Astrology blog
Planets, houses and aspects in plain language — from your first chart to a year-ahead forecast.
Birth-time rectificationYou've hunted for your birth time and come up empty. The certificate has a date and no hour, the hospital's records have thinned with the decades, and your family offers a shrug and a vague "sometime in the morning." Then an astrologer says something that sounds equal parts hopeful and suspicious...
Oksana Miatova11 min
GuidesHalf past four on a Thursday in a small café off Borough High Street. A 34-year-old woman tells her oldest friend, between sips of flat white, that the promotion has come through. The friend says the right warm things. Then, in the gap before the next question, the heroine looks down at her cup a...
Oksana Miatova22 min
HoroscopesMost Virgo horoscope columns will tell you to organise something today. Your inbox, your week, your finances, your skincare drawer. They will be confident about it for one paragraph, and slightly different from the next column's verdict by Wednesday. If you've ever read your Virgo horoscope and t...
Oksana Miatova16 min
CompatibilityIt is Saturday morning, six months after you moved in together. He has chosen a small ceramic jug at a craft market because the colour was right. You have relabelled the jars in the cupboard so the lentils actually get used. He bakes bread on Sundays now. You buy the kind of tea he drinks without...
Oksana Miatova18 min
CompatibilityIt is Thursday evening. They have been together two years. He is talking about the new bakery in Stoke Newington he wants to try on Saturday morning, and the long lunch they had planned afterwards. Her phone buzzes. A friend has a spare seat in a car going to Cornwall, leaving Friday night, back ...
Oksana Miatova14 min
GuidesSomewhere around your birthday, the Sun returns to the exact spot in the zodiac it sat at the minute you were born. A solar return chart is the snapshot of the whole sky at that moment — and astrologers read it as a one-year theme map running from this birthday to the next. It isn't always on you...
Oksana Miatova15 min
CompatibilityShe screen-grabs a paragraph from Cosmopolitan and sends it to her best friend. «Is this us?» The friend reads two sentences and sends back a shrug. A different site rates the pair at 47 per cent. A third calls it «one of the most challenging matches in the zodiac», then a Reddit thread tells her...
Oksana Miatova12 min
CompatibilityThree horoscope sites can read Cancer and Scorpio and come back with "soulmates", "watch the possessiveness", and "difficult match", each writer perfectly confident. They aren't lying. They're all looking at the same one tenth of the chart and filling in the rest with mood. Astrological birth cha...
Oksana Miatova17 min
CompatibilityShe wants to know whether they're moving in together. He answers, easily, by suggesting a long weekend in Porto, as though those two questions belong on the same shelf. Both think they have engaged. Neither has heard the other. By Tuesday the conversation about the flat has gone quiet, and he is,...
Oksana Miatova13 min
GuidesThree friends, three different January birthdays, three different Chinese zodiac animals — and at least one of them looked it up on a different website and got a different answer. Somewhere in that confusion is a real question: what are the Chinese zodiac signs by year, how do you find yours, and...
Oksana Miatova18 min
GuidesFour o'clock on a Friday in October. Your manager rang to say you're being put forward for senior consultant — that you've earned it, that the directors agreed it was overdue. You thanked him. You hung up. You made dinner, watched something undemanding, brushed your teeth. The whole time, running...
Oksana Miatova24 min
GuidesEmma opens a third browser tab. The first article said the Leo birthstone is peridot. The second said it's ruby. The third gave a list of ten stones, all of them apparently «the Leo stone». She closes all three. None of them said the same thing as either of the others, and none of them said why.
Oksana Miatova17 min