Written each evening from the real sky over London ·
Cancer horoscope today
The Crab, 21 June to 22 July · Water, cardinal, ruled by the Moon
The sky Moon in Leo, then Virgo from 8.34pm · waning crescent, 4% lit · Saturn retrograde. New moon on Friday at 4.27am, two days away.
Something for the freezer
You have been feeding everybody but yourself this week, in the ordinary sense and the other one. Wednesday is the day to cook twice and put half away, which is the most practical form of optimism there is.
Love
A birthday card has been sitting written and unposted, or a message half typed. Send it today rather than waiting for the perfect moment, which is not coming. The person on the other end is not keeping score, and you are the only one who thinks it is late.
Work and money
Somebody will lean on your good nature this afternoon and you will say yes before you have checked the week. Ask what the deadline is before you agree. If it collides with what you already promised, say so now, while it is still a scheduling problem.
Body and mind
The evening is where your energy is, oddly, so use it: cook, tidy one drawer, then stop. Your sleep has been broken by things that cannot be solved at three in the morning. Write them on paper before bed and let the paper hold them.
If you read nothing else
Post the card, cook twice, stop at half nine
The sky Moon in Virgo all day · new moon, 1% lit · Saturn retrograde. New moon tomorrow, at 4.27am.
A friend two hundred miles away
Some days are for cupboards and some are for the people who have drifted, and this one is quietly the second. There is somebody you think about often and ring almost never, and that gap has been widening since about March.
Love
The friend who moved away has not stopped being your friend; they have stopped being convenient. Ring at a slightly wrong time rather than waiting for the right one, which has not turned up since the spring. Twelve minutes on a Thursday evening keeps a friendship alive, and nothing more impressive is required.
Work and money
Somebody made a mistake last week and you smoothed it over before it reached anyone senior. That was kind, and it was also invisible. Tell them what you did, once, without the lecture attached. If it happens twice more you will want it on the record, and a record is far easier to start today than in November.
Body and mind
You rest better in a room that has been aired than in one where the whole day is still lying about. Ten minutes of putting things back before bed does more for your sleep than the extra hour you spend lying there afterwards, wondering whether you said the wrong thing.
If you read nothing else
Ring the one who moved away tonight, not at the weekend
And tomorrow, Thursday 10 September
A friend two hundred miles away. Some days are for cupboards and some are for the people who have drifted, and this one is quietly the second.
Cancer is the sign of the inside: the house, the family, the small circle it would do almost anything for. Ruled by the Moon, its mood has weather, and the people who love it learn to read the sky rather than take it personally. It notices who was kind in 2014 and who was not.
Its shell is not shyness, it is a policy. Cancer opens slowly, and once it has opened it is more loyal than is strictly good for it. Its hardest lesson is that looking after people is not the same as being needed by them, and that saying no early is kinder than resenting them later.
Cancer in love
Cancer wants to belong to someone and have that be safe. It shows it in food, in remembering, in turning up. It will not ask directly for reassurance; it will go quiet and hope you notice. If you love one, say the obvious thing out loud, and say it more often than feels necessary.
Cancer at work
Better at work than it believes. Cancer builds the atmosphere a team runs on and is usually the one holding the institutional memory. It undersells itself in the room and then minds. It does well where care is the actual product: health, teaching, hospitality, anything with people in it.
Who Cancer gets on with
Scorpio: Both go deep, and neither is frightened by it.