, Larry Summers and James D Watson. You may need some churchin’ up.

TAURUS: You cannot put it off any longer. No biscuity distractions, no junk food, no offers of nights out will suffice. And how long does it take to write up a thesis, anyway? Your best bet is to join the editorial staff of a journal. Then you can put it off indefinitely.

GEMINI: The month should start well, but by the 15th you’ll be more or less convinced that against the Power of the Ring there can be no victory, except in some rather peculiar circumstances which may pertain on the 19th and 27th. Lucky cDNA clone: Origene.

CANCER: The tall dark stranger you will see on the 9th is either Death, or your electrician who’s come to mend the main fuse. It all depends on the scythe, but such things can be hard to make out in the dark. It’s your call.

LEO: You’ve drawn the short straw to write up your lab’s next paper. But all those wonderful phrases in your head turn to old mashed potato as soon as your fingers meet the keyboard. However hard you try, you cannot start a paper without using the words ‘oldsmobile’ and ‘wildebeest’.

VIRGO: Don’t laugh at the nightmares that afflict your colleagues born under Aries. Yours will involve alarm clocks, suits of armour, stuffed penguins, and being flagellated with a wet suit full of lumpy custard. But you’re a Virgo, so maybe you like that sort of thing. Lucky recombinant human beta-NGF: R&D Systems.

LIBRA: On the 5th you’ll wake up to a sense of terrifying futility. This will slowly transmute to a conviction of the imminence of death by the 8th, mute fatalism by the 12th and bored resignation by the 20th, but you’ll manage to work through all that, so that by the end of the month you will be able to read papers on chromatin structure with a new comprehension.

SCORPIO: After reading a paper in Nature entitled ‘Methylation of histone H3R2 by PRMT6 and H3K4 by an MLL complex are mutually exclusive’, you decide to take up Scrabble, except that after putting BENZOQUINONE over two triple-word scores you get thrown out for cheating.

SAGITTARIUS: The tall dark stranger you will meet on the 9th is not Death, but the electrician who has come to mend the fuse of your Cancerian neighbour. Don’t tell your neighbour, though. There is nothing so much fun as laughing at a Cancerian facing the prospect of the hereafter.

CAPRICORN: You should know better by now, but after three years trying and failing to get a Southern that doesn’t look like a Roschach Test created by a seven-legged spider with Tourette’s, you have come to terms with the fact that it’s less to do with science than witchcraft.

AQUARIUS: Every person you see – at work, on the tube, even at home – has the same face. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were a nice face. Liv Tyler, maybe. Even Judy Finnegan would do. But Timothy Spall? You should take some of that accumulated holiday, but avoid building sites in Birmingham or Newcastle.

PISCES: What with your Aquarian labmate suddenly on vacation; your Aries and Virgo colleagues in therapy; your Cancerian colleague helping police with their inquiries after pushing their now-hospitalized Sagittarian neighbour downstairs; your Taurean technician having run off to become Chief Editor of Nature Histone Methylation (taking the Libran as Associate Editor); your Leo colleague in the library trying to write; your Capricorn colleague having left early in search of sacred oak groves and mistletoe; and the Gemini with her nose in The Lord of the Rings – you’ll have the lab to yourself, more or less. Just steer clear of Scorpios looking for a Scrabble game.