Áilín Quinlan: What... I’ve been reading my wrong star sign all this time?

Sitting on the plane, with a good tail-wind behind us but some distance yet to go, the conversation turned to Old Moore and his famous green book.

My neighbour in the next seat was attractively, yet efficiently dressed for air travel in a smart, branded running jacket and leggings; her blonde haircut was absolute perfection.

The conversation meandered around. She mentioned Old Moore’s Almanac. Her granny had always had it in the house, and when she grew up she bought it every year just before Christmas. It was kind of a tradition for her. Did I know it? Oh yes, I said, I’d often bought it.

Old Moore’s Almanac, as you may or may not know, has been going strong for untold generations – it celebrates its 261st birthday this year. It’s one of the oldest almanacs in the world and there are editions, aged 250 years and older, to be found in the Long Room Library in Trinity College.

My neighbour, it turned out, now worked in the capital and, at some point, had actually viewed the ancient editions. This year, though, she confided, she was a bit disillusioned.

Thing is, the woman observed; she’d always found Old Moore to be quite accurate.

True, I agreed; it’s well known for hitting the bullseye about events in Ireland and abroad - the Almanac gets a lot of coverage both on the domestic front and abroad too, for the precision and reliability of its predictions – it said that Joe Biden would step down before the election, that there would be assassination attempts on Trump, that Kanye would have mental health problems, that Kate Middleton was pregnant with Princess Charlotte (before it was announced, plus it got the name right).

And, of course, as the dogs in the street now know, the Almanac also predicted the pandemic.

“Didn’t it say this year that Prince William would become King and that someone would try to kill Elon Musk?” I recalled a bit fuzzily.

My memory was sketchy. Christmas had been busy. Although I’d bought the Almanac in early December, and read through it one night in bed, I hadn’t really retained much information.

My companion sniffed. Thing was, she said, personally speaking, she’d always kind of set her own expectations for the coming year by Old Moore.

“What d’you mean?” I asked.

The horoscopes, she said.

Ah, the horoscopes.

The personal stuff. Scorpio and Leo and Gemini and that.

Old Moore, for example, my companion said, had got it absolutely bang on for her time and time again. All through college. And more recently, take 2023, for example. The horoscope had said it would be a good year. And it was right.

She still recalled 2023 with warmth and fondness. It was a good year. A pleasant year. A nice, happy sort of year without any nasty shocks rushing at you out of the blue. “God, I hear you there,” I said with feeling.

She’d had some rattle though, she said, when she’d bought the 2024 Almanac and read her horoscope.

It put her out for weeks because the horoscope had warned of a bumpy road ahead. Thing was, he’d been right. The year 2024 had been horrible, she said, shuddering.

“In what way?” I asked.

“Everything,” she said, shuddering, “every way. Every single thing you could think of went wrong that year.”

Mad bulls, she said, had kept swerving out of left fields and head-butting her. A cascade of things went wrong in the family network, at work and in the house; you name it. There was sickness and discord and trouble. Certain people had entirely lost the run of themselves altogether.

“Awful,” she said, “just awful.”

She blew out a sigh.

“Actually,” I said, now very interested, “I didn’t like 2024 very much myself either. Maybe it was just a difficult year all round for lots of people one way or another.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Who knows?”

So then we told each other what sign we were.

Oddly enough, it emerged at that point that I’m not quite who I thought I was. Although I initially assumed I was under the same Zodiac sign as my neighbour, when I told her my date of birth, she said that in reality I was positioned on the cusp.

The cusp? I asked, a bit rattled.

Talk of teetering on cusps seemed a bit insecure to me.

Oh, she said nonchalantly, I’d only scraped into the sign I thought I was purely by the skin of my teeth. There was probably quite a lot of a completely different sign in me. She named the other sign.

This was a revelation.

Was this a good thing, I wondered?

Could I now pick and choose between the predictions for each of my star signs if I didn’t like something? Maybe being on the cusp offered a bit more leeway, I thought hopefully.

“Anyway, what did Old Moore predict for 2025 for your star sign - and for the bit of me that managed to scrape in under it?” I inquired.

We were supposed to have a nice, solid, good year, the woman said.

2025 would be a positive year. We’d learn things – nice things. We would prosper. We would enjoy a family life that would be smooth and happy. No major upheavals. Important relationships would thrive.

But this wasn’t happening, she said miserably. Things had started going seriously AWOL in her life the very minute Christmas was over.

I gawped at her.

Sickness. Obnoxious behaviour. People losing the run of themselves. Problems everywhere. Trouble and discord in the family network. Plain, unexplained out-of-the-blue nastiness.

“To tell you the truth, I’ll be mighty relieved if this plane lands on time today. I was sure we’d be delayed or cancelled or something. I keep waiting for something to go wrong, and then it does. ”

She looked at me.

“How are you finding 2025 so far?”

Well, nearly two months in and I couldn’t honestly report that there had been very much sunshine and roses in my corner so far, I told her.

“Maybe things will pick up,” I said hopefully.

“Hmmm,” the woman said. She settled her glasses on her nose, readjusted her neck cushion, and picked up a magazine.

The first thing I’d do when I got home, I decided, was find that bloody 2025 Almanac and investigate. Both my signs.