18 Nov Mercury Retrograde: It’s Not Just in Your Head
November 18, 2025
As I write, Mercury has been retrograding in the zodiac sign of Sagittarius for the past week, and already I have been having to navigate the usual crop of technical glitches, transportation chaos and miscommunications.
It started whilst we were being buffeted (I won’t say battered, as others had it far worse than we did) by Storm Claudia last Friday. Of course, the wi-fi in my garden office chose this moment to conk out. It’s never been that great, since it relies on transmitting through our home’s electrical circuits then out via a three-year old cable that powers the wooden structure that overlooks my lawn. This time it went from an adequate 45 megabits per second to 9, then down to 0.2.
Since I can’t work or even chat with my highly intelligent artificial assistant when pigeons could deliver messages more quickly, it was time to run a separate extension lead from the house. However, this meant going out in the cold and dark and the pouring rain to feed the lead through not one but three cat flaps in order to avoid having an open window and freezing to death in front of my PC. Needless to say, the cats were not amused that that this snake-like thing was going through their private doorways. My partner, who had spent several days trying to do his invoicing, was getting a little, shall we say ‘stressed’ at my cable-laying activities, which in the end didn’t work at all.
The next day there was more testing of different configurations of powerline adaptors, and in the end I discovered that the only way to get the signal back was to plug it into an external mains socket on the garden wall. This then necessitated a 3-mile bike ride to buy a plastic box to act as a temporary housing in case the rains came back and blew up the adapter and fused the garden office’s (and my) circuits. It’s running quite smoothly now, but we will have to pay an electrician to investigate the cause of the sudden slowdown, and possibly rewire the office.
And just 10 minutes ago, when booking a coach journey to London to meet Maggie and my fellow Page of Wands team members for what will no doubt be a very pleasant lunch in December, naturally the website couldn’t cope and still says ‘We’re experiencing technical issues on our end.’
Yes – you and me both!
Mercury’s roughly three-week retrograde periods (this one ends on the 30th of this month) take place around three times a year. They are times when it’s good to step back and not take events so seriously (if we can) and especially good for reflecting, journalling, planning and dreaming – even for taking a holiday. Just be prepared for a few surprises along the way!
Written by our astrologer Graham Boston 2025
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