Yesterday in the Guardian though, I got into much more trouble than that. Catherine Bennett dedicated the best part of a page to an attack on astrology - using me as proof that it must all be a load of rubbish. She writes "Cainer has apologised to readers for suddenly changing the sign for Scorpio into an eagle, with qualities that are correspondingly eagle-like." She implies that by doing this, I am creating a "pick your own zodiac" and showing the world just how "made up" astrology is. Interestingly though, she then misses a trick. She quotes my line about the "poisonous insect" but does not correct the mistake in it. Maybe she doesn't know about the spiders, either.

She doesn't miss many other tricks though. She trots out many of the hoary old chestnuts that over the years I have come to know and love. She mentions, for example, that a professor at the University of Southampton is now undertaking a study into the claim that astrological factors can influence the success rate of IVF treatment. Snootily, she comments; "There is no evidence that the stars influence fertility, or for that matter, any other aspect of human existence." Here, she is about as wrong as she can be. There is, actually, compelling evidence to back the suggestion that the female menstrual cycle is influenced by the cycle of the Moon. Both cycles take just under 28 days to complete. That's a suspicious coincidence that a university would be silly not to investigate, even if people hadn't been talking about this link for thousands of years.

As for Catherine's assertion that the sky has no influence on any other aspect of human life, this too is just plain ignorant. The scientific evidence is patchy but a fair bit does exist - much to the chagrin of the cynics. One famous example of scientific proof involves the work of Michel Gauquelin, a French statistician in the 1960s. He found that, if you were born at certain times of day, you were far more likely to take up certain careers. This so much upset the scientific establishment that they commissioned a further study to "check" his findings. This study reached a very different conclusion. Gauquelin was discredited. Only some years later did a dreadful scandal come to light. The disproving data in the second study had been fiddled. When evaluated properly, it TOO showed a link between birth time and profession.