It served Mercury right for having had great expectations.

Ordinarily, being of the school that thoughts become things, Mercury had rather looked forward to the opportunity to catch up on household tasks, work out, listen to webinars and read on May Day. A holiday, in other words.

He ought to have known that, despite the abundant sunshine and hot weather, there was to be no lightheartedness or playful laziness. Transiting Mars (the impulse to do, to push, to fight) was opposing Saturn (stability, delays, foundation, the past) in the heavens.

Sort of like flooring the accelerator on a car, while having the hand-brake up.

Well thank the primal cause (that's G-O-D to you) the sun is finally in the sign of Taurus.

Nothing against my pyro-frantic Aries friends, but in this little corner of paradiso, tempers need to settle, people need to take a chill pill and somebody better fire up a barbecue or three.

It's sunny spring time, and we're being treated to a good dose of Sol worship right now - which is just what the doctor ordered, frankly, after the trying days we've all been going through.

Mercury hopes everyone weathered the full moon in Scorpio in one piece this past Thursday and is grateful that, for Easter celebratin' folk at least, there's the promise of a week wholly (see what I did there?) devoted to winding down, getting outdoors and tucking into a good meal.

Once in a blue moon, Mercury catches up with his first love, the arts - more specifically, the performing arts.

And this past Friday night, in the midst of deliberating whether or not to take part in a quiz at the ESOBGA club house or head off to watch a local production of Eve Ensler's The Good Body at Melina Merkouri Hall, fate took a hand.

While Mercury was trying to weigh up how best to lay out an article on the escalating crisis in the Korean peninsula, while freeing up room on the page for a story on a building collapse disaster near Mumbai, the phone rang at the far end of the subs room.

Mercury heard the colleague who answered say to the caller "...no, just guys here, and [name of a female colleague], so I don't think so..."

Let's face it, the last week or so has been rather ugly in this little corner of paradise.

Cypriots have been bombarded by all sorts of dire proclamations that their (still relatively recent) way of life (read: affluent) is dead. People are bracing themselves for austerity, hardship, layoffs, pay cuts, spirals into heavy debt, belt-tightening and all-round general grimness.

For an island associated with Venus, the goddess who loves pleasure (and money), and all the things that indulge the senses, this is rather dispiriting news, to say the least.

Unless you live on an isolated island with no access to the internet or TV, there's a good chance you've heard a new Pope was elected yesterday.

Francis I, to be precise.

In the irreverent subs room of the Mail, there were ongoing anecdotes of "the black smoke monster" as the papal conclave prepared to meet and then cast its ballots.

Inevitably, there were also jokes whose basis were the recent scandalous history of the Roman Catholic Church. Mercury will leave this to your respective imaginations. Smut, filth and hilarity were involved.

Meanwhile, the even more irreverent free-for-all that is Facebook had been circulating photoshopped versions of the previous Pope on the heels of his resignation, and they were not, shall we say, terribly complimentary.

Anybody else feeling the intensity? There's been a fair bit of activity in the heavens and it's building to a crescendo (one of a number this month) at the new moon in Pisces. Which, at the time of posting, is tomorrow, Monday, March 11.

Pisces is the last station along the zodiacal journey and, like the other water signs, suffers from rather bad PR.

The sign of the two fishes, so the mainstream interpretations go, is where you'll find the hopeless romantics, the lovelorn, the alcoholics, the vulnerable dreamers, the waifs, the damsels in distress and the utterly lost, unable to find their way back to reality from the glittering hall of mirrors.

To continue on from last time, there was a rather cunning point to pegging an introduction to this blog around the theme of re-visiting.

Why? Answer: the dear old communication god Mercury, namesake of this little corner of pristine blogo real estate, is retrograde at the moment.

That's right. You've probably heard of the phrase before.

It's amazing how much astro-parlance has filtered into our banter these days:

"Life sucks - I'm going through my Saturn return"

Or:

"Don't mess with me, I'm a double [insert zodiac sign]"

Or even:

"What do you expect - his ascendant's in Scorpio".

Do these folks even know what they're saying half the time?

And just what is Mercury retrograde anyway?

There is a certain poignancy to re-tracing one's footsteps, or going back to things long abandoned or imperfectly realised. There's a reason some things are stillborn, or shelved, or half-finished.

Nonetheless, for those so inclined, going back to the beginning (or the middle, or the three-quarter mark, or whatever) can be curiously rewarding.

Which all sounds rather abstract, so let me begin again, since this is an introductory post.