NOTICE anything different about my picture for this week's column? Yes, it is me. It's me on two or three days every month.

I turn into a lunatic - literally meaning moonstruck. Those who know me might say it's more than a couple of days a month, but believe me, it's no laughing matter.

I don't howl at the moon, but that great chunk of cheese in the sky pulls at my moods as surely as it pulls oceans from one side of the world to the other.

Well, why not? They say people are made up of 90 per cent water - the other ten per cent is wind - so why shouldn't the moon's magnetic pull affect us?

Last Christmas my boss bought me a calendar of the moon's phases so that I - and she - would know when I was going to be odd. My wife marks it in her diary every month. She simply puts in "PLT" - pre-lunar tension. Living in a house with a wife and teenage daughter you can imagine the mayhem when PLT meets PMT.

There's another touchy topic. Years ago a pal of mine went into Boots and asked the nice lady if she could give him something for pre-menstrual tension. "But that's what women suffer from," she said. No, no lady. Men suffer from it far more!

Women have been known to get away with murder because they were suffering from PMT when they stabbed their husbands. So surely I can be forgiven a touch of tetchy PLT.

For those few days a month a black cloud seems to hang over everything. Anxiety, irritability, clumsiness, sleeplessness and total unease. Life seems so bleak. And it was only in recent years that I realised it was a regular monthly thing and it coincided with the full moon.

As a teenager I would occasionally be so restless I'd get up in the middle of the night and walk miles into the countryside, always to the light of a lovely, silvery moon.

It's not as if I grow hair on the palm of my hands - or on my head, even - and I don't attack passing virgins with a bite to the throat. My fangs don't get any bigger and I am no more vulnerable to silver bullets than ordinary lead ones.

The consolation is that I am not alone. All around the world, police and other emergency services report an increase in violent and weird crime, suicides and accidents at around the full moon. So the next time you prang your car, check the calendar.

In America, particularly, the murder rate increases dramatically and many of the infamous gun rampages have coincided with lunar tension time.

A quick surf of the internet will turn up whole websites devoted to the study of the moon's effects on our moods. They chart how people around the globe become more talkative, have boosts of energy which makes them want to clean everything in sight, or they are easily provoked and agitated.

And did you know that the Malayan black rice bug always mates at full moon? But that may just be because in the silvery light he can see how beautiful his partner is.

In many crustaceans, renewal of shells, sexual activity and regeneration of lost limbs all occur with the full moon.

Some serious students of the lunar phenomenon believe it could be the silver light that affects us. We all know that different colours of light affect us in different ways: red for passion, blue for calm, green for clarity of thought. Silver just throws us off balance.

Whatever it is, it's a damn nuisance if you are susceptible.

In all the research and all the websites in the world, I cannot find any offers of a cure or solution. There does not seem to be a Full Moon Sufferers' Society where we can get together (in the forest at midnight once a month), shake our hairy palms and swap weird tales.

Come on. Werewolves of the world unite. It would be a howl.

Updated: 12:07 Tuesday, October 07, 2003