Gustave Doré’s Red Riding Hood. Usually, conversational gambits at the school gates go something like this: “How is Ermyntrude settling in?” “Isn’t the traffic awful?” “A bit nippy this morning eh?” Not the most thrilling set of references. So [...]
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David Cameron, Jupiter and death
David Cameron with his first son Ivan in 2002. Ivan died in 2009. It’s remarkable how often in families a death and a birth happen in quick succession. Poor David Cameron lost his father today just weeks after his wife gave birth to that darling baby. My wise friend Judith, who has seen [...]
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Newspaper horoscopes: should you bother?
Desire Dehau reading a newspaper by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1890). They didn’t have horoscope columns back then but it’s a nice picture. I wrote this a while ago for a pilot partwork, but I think it’s worth republishing. Every day in newspapers and on the internet, [...]
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Why I love Mercury retrograde
Yes – it’s that time again. Mercury is retrograde, so astrologers say don’t put anything in the post, don’t sign contracts, don’t buy computers, don’t make plans bla bla bla. If you paid attention to that you’d be spending about a fifth of your year [...]
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Times are changing
This is from an old copy of the defunct magazine Punch. I can never see the joke, but it does seem appropriate. We had dinner with an entertainingly gloomy Irishman last night. He’s clearly enjoying the credit crunch a lot – because it means that he can wallow in deepest pessimism, [...]
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What is the point of your astrology?
This is one tiny bit of the magnificent Jantar Mantar or astronomical observatory in Jaipur built by Jai Singh II in the early 18th century. Those Mughals took their astrology seriously. I had an interesting conversation with a friend visiting from Calcutta last weekend. He’s an [...]
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Between land and sea
I’ve just come back from a week at the beach in Winchelsea, East Sussex. It’s an uncanny kind of place with a wide tide. At high tide, it’s an ordinary shingle beach. In the distance you can see the eerie power station at Dungeness and a huge windfarm. As the tide goes out [...]
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Cork that gusher – yadda yadda yadda
My mother phoned up this morning to tell me that she had her very own gusher staying with her – in the form of a dear friend who talks a lot. He’s lovely but he chatters so much that she feels as if she’s drowning in a sea of words. I happen to know he’s […]
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