ON PLACES, AND THE PEOPLE THEY WRECK

Your birth chart records the sky at one moment. Astrocartography asks where on Earth that same sky would have placed each planet on one of the chart's four angles.

Four minutes of error moves a line about a degree. An hour moves it across a country. The least mystical paragraph on this site, and the most consequential.

Astrology should be the third filter, not the first. In that order it is genuinely useful. In the other order it is an expensive way to end up somewhere with no work and no friends.

The maths is accurate to the minute. The meanings are a tradition. Whether a line changes your life has never been demonstrated, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Your first map looks like a plate of spaghetti thrown at the world. There is an order to look at it in, and it is not the order your eye wants to use.

They get used as synonyms constantly. One is a filter that works on the whole globe at once; the other is a detailed reading of a single address. The order you use them in matters.

Venus is the line everyone asks for, and the one most often mistaken for a promise. Which is how people end up making permanent decisions about a city they met on holiday.

You get off a train somewhere you have never been and something in your shoulders drops. Plenty of explanations for this. There is also the one people actually want… is this home?

The instinct is to go somewhere beautiful and full of couples. The instinct is wrong, and there is a reasonably clear-eyed argument for why.

Expansion is the most oversold word in astrology. It does not mean things get better. It means things get bigger, which is a different and much more expensive proposition.

Before you blame the city, there is a short list of duller explanations worth ruling out. Most people who move without doing that discover the problem had a suitcase.

Almost every chart puts ambition and rest on opposite sides of the world. This is inconvenient and, on reflection, not remotely surprising.

Every beginner's guide tells you to avoid it. The tradition associates Saturn with restriction, effort and competence — and a few people go there deliberately for exactly that.

The house was chosen by two people, at least one of whom no longer lives in it. That is a real reason to reconsider where you are — and a poor reason to be in a hurry about it.

Grief does not respect a floor plan. The house is the same house and it has stopped being the same house, and no amount of rearranging it settles the question.

Almost nobody chose where they live. They chose a job, and the postcode came attached. Retirement is the first time in decades that the constraint is gone, and the freedom is more disorienting than people expect.

Everything about the house was decided by people who no longer live in it. The catchment area, the spare rooms, the distance to the station. The reasons left; the mortgage stayed.

Every publication runs this piece. Almost none mention that it sorts eight billion people into twelve holidays, which even by astrology's standards is ambitious.