MISCELLANY: YOUR STARS: IT COULD HAPPEN

So we move into Taurus, the scariest of signs (Barbra Streisand). It's also disproportionately the sign of aristocrats (Dukes Wellington and Ellington). The Queen's soul has chosen this incarnation to demonstrate there is no security in the flux of reality, and to experience the hollowness of material passions. Bound by possessions to the wheel of life, Taurean souls struggle to release themselves from the agonising hallucinations of property and position in the world. Her Majesty still has some work to do, as has the Emperor Hirohito. Juliana of the Netherlands has done so well she'll be graduating into Gemini. Denis Thatcher will be relegated back to Aries.

There is something rather awful about Taurus - the car coats you wear for your Sunday drive around the common. You are usually union officials, horse trainers, and unsuccessful welterweights (especially the women). Taurus is the solid, acquisitive sign of tax plans, household accounts and deferred gratification. It's the sign of bank managers (Jacob and Guy de Rothschild). In the Taurean soul it's always Sunday afternoon three hours before the pubs open. Only Taureans found Tony Hancock funny.

The monotonous certainty which you bring to your views means that you do well in politics, but not very well. Your chief talent is loyalty. All the politicians you've never heard of are Taureans, and much of Britain's post-war decline can be ascribed to the conservative sloth and implacable self-interest of this wretched sign. But some ambitious Taureans do add texture to their lives by involving themselves in totalitarian government. They know the pit of the bourgeois heart and can tap its latent rage to wreak monstrous horror (Karl Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Lucrezia Borgia, Lonnie Donegan). Finally, their most significant talent is to die memorably (Jayne Mansfield, the topless actress).