Friday Bite 18 September 2026

Recollections May Vary

“You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth – and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” Penelope Hegseth

“Secretary Hegseth has done an extraordinary job at the Department of War…This has literally been the most productive and successful and aggressive Congress… We’re confident American voters are going to remember that when they head to vote this fall.” Mike Johnson, House Speaker

“The Supreme Court has really let our Country down!… [some justices were] “totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America… These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,”. Donald Trump, 15 September

“Canada and Europe should secure our strategic autonomy through deep cooperation in the full range of strategic capabilities…Canada and Europe are each strong. Europe and Canada are stronger together … The objective is not self-sufficiency, it’s collective resilience… I am not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival, only with better manners… but a beacon for other democracies” Mark Carney, 16 September.

“Laughable!” Donald Trump, 16 September

SO MUCH TO dissect. What to focus upon?

Here are my picks of the week:

• 13 September: A ferry capsized in the Java Sea. Six people drowned, 107 were rescued and 130 remain missing. It is the fifth of several water-related tragedies that have occurred since the lunar eclipse in Pisces on 28 August.
• 15 September: A village of 350 residents voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest over the government’s decision to move 1250 male asylum seekers into disused military accommodation nearby. The vote may have been symbolic, but it got the message across. And it appears the Great Crested Newts may have come to the rescue, given they are a local protected species. (Yay Newts!) We can expect a return to this story in roughly a month when the Venus-Pluto square that was presiding over the week’s astrology returns. There will be protests.
• 16 September: The European Parliament invited Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to become an associate member of the European Union. He accepted the following day. I have had a brief look at all the charts involved, and although I think the offer is of great merit, with Pluto on the IC squaring a rising Venus at the time – and Venus is also held in a Yod configuration with Uranus and Neptune – bureaucratic issues and a whole raft of other problems will frustrate the future of this association. That doesn’t mean it can’t ever come into being though. More that there will be other challenges and changes, not least in regard to the USA’s role in NATO and its relationship with Canada. Let’s see where we are two years from now.
• 16 September. The Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s request to restrict voting by mail before the midterm elections. This was in response to an executive order signed by the President on April 1 (Venus square Pluto). We can expect not to have heard the last of it.
• 17 September. House speaker Mike Johnson cancelled a vote and sent members home one day early for the midterm recess. They will not return until 9 November. Earlier, Republican Representative Thomas Massie had taken to the House to read his bill regarding the impeachment of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. The two incidents seem not unconnected.
• Since early this week extracts from Charles’s Spencer’s tribute to his beloved sister, Diana, Swan Song, have been appearing in the British tabloid The Daily Mail. Unheard of in royal history, King Charles made a comment. In words to the effect of ‘recollections may vary’, he said, “the pain of fraternal grief can cloud reason, affect judgment and colour memory in ways others do not recognise, even many years after such a loss”. In his book, due out next Tuesday, Spencer accused the then prince of sounding “giddily elated” when informing him of his sister’s death – a state of being he assumed was related to the prospect of his now being free to marry Camilla Parker Bowles. Adding insult to injury, on a separate occasion. Prince Charles commented that Diana “would soon be forgotten”.

THIS MIGHT BE a storm in a teacup. Except it’s not. It’s a big deal, especially coming at a time like this when the monarchy is trying to cleave onto as much respect as it can. The Harry and Meghan years have eroded faith, virtue and value in the monarchy. The couple have separately and individually trashed it, and now they’re back. To his credit, the King has striven to counteract the trend and even some of those who thought he had as much charisma as a fruit bun, have acknowledged his triumphs – his recent tour of the US in April was one such stellar success. But now we are forced to think back twenty-nine years to when Diana tragically died and her ex-husband was villain-of-the-day.

I, however, remember things rather differently. In the hours after Diana was killed in the accident in the Alma Tunnel, Charles personally organized an aircraft of the Queen’s Flight to fly him and her two sisters to Paris and then bring Diana home. He was visibly shaken – grey in colour – hardly “giddily elated”. It was a duty, for sure, but one borne in dignity and care for the mother of his two boys and the woman he had married.

We must know that Charles Spencer was devastated by his sister’s death, and we all certainly know how he felt about the manner of his sister’s death. “Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.”

Charles Spencer was the youngest of five children – three sisters and a brother who died shortly after birth. The family was not a happy one. His father Johnny had a violent temper and the children were all witnesses to his physical and verbal attacks on their mother. They later divorced. Charles was sent to prep school at eight-years of age, which he describes in his own memoir as a “culture of cruelty… of hopelessness and abandonment… with violent beatings and sexual abuse. Diana for her part, although loving boarding school, nonetheless grew up feeling abandoned and unaddressed. It was Diana who took her brother under her wing, mothered him in fact, and they retained a close bond throughout life, even with the occasional spot of permafrost.

I’m not going to spend too long on the synastry between Charles Spencer and Diana, but what is particularly sweet and binding is the fact that her Venus (24 Taurus) is his Sun (29 Taurus) and his Venus (5 Cancer) is her Sun-Mercury midpoint. They were babes in the wood and grew up to be complicated – emotionally complicated – people who had their hearts repeatedly broken, and did the same to others.

What is interesting about the synastry between King Charles and his ex-brother-in law is Saturn-shaped. The King has his natal Saturn at 5 degrees of Virgo while Charles Spencer has his at 5 degrees of Pisces. At this point in time, Uranus in the early degrees of Gemini, is squaring them both. And when Uranus meets Saturn, there are shifts, even those that have taken 29 years to move and bring up buried stories, resentments and jealousies. And where is Diana in all this? Her difficult Mars-Pluto conjunction at 5 degrees of Virgo, which was being squared by Pluto at the time of her death and the focus for a solar eclipse within hours of the accident, was also in play.

This is a tragedy told in three separate lives, in three separate ways united by a common theme – the ineluctability of fate and the coming together of events at a single point in time. Once again, we see degree areas – spheres of influences – being triggered and resounding across time.

Next year will be the thirtieth anniversary of Diana’s death, and there will be many documentaries and books to emerge that will tell the tale anew. And it will surely rake up yet more heartache for her family and those who knew and loved her. To my mind, her death is as raw as ever and I think about her a lot. But I’m going to leave you with her brother’s final words in his eulogy at Westminster Abbey on 6 September, 1997.

I would like to end by thanking God for the small mercies he has shown us at this dreadful time. For taking Diana at her most beautiful and radiant and when she had joy in her private life. Above all we give thanks for the life of a woman I am so proud to be able to call my sister, the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana whose beauty, both internal and external, will never be extinguished from our minds.”

Friday Bite 11 September 2026

Desperate Measures

“Right after the election, the war is going to end. I think the war will end… because they [Iran] can’t hold out any longer. They’re desperate.” Donald Trump, 9 September

“Here is my promise. If the Republican Party wins the House of Representatives and the Senate, both of them, because of our economic, tremendous economic success, like, in history we’ve never had what’s happening, but because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the USA for $5000… So, if the Republicans win, you’ll get $5000… It will be called The Trump Dividend.” Donald Trump, 9 September.

“The charitable work of the Duke and Duchess is a personal matter for them both and undertaken in their private capacity… in short, their position is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests”. King Charles, 7 September

IT IS GETTING harder and harder to keep up with global developments. Any one of the past week’s events would be worthy of an entire Friday Bite, so here they are in brief.

• 6 September: Germany experienced a major political earthquake, the aftershocks of which could prove even mightier. Germany’s AfD (Alternative Für Deutschland) party came first in the Saxony-Anhalt region of the country. The state party leader, Ulrich Siegmund campaigned on a platform of closer ties to Russia, mass deportations and separating refugees from German children in the classroom. It is the first far-right party to govern part of Germany since the Nazi era.
• 5/6 September: Black clad, balaclava-headed figures gathered in their hundreds in Portsmouth and Dover to protest the continuing arrival of migrant-bearing boats on Britain’s shores. The protests were organized by Daniel Thomas, better known as Danny Tommo, leader of the far-right Patriot Platform group, and Tommy Robinson’s right-hand man.
• 9 September: The fallout from last week’s Channel Four broadcast on the far-right Reform Party’s funding practices gathered momentum with the Metropolitan Police announcing that it was to carry out criminal investigations into allegations that the party broke the law in relation to foreign donations.
• 6 September: Jared Kushner and Steve Witcoff travelled to Kyiv for the first time in their shuttle “diplomacy” efforts to negotiate the end of the war in Ukraine. Prior to their arrival in Kyiv, the two had met with Putin and other Russian officials. The hapless duo was meant to fly to the Ukrainian capital, but it was deemed too unsafe and they travelled by train instead. Trump’s emissaries proceeded to lavish praise on the Russian president and determined the meetings to be “substantive”. Putin told the pair that Russia was making “real progress” on the battlefield and was confident of achieving its goals, while stressing the necessity of addressing “all the root causes of the conflict”.
• 6 September: The Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to allow its plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterms.
• 7 September: The Lord Chamberlain sent a letter on behalf of King Charles to Harry and Meghan reminding them that they were still private citizens and not part of the royal firm.
• 8 September: Britain’s airports were plunged into chaos when thousands of flights were cancelled across Britain due to a malfunction in the flight processing system at National Air Traffic Services. This was the third such incident in the past eighteen months.
• 9 September: The Republican midterm convention opened in Dallas. Texas. The president spoke for one hour forty-four minutes surpassing his own record. The speech was predictably full of exaggerations, self-congratulatory remarks, fabrications and barefaced lies, “I won three presidential elections”. And then there was the offer of $5000 to every adult in the United States. Americans would do well to remember that in 2025, Trump promised a similar amount to every citizen as a consequence of DOGE’s successful mission to gut government spending. Apparently, that dividend has been “held up in Congress”.
• Last but not least, the US and Iran have been trading missiles again. The US said it had attacked and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday while Iran claimed it had struck two US ships and eight oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. In consequence, the price of oil rose over $100 a barrel.
• And how could I forget. Yesterday, a top safety researcher at Anthropic said that he believes AI is advancing so rapidly that there is “a greater than 10 percent chance it could kill all humans within the next decade.”

Well, lah-di-dah.

2026 has been a year like no other. In times past, I would be able to look at a week’s transits and confidently predict that the astrological weather was calm and accordingly we could go about our business with confidence. Not so this year. In part, this is to do with the grand alignments continuing to remain in play so that even amidst a beautiful Venus-Jupiter influence, they are exerting their influence. So, I might have looked at the current astro-scape and the forthcoming new moon in Virgo and considered that a new season was on its way and we could put the past behind us. Sadly, not. We are dealing with the effects of a series of disastrous moves, primarily those made by the Trump administration, and we cannot turn back the tide. We are heading into increasingly perilous waters.

There is a collective sense of frustration which is driving people in more and more extremist directions. This we can perceive from the list above. Germany electing a far-right party? England at risk of doing the same? And France, even more likely to see a far-right government in power in 2027. This would have been unthinkable five years ago. But it is part of a growing populist wave. People have lost their faith in governments that have failed to alleviate their problems. And since most of those governments are democracies, the freedoms many of us have known for the past seventy-five years are in jeopardy. Old systems are simply not working and something – anything – that is radical and new offers hope.

I have from time to time talked about the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triad, which is at the helm of all the major configurations that have been in play since 2025 to today. And this alignment will continue to hold sway into 2027. Neptune, Uranus and Pluto were in the same formation in the nineteen-forties, the World War II years, years which saw suffering, sacrifice (Neptune) devastation and obliteration (Uranus and Pluto) yet out of these years of conflict came great innovation. We emerged from World War II different people. As we will do again, once we have traversed this dark and dangerous passage.

The times we are living in also have a reference to the nineteen-thirties and rise of fascism. After Germany lost the first World War, it was forced to sign the Treaty of Versailles, which held the country to blame and forced it to pay massive debts. Many Germans felt disgraced so when Hitler promised to tear up the treaty, rebuild the military and restore national pride, the people followed him in their droves. He was their saviour. He would make Germany great again. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat and economic pain, which lead to the purges and ultimately the genocide of the Jewish people.

So, there is a clear resonance with those times.

Which brings us to today and the anniversary of 9-11.

Most of us who weren’t tiny children at the time will remember where we were on that day. I was in Haslemere, Surrey, getting ready for my then husband to arrive from the United States that evening. I was collecting some printing material from a shop when a woman burst through the door exclaiming “a plane’s crashed into the Twin Towers!”. I returned home to find my middle son staring horror-struck at the television which was showing footage of smoke and flames pouring out of the North Tower. I have written an article about this day, which you can find here on Astrolutely.

One of the most significant aspects of the chart of 9-11 is that at the time the first plane hit the North Tower, 14 degrees of Libra was rising, which is the USA’s natal Saturn. Mercury was also on that same degree, as if to make the point that the attack was delivering a powerful message to America. The Saturn-Pluto opposition was straddling the United States’ Ascendant-Descendant axis and Neptune was conjunct the US’s nodal axis. Pure astrological poetry in terms of the loss of life, the devastation incurred and the War on Terror that followed.

You will see that I have drawn in a configuration involving Saturn, Venus, Mercury/Ascendant and Pluto. That configuration may seem familiar because it is a Barbault Basket, an alignment that was in play in July and early August this year. If you remember, André Barbault saw the 2026 configuration, which involved all the outer planets and Jupiter, as the start of a “Golden Age”, albeit one in the making born during a time of strife. Looking back on that day in 2001 and the years that followed, there was certainly no golden age but years of conflict, which continues to this day.

A quarter of a century later, and we find Saturn at 13 degrees of Aries – the opposite point to its natal position in the United States chart, and also the Ascendant and Mercury at the time of 9-11. At Saturn oppositions, we reflect on what has passed and assess what we can take away from events in order to avoid repeating them.

I have drawn in the configuration presiding over this anniversary, which involves the aforementioned trio and Mercury, which is trining Uranus and Pluto and opposing Neptune.

This twenty-fifth anniversary comes at a time when America is at war, not with an Islamic terrorist organization but an Islamic republic, Iran. The resonance could not be clearer.

And the question we must ask, is why the Trump administration is failing to heed the lessons of the past.

And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.” Republican Convention Dallas, 10 September.