This mysterious disc is said to be the oldest known map of the heavens. Two nights ago the stars sparkled so fiercely above our house. Jupiter was a perfect, tiny orange disc, suspended between bright burning Aldebaran, the Watcher of the East, and Orion. The Pleiades were easy to see, a [...]

Amy Winehouse (born with Saturn in Scorpio) Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just gloss over the nastier side of human nature and pretend there’s no jealousy, no murderous rage, no stomach churning fear, no madness? We could all live in a happy, smiling Libra world…. but we [...]

 It is indeed a dreamy night tonight, a night to stay up until dawn inventing epics and love stories. Neptune, master of illusions, rises as the Sun moves into Cancer. The two cast a knowing beam to each other through the imaginative, watery signs of Cancer and Pisces. What’s more the [...]

Happy May Day to all my readers.As you may know, May Day is celebrated with some ferocity in Oxford – drinking, dancing, dressing up. It starts with a choir greeting the dawn from the top of Magdalene Tower and continues with dancing in the  streets.It’s been raining all night here [...]

The Virgin at La Salette, France “MAY is Mary’s month, and I Muse at that and wonder why:     Her feasts follow reason,     Dated due to season—   Candlemas, Lady Day;         5 But the Lady Month, May, [...]

Here is what the English poet Robert Herrick wrote about the morning of the first of May, about 400 years ago, in Corinna’s Gone A-Maying. Read it and feel a rush of blood to the head. Flora designed by William Morris GET up, get up for shame! The blooming [...]

I’ve just been asked to put up a chart for the earthquake, so here it is. As I pointed out before, Uranus is in the last minutes of Pisces, so the planet of surprises leaves the sign of the deepest oceans on a tidal wave. The imagery could not be clearer. I haven’t decided which [...]

Uranus leaves Pisces today or tomorrow (depending on where on earth you are) after eight eventful years. Get your life-jackets out, it’s going to be stormy.

Shade and Darkness – The Evening before the Deluge. JMW Turner 1843 A wall of water ripped through inland Australia tearing up trees, tossing cars and buses like flotsam, swamping houses and taking lives. Today hundreds of Brazilians died in muddy landslides caused by torrents of rain. In [...]

Winter Moonlight by George Inness captures the stillness of this time of year. The end of December. In the northern hemisphere, the darkest, quietest and stillest part of the year. The time when the earth’s energy is at its weakest and we have a little more time to think – reflecting on the [...]

Here in Oxford, we are having an extraordinarily beautiful autumn. The leaves are lambent red and gold, yellow and bright green. The air is very still, slightly damp and shining. It is unusually warm, so the light is not crisp and sharp, but gleaming. In short it is like a dream. I cycled back [...]

Whenever I go past the alley of trees in this picture, I think of how somewhere between them may be the Sunderland Avenue, North Oxford, Summer 2010.gateway to a parallel Oxford. In His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman‘s fantasy trilogy, Will Parry, the boy hero, creates an invisible [...]

  Ripe apples drop about my head;  The luscious clusters of the vine  Upon my mouth do crush their wine;  The nectarine and curious peach  Into my hands themselves do reach;  Stumbling on melons as I pass,  Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. The Garden, Andrew Marvell  (1621-1678) [...]

I’ve been looking at pictures of the Biblical floods in Pakistan, listening to the statistics – more people affected by this than by the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Is this possible? So I found a map and realised that the area being flooded is the Indus Valley itself, one of the [...]

The Sun’s gone into the sign of Leo now. It’s full summer, the time of the Lion, as hot as it gets in the Northern hemisphere. Leo is a fire sign of course and its ruler is the Sun, by far the brightest thing in our solar system. No wonder Leos have a reputation for […]