RELOCATION

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.