19/8/08: JUPITER RETROGRADE...
... has been on my Quotidian MC today. Yes, I re-ordered our monthly box of the finest chocolates money can buy (from our friend Roy Nesling, Chocolatier, established in East Looe) and put up cheery new curtains in my study, and made an excellent stew ... but the day was really about Channel 5's gory hour on the Romans & Druids during the 1st-century invasion of Britain. At 20 past 8 we were told that the Roman legions trampled across the South-East, mowing down anyone who was unlucky enough to be in their way. At last I had confirmation of one of my earliest flashbacks.

This had taken me totally by surprise over 20 years ago in my own kitchen at Ospringe (whose fields have since been much visited by diggers, including my old drama school acquaintance Tony Robinson). I was standing by the sink, holding in my hand a bone-handled knife which hitherto I had never brought myself to use. Suddenly my skin felt covered with very different clothes; against my cheeks was soft but firm leather - the lining, I assume, of a helmet's cheek-pieces. I had sandals on, and a short tunic; and I knew in that moment that I was a Roman legionary. But I was frozen in a dilemma - at the edge of the rough path on which I stood (just like the beaten tracks shown on Channel 5) cowered an old man, a local, who was in my way, and I was supposed to stick my bone-handled knife into his skinny body and be rid of him. The problem was that at some point I had encountered the teachings of Christianity, and I couldn't do it. For about ten minutes the vivid flash-back and the agonising dilemma held me motionless and fascinated beside the open cutlery drawer, before normality returned and I could put the knife back again. Ever since that episode my life-long nervousness of knives ebbed away.
Twice more in the 1980s that Roman life came back to me - once at Reculver where I remembered spending months of boredom staring out to sea, 'keeping watch' (about as enthusistically as the Yorkshire cops in 'Last of the Summer Wine'!) and once at Broadstairs where the oppressive aura of old and bloody battles sent me home miserable with migraine. This evening that sick revulsion at the violence we met and meted out returned in full force - and this time the story had moved to North Wales, our home for the past six years.

I now understood that Qotidian Jupiter, moving backwards; in my nativity (also retrograde and so inviting a return to the past) it rules the IC, therefore both the home and the past itself. In east Kent I was living on the southern end of my local space Jupiter line; coming to north-west Wales we had moved along its diagonal to pitch camp near its northern extremity. In 1981 our honeymoon on the Nile had taken me sailing and exploring where Jupiter had culminated at my birth - and here again memories had come flooding back, amid some joys bringing the lessons of much private pain.

Yes, it turned out to be quite a day!