Roisin Gorman’s Open Letter... on horoscopes

I’m a lapsed Sagittarian. For a few brief years I was the Snow White of the cosmos, spreading cheer and love. Then it turned out I’m a Scorpio, who regards Cruella de Vil as a role model and steals cosmic sweets from babies. We’re the least favourite star sign behind magnificent Leo and gentle Pisces. In a recent poll in Utah of people most likely to get a Covid vaccination, Scorpios were bottom of the pile, again. The poll was as scientific as astrology and palm reading rolled up in homeopathy, but even when bored health officials monkey about with data for the craic, Scorpios are still evil. I discovered the real date of my birthday when the school required a birth certificate before Holy Communion, and after nearly eight years as a Sagittarian, born on November 24, I was thrown backwards into Scorpio, actually born on November 15. To be fair to my parents, they were busy people with a young family, and the baptism was on December 24, because what else would you do on Christmas Eve with five kids but baptise one of them? That may be where the confusion came from. It also runs in the family. During a heated debate with my husband about our son’s date of birth, I played the trump card of ‘I gave birth to him’, and was completely wrong. In my defence I had just had a baby — trump card forever. Working out wedding anniversaries also requires a calculator, a calendar and a stab in the dark. In terms of birth signs the universe would have known I’m a Scorpio, but I’d have gone through life mistakenly living it up as a Sag, as we former Sags like to call ourselves. A whirlwind existence as a thrill-seeking, magnetic, fun-loving life and soul of the party lay within touching distance, but instead I got manipulative, plotting, controlling Scorpio. By the age of eight there hadn’t been much thrill-seeking beyond walking up a slide, but who knows what could have happened? The heat of a fire sign suddenly gave way to the deep-flowing currents of a water sign. It could have been worse. I could have gone from earth to water, which is just mud. Despite assurances from the cosmic aficionados that star signs influence the very core of our personality, I got over being in the wrong one because I’ve never really understood the complicated machinations of planets ascending and descending and the lure of the quadruplicity. Wasn’t that a Beyoncé album? And I’ve never got how planetary alignment at the time of your birth will now predict an imminent cappuccino next to a man with a beard and a bad attitude. The nearest most of us come to astrology is the daily horoscope, which has only been around since the 1930s, and it doesn’t help that a friend used to write them for a magazine. The trick was to throw in a retrograde planet, a moon cycle and keep it vague, so a life challenge could be a tricky sudoku or a broken leg. Pre-horoscopes, Nostradamus was the king of the woolly prophecy with a side order of flowery language, and I remember my eminently sensible grandmother was a big fan of Old Moore’s Almanac, like Marie Claire for farmers with star signs and weather predictions. Right now, I don’t need a horoscope to know what’s coming — another birthday, I think.