Astrological Quote of the year? Well, I have no hesitation in nominating just one sentence from Julia Parker's recent Carter Memorial Lecture:

"It is a great pity if people come into astrology just to delve into their own charts."

There is no doubt that many people do this. I too have seen at conferences, usually from the very beginning on the Friday afternoon, those people who gravitate towards a favourite astrologer with questions about their own charts. (I'll never forget one conference - I think it may have been Exeter in 1984 - when one lady astrologer was trying to comfort a friend or client with the short homily. "Yes, my dear, Saturn is a bugger!")

I think we have to admit from the outset that astrology is, and always will be, a minority interest. It is one of those subjects which many people embrace briefly, very often using it as a crutch while going through some great crisis. Now there's no harm in that, but once the crisis disappears, so does the person concerned. You don't see them at conferences any more. (I haven't been to an astrology conference since 1988 but that's besides the point.) They stop buying astrology books - that is if they ever bought any in the first place. Their memberships of national organisations and local groups tend to lapse.

Each to his own, I suppose. Some people drift on to other disciplines like tarot cards or psychology, and if they can derive any comfort or knowledge from them, then all well and good. But to get back to Julia Parker's remark, I feel that many people are missing out on the wonderment of astrology. Naturally Julia is speaking from the point of view of a professional astrologer and lamenting the fact that people obsessed with their own charts to the exclusion of all else fail to pass on astrological wisdom to others. I am writing from the point of view of a collector of birth data. I think it's logical to assume that the more charts you look at, the more astrological knowledge you accumulate over the years. But more than that, you become more tolerant of the rest of mankind. You begin to appreciate that we are all different from each other and therefore you are slower to condemn other people for their bad points than you would otherwise be if you had no knowledge of astrology. "Ah yes," you think, "I always wondered why Fred was an abrupt so-and-so. It must be that Moon/Mars conjunction in Aries." The advantage which the astrologer has over others is that he or she not only knows what a person is like but also why the person is like that. It may be a close friend whose chart you are looking at or maybe that of a "celebrity" whose name is constantly in the headlines. In my case it's normally the latter.

As we all know there are various keywords attached to the signs of the Zodiac, and one that frequently crops up when we are talking about Sun-Gemini is "superficial". But is this justified?

I can't help thinking that it is. You only have to look at the mindless game shows on TV and the number of Sun-Gemini presenters associated with them, although they by no means have a monopoly on this particular area of broadcasting. But one of them in a recent interview admitted to having a very short attention span, and this lack of ability to take in anything of any substance may go some way to explaining their superficiality. A neighbour of mine for nearly forty years has Sun in Gemini and watches a lot of TV, but when asked if she watched an interesting programme the other night, her reply is always either "No" or "Well, I saw bits of it", the latter often accompanied by a painful expression. The significant word here, of course, is "bits". She also thinks Channel 5 is the best of the terrestrial TV channels. Oh dear!

I think Reader's Digest is a typical Geminian publication insomuch as it contains interesting "bits" which place no great demand on its readers. None of the articles are directly commissioned for RD, the only contributions from the general public being jokes and funny stories, some taken from real life experiences. I stopped buying RD last year, one of the reasons being that there are too many adverts. Newspapers (or most of them), magazines, much TV and pop music are, by their very nature, somewhat Geminian and ephemeral. (Now there's an interesting word.) This is the age of the "instant celebrity", a status made possible by voyeuristic TV shows such as Big Brother and Pop Idol.

Pantomime is Geminian in many ways. It is a unique entertainment which is meant to appeal mainly to younger people, but I'm afraid I saw through the superficiality of it all at a very early stage of my life. It is just a collection of stories, most of which we already know backwards,laced with the usual catchphrases such as "He's behind you" and "Oh no he isn't, of yes he is." It is particularly difficult to explain to overseas people the Geminian duality of the performers - men as women and women as men. Well, maybe this form of entertainment is suited to people with short attention spans but I could never see anything in it.

One of the more annoying misconceptions which separates serious astrology from the "pop" variety is the question of when one sign of the Zodiac ends and the next one begins. To be fair, there are many newspaper astrologers who take pains to point out that the dates are not fixed. But others give the impression that the Sun leaves one sign on the stroke of midnight and appears in the next for the start of a new day. What is more annoying is that there are probably some "astrologers" who are convinced that this is how astrology works. To give you an example, in recent years I have come across two newspaper astrologers who were convinced that Prince William was Sun-Gemini. True, his birthday is 21st June but the Sun in his chart is in the first degree of Cancer.

More recently I was talking to a woman in her early 80's whom I have known all my life. She just happened to mention that her daughter was born just before midnight on 22nd November 1949. "Ah," I said, "she was born on the cusp", and she smiled, saying "That's right." It's strange how some phrases are well known even to non astrologers.) "But," she went on to say, "she's definitely a Scorpio. I know that for a fact, because years ago someone told her fortune." Later I consulted The American Ephemeris and discovered that the Sun had already moved into Sagittarius on the day the woman's daughter was born. I didn't have the heart to tell her.

I'm not knocking Sun-sign astrology. There are people such as Marjorie Orr and Jonathan Cainer who have attempted to educate the layperson into accepting there's more to astrology than lumping the whole of mankind into twelve different categories. Jonathan Cainer's stint with the Daily Express was particularly interesting, but sadly he didn't stay very long. Is it the policy of some newspaper editors that "Lucky Star" columns should not get too technical or serious for the average reader? I don't know. I volunteered some articles on basic astrology for a local newspaper some year ago, but the editor wrote back saying they already had someone doing just that. What he meant was that someone was doing a Sun-sign column. Like many of his readers he had seen something labelled "astrology" and thought that's all there was to it.

Should we mind? I may come back to this particular topic at a later date.