Astrology blog
Planets, houses and aspects in plain language — from your first chart to a year-ahead forecast.
GuidesThe Pisces symbol — ♓ — is two fish, tied at the tail, swimming in opposite directions. If you've ever seen it on a horoscope page or on someone's wrist as a tattoo and thought "two fish, fine, but why are they tied together, and why facing away", you weren't being slow. The geometry is the meani...
Oksana Miatova11 min
GuidesMaya is thirty-one. People keep asking what she's doing now, and she keeps answering with a line out of her CV, as if she were reading the side of a tin. The honest thing, the thing she doesn't say aloud, is that she's been answering that way since university. Long before the divorce, long before...
Oksana Miatova19 min
GuidesAnna opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Libra birthstone is opal. The second listed eight stones — opal, rose quartz, lapis lazuli, sapphire, tourmaline, peridot, jade, citrine — all apparently «the Libra stone». The third was firm: «Sapphire, if you were born in September, eve...
Oksana Miatova20 min
GuidesIt is nine on a Wednesday in October. A 34-year-old woman in Manchester is sitting at her parents' kitchen table, three months after her divorce was finalised, in the slow logistical middle of finding her own flat. A mug of herbal tea has gone cold beside a notebook with two underlined words, *wh...
Oksana Miatova20 min
GuidesHannah opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Taurus birthstone is emerald. The second listed ten stones — emerald, rose quartz, jade, lapis lazuli, sapphire, peridot, garnet, citrine, malachite, tiger's eye, all apparently «the Taurus stone». The third was quieter and stranger: «E...
Oksana Miatova23 min
GuidesThree websites, three slightly different dates for the same sign. One friend swears she's "such a typical Capricorn", another tells you Capricorns are nothing like her. Somewhere in the middle, you'd quite like to know what the twelve zodiac signs actually are, where the dates come from, and whet...
Oksana Miatova18 min
GuidesIt's 11.47 on a Monday night. The alarm goes off in six and a quarter hours. You're lying on your back, eyes open, replaying a phrase from this morning's meeting — what your colleague said, what you said back, what you should probably have said instead, and what he might have meant, and whether t...
Oksana Miatova18 min
GuidesIt's a Tuesday evening in a Clapham café and your partner of two years hasn't answered the message you sent at six. It's now seven. Your stomach has done that small sliding thing it does, and the thought has arrived on its usual schedule: *something's wrong, he's going off me, I can feel it.* You...
Oksana Miatova17 min
GuidesThe hoover packed in halfway through the living room, and that was how Anna ended up sitting on the rug at three on a Sunday afternoon, two-and-a-half years after the divorce went through, realising she could not remember when she had last gone for a proper walk. She used to love walking. Used to...
Oksana Miatova17 min
GuidesIt's the sixth Friday of a relationship that, by every honest measure, is going well. He's kind, available, turned up on time, and last week he remembered something you mentioned in passing. You should be pleased. Instead, in the half-hour before he arrives to collect you for a weekend away, you ...
Oksana Miatova16 min
GuidesThree different sites will tell you a Scorpio is mysterious, intense, secretive, jealous and vengeful — usually in the same order, often in the same words. If you're a Scorpio and you've read those lists thinking "that's only half right, and the half that fits doesn't fit all the time", you weren...
Oksana Miatova13 min
GuidesSunday, half past five. The laptop has been closed since Friday. You did the long walk, made the slow lunch, ignored the inbox the way the wellness columns suggested. You open the laptop now just to check, just to be ready for Monday, and the feeling you spent the weekend trying to outrun is alre...
Oksana Miatova17 min