Written each evening from the real sky over London ·
Capricorn horoscope today
The Goat, 22 December to 19 January · Earth, cardinal, ruled by Saturn
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.
The ladder is still in the shed
You have a list of jobs that each need an hour and a second pair of hands, and you have been waiting to have both at once. Ask somebody this evening. They will say yes faster than you expect.
Love
The people at home can tell the difference between tired and troubled, and this week you have been the second while calling it the first. One sentence about what is actually heavy, at the kitchen table, not on the way out of the door.
Work and money
A decision that is yours to make has been sitting in a folder marked later since the end of August. Nothing new is going to arrive to make it easier. Make it today, write down why in three lines, and stop paying rent on it.
Body and mind
Your back is telling you about the chair and you have been negotiating with it. Stand up every hour, and go to bed before midnight twice this week rather than promising yourself a proper rest at the weekend, which never quite arrives.
If you read nothing else
Ask for the second pair of hands this evening
The sky Moon in Virgo all day · new moon, 1% lit · Saturn retrograde. New moon tomorrow, at 4.27am.
Leave you have not taken
Thursday is a working day and you will work it; that was never in question. What is in question is whether anybody has told you lately that what you carry is unusual, and whether you would believe them.
Love
You are the one who arranges things, and arranging has quietly replaced enjoying. Let somebody else choose the restaurant, the film, the weekend, and resist improving on their choice out loud. The people at home want your company more than your competence, though they have long since stopped expecting both.
Work and money
Find out how much leave you have left this year. If the number is embarrassing, book one day of it before the month ends, on a Friday when nothing will collapse. Not a holiday. One day. The place will cope, and you will learn something useful about how indispensable you have decided to be.
Body and mind
The strain you carry tends to show up on a Saturday morning, when you finally stop and feel dreadful for no visible reason. Midweek is the cheapest time to rest and the hardest for you to permit. Half an hour tonight in which nothing whatsoever is achieved.
If you read nothing else
Book one day off before the month ends, then actually take it
And tomorrow, Thursday 10 September
Leave you have not taken. Thursday is a working day and you will work it; that was never in question.
Capricorn takes responsibility early, often earlier than it should, and builds the way people used to build houses: slowly, and to last. Ruled by Saturn, it respects effort and time, distrusts shortcuts, and quietly notices who did the work. It ages in the right direction, and its forties tend to be better than its twenties.
The cost is that it carries things alone. Capricorn will decide it is the responsible one and then resent a job nobody asked it to take. Underneath the seriousness is a very dry sense of humour, which arrives without warning and is the fastest way into its confidence.
Capricorn in love
Slow, careful and serious once decided. Capricorn shows love in commitment rather than declaration: the plan, the pension, the standing arrangement. It needs to be told that it is wanted for itself and not for what it provides, because it half suspects the second is the real reason.
Capricorn at work
It gets there. Capricorn is the one still going when the clever starters have moved on, and it is usually running something by the end. Its blind spot is asking for help, and its other one is assuming that the good work will be noticed on its own.
Who Capricorn gets on with
Taurus: The same pace and the same idea of what solid means.
Virgo: Standards, kept, without either needing to explain why.
Scorpio: Two people whose word is the actual contract.
Aries and Libra test its patience: one wants it now, the other wants to keep discussing it, and Capricorn wants a decision and a date.