Last week, the second Mercury retrograde this year came to an end. I know because I overheard a group of friends toasting their Espresso Martinis to the end. We won’t have to go on Amazon and buy the most cost-effective portable hard drives to back up our data lest this planet of communication and its ‘backwards’ orbit around the sun causes technological chaos. We won’t have to drop it into polite small talk as though it were a meteorological observation. Akin to reminding people to bring brollies: ‘Oh be careful of travelling long distance. Mercury retrograde!’ When your Uber driver talks about Mercury retrograde causing the North Circular pile-up, you know that this astrological happening is shifting from social media bubbled stardom to normalised water-cooler fodder.
I thought back to a month of minimal mishaps. I also chortled at the regular frequency of this meme-friendly planetary motion popping up in friends’ WhatsApp conversations to explain away every single thing that had gone wrong, no matter how regularly they occur outside of the retrograde period. A missed flight connection. A cab driver going the wrong way. A poor wi-fi connection. Someone winding up in ER, despite the circumstances of said in-patient having little to do with the namesake planet of the Roman messenger god. Who or what did we blame beforehand? Guess ‘Shit happens’ or good old fashioned ‘C’est la vie’ doesn’t quite cut it.
