I used to read my horoscope avidly, in the days when it was in the newspaper. I also had a list of astrologers in my Favourites on the computer. By scrolling through the list I could even find a favourable one on a day when everyone else was predicting gloom and doom.
As the years in Al-Anon family groups ticked by and I learned about CONTROL and the way it spread through families of alcoholics like mycelium underground, popping up everywhere after a shower of alcohol in poisoned toadstools, I realised that was the reason I read the horoscopes so avidly; I had ceded control of my own life to my mother, my OH and anyone else who couldn’t control their temper, drinking, or outbursts and had decided to control me instead. The horoscopes were an attempt at a map of the unknown road ahead, which is what you’ve got with someone else at the wheel.
So I eliminated all astrologers except Georgia Nicols, because she is hilarious.
However.
Today there is a possibility that 1) the full moon coupled with 2) change in the power of signs to the next one from mine and 3) Scorpio doing something dodgy and 4) Something in trine, or rising, or dropping off or in opposition and Mercury retrograde, all combine to predict that: Today anyone called Jane and a Taurus is going to have a very expensive and generally rubbish day. The only consolation being that George Clooney (exactly ten years younger than me) is also having a shit day.
It started on Saturday, this Wednesday.
The OH suggested on Saturday, lying, as he was, at full length in a chair, watching me fly around getting the house and the food and the everything else ready for the arrival of the grandchildren and their parents, on Sunday, that to prepare the drive I needed to move my car out of the way. I was in such a rush I decided it was easier to do that than argue, which I did not have time to do, so I parked it in front of the garage door, leaving plenty of room on the drive.
Although the year-long build has been generally satisfactory, a less wonderous feature is the amount of rain generated by the new sloping roof. In a thunderstorm, such as we suddenly had on Saturday, the gutters overflow in a waterspout, on to my little car, parked under a waterfall. I knew this was daft and moved it later when I had to go out for something I’d forgotten, subsequently sitting further up the drive in a hail shower that sounded like hammers on the roof, trapped inside watching the snow sliding sideways across the windscreen. In May.
Sunday was a family day, only slightly spoiled by the OH taking the family round the new build and taking all the credit for something he didn’t design. help with, finance, or even get out of bed for, while I was doing cooking things.
Monday we just sat, knackered.
So it was Tuesday when I got into the car and found I was paddling. I drove round to the supermarket and it sounded as if I was driving a swimming pool.
I rang the garage and asked if it was safe to drive to the garage and the garage asked if the water was anywhere near the electrics.
Where are the electrics?
Oh, all over.
This morning I drove with some trepidation to the garage, expecting to be electrocuted momentarily. The OH followed and brought me back.
The garage rang, expressing surprise at the hell of a lot of rain (their phrase) and the dampness of the carpets. It would be necessary to the tune of £600 just for the labour to get the seats out and the carpets up and necessary to the tune of another £600 plus VAT to have new carpets. The OH suggested taking it somewhere cheaper, but as I plan to part exchange this car into that garage, that was right out.
I then drove the OH’s car to my dentist’s appointment, having first nearly backed it into the garage door. By the time I got to the next town I’d got the hang of it and my heart had stopped hammering, right up until the bit where the dentist said the only permanent way to cure the stain on my front tooth which had developed in a lockdown year with no dentists, was not a new filling but a new wrap-around doodah (the leaflet for which I carefully left on the waiting room floor in shock at the price.) £600 for this tooth and, don’t you know, you have to get the one next to it done too, to make them the same colour, otherwise you’ll have one candy striped front tooth and one next to it with the usual blue swirls on it, so that one will be £600 as well.
£2,400 poorer (in one afternoon,) with £3,000 per eye cataracts to come, I switched on the computer to find my latest literary agent’s rejection.
Will Scorpio make friends with Aquarius? Will the second declination of the third house put the mockers on the advancement of Libra? Will the garage find out where the water is getting in? Will I ever find a literary agent who isn’t a scam or a rejecter? Will it be dry enough tomorrow to wash the bath mats?
It’s a right whatsit, Mercury Retrograde, or as Georgia put it: Today’s Moon Alert takes place in your house of money, avoid spending.
Quite so.
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