Whilst crossing the road this morning with the “green man” clearly in view, I looked to the left to see a police van driving at speed towards me with a young officer at the wheel who clearly had no intention of stopping. I therefore halted in the middle of the road, and delivered a rude salute to said vehicle as it passed by. A woman in white to my right expressed immediate support for my gesture, and thanked me for my attentiveness as she – apparently new to the area – had been looking straight ahead (for Foregate Street railway station as it happened). We agreed that police drivers can be over zealous in pursuit of “the law”, and I then noticed that the lady in white was carrying several magazines, the top one apparently entitled Jesus (in big red letters). There was no opportunity for further conversation, however, because we were already adjacent to the station where the lady left me.
Now I have to confess to taking more than a passing interest in the darker forces of life, as well as the lighter ones. By way of illustration, my current “good read” is H P Lovecraft’s “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”, a cautionary tale of one who takes too strong an interest in genealogy, antiquarian and occult studies, only to unleash an hereditary evil spirit. This is a wonderfully Amercian gothic story (in the tradition of Nathanial Hawthorne and Edgar Alan Poe), which perhaps goes rather further than its predecessors in pursuit of “The Horror, The Horror”, to the extent that very possession of the book (in my case obtained from Worcester City Library) makes one feel wicked, albeit in a curiously humorous way.
As it happened, this morning I was contemplating whether some rather more benign, but nevertheless disruptive, earthly force, might be unleashed in the direction of one or two unsustainable developments in the environs of Worcester with the natural consequence of stopping them. My mind was also occupied with other more mundane matters, like whether to purchase a particular women’s magazine. The police van’s rude interruption upon these thoughts, and the proximity of Jesus’s disciple in the Lady in White, were therefore interpreted by me as an important Jungian synchronicity, or meaningful co-incidence. But what did it all mean ?
My feeling, in retrospect, is that I was being encouraged to take action on the much-needed “regeneration” of Foregate Street Station and the area around it, thereby exorcising any local evil spirits, who contribute, for instance, to dangerous driving by Men in Black, and to pay particular attention to users of Slow Modes, like walking and cycling, thereby performing The Good Lord’s Work, be he The Green Man of The Old Religion or Jesus of The Christian Faith and The Lady in White.
The Witch of Worcester 