Hands off our national treasure My friend down the road never “bakes a cake”, she “does a Nigella”. I’m sure she’s not alone. Is there a kitchen bookshelf in Britain that does not have a thumbed edition of How To Eat or Feast or some other of Nigella [...]

The angels are calling Nelson Mandela. He may not go yet, but they are very close. When a death is at the right time, often Jupiter, the planet of benevolence and generosity arrives, ready to shepherd the soul on its journey. Mandela’s Jupiter Return is on June 3Oth. When Mandela was [...]

Agia Sofia: layers of meaning Photo: Osvaldo Gago, wikimedia commons If you stand still in the middle of the vast space of the Agia Sofia, Istanbul’s great mosque/church, as the masses of tourists swirl around you and the silvery light filters from high up windows, you can almost feel [...]

The eagle is another symbol for Scorpio. My friend Michael Wolfstar, who runs the website Neptune Cafe, wrote to me after reading my previous post American Aprils. He didn’t disagree with the substance of it, but he wanted to point out that the chart he uses for the US has Scorpio Rising [...]

The “Minutemen”, American revolutionaries ready to snatch up their weapons at a moment’s notice, confront the redcoats. Their flexibility, speed and the urgency of their cause was a big factor in their victory. Allied to the fact that they were on home territory. Even though [...]

Winning her second term 1983. The whole country was frozen, dry and still in March and early April. In my garden, which at this time of year is usually bursting with buoyant blooms, nothing changed for weeks. This was all due to the strange, bitter weather, of course. Spring had been arrested. [...]

So now it’s naughty little Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, which is giving the eurozone the screaming abdabs. Aphrodite is the Greek Venus, of course. In astrology, Venus rules money, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that Cyprus was, until a week ago, a great place to get your [...]

Pope Francis. More than half of the denizens of this planet have just had a new leader chosen for them. Two small groups of powerful people within two vast, and rather arcane institutions have voted in two new leaders on opposite sides of the world. President Xi Jinping We have a new Pope, [...]

Here is what I wrote about Syria last spring. “Let us pray for as many ceasefires as possible, because this is a long, drawn-out struggle. I really hate to be pessimistic, but it seems to me there is a strong potential for civil war, whether Assad himself stays or goes. If the [...]

(This is the second part of my piece on the UK. There is much more to say, but for now, this will suffice.) Sometimes it feels like Britain is a boxer still upright after 10 rounds but punch drunk: standing up because of a combination of will power and show business. One blow after another [...]

Corridors of power under a Neptune transit. For a month or so last summer what it meant to be British in the 21st century seemed so clear – in an eccentric sort of way. There were James Bond and the Queen and Mr Bean cavorting about, and various sporty types and dancing nurses and Voldemort, [...]

After I gave birth to my first daughter in a London hospital, I shared a room with three other women – a Palestinian, an Israeli, and a London Iranian. No kidding. There was some awkward negotiating around drips, cots, nurses and nappies. But the presence of tiny new babies creates a certain [...]

Little Red Riding Wolf: The fairy tale give some good advice about how to deal with predators. A while ago I met someone who had been molested by the late kid’s TV host Jimmy Savile back in the 1970s. I won’t disgust you with the details; he was a little boy at the time and […]

Romney: Sun in Pisces (the mirror) Gemini Rising…. Mitt Romney is the son of two truly remarkable people: his mother Lenore – clever, beautiful, a trained actress and a candidate for the senate when women did not do that, and his father George – an immigrant who pulled himself up from [...]

Smith I vowed a long time ago not to watch Doctor Who until he regenerated as a woman. So far, the Doctor has had 11 incarnations, each with his own take on the character but none with a different gender. However, my children, as usual, changed my mind, so here at Schloss Astrology we have [...]

Could this be the next Prime Minister? Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has had a fantastic summer, using the Olympics to upstage the Prime Minister David Cameron, repeatedly. His season of triumph climaxed with a rabble-rousing speech on Monday outside Buckingham Palace, when he [...]

Thomas Cromwell: fixer, strategist, statesman – Scorpio. Hans Holbein King Henry VIII – charmer, playboy, wife-killer and the first head of the Church of England – had an axe-man, Thomas Cromwell, whose job it was to facilitate the King’s desires – divorce, dissolution, beheadings, [...]

This beautiful hybrid orchid is named after Aung San Suu Kyi. You never know who you’re going to see in Oxford. A while ago I got to say good morning to a fistful of bishops as I got out of the car. This afternoon, we saw Aung San Suu Kyi whizz past in a security […]

Ted Hughes was best known as a powerful nature poet before he was made laureate in 1984. It seemed like a strange choice; this poet of fox and moor, black-backed gull and deadly pike, above all of wildness, asked to write about the baroque, many-layered, structured, civilised, profoundly tamed [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France. Sun Aquaris/MoonPisces Like so many nations, France is in a right mess. Unemployment, social unrest, shambolic finances, a failing education system – and perhaps worst of all, no clear vision for the future. And France is in the midst of general election. [...]