and it ain't not proving that me mind ain't moving....

There was a funny crowd out in town on Saturday night. I wasn't stopping for long, and was just having a quick meal after the cinema before heading home... but it was long enough to see that the makeup of the crowd was a lot older and more male than usual. It took me a minute or two to realise, as I walked up the Lace Market, that Carl Froch was defending his Super-Middleweight crown at the Nottingham Arena later that same night, and that the people milling about were likely boxing fans whiling away their early evening before the start of the under-card. If anything, this had a calming effect on the city centre, with pubs filled with crowds of people having a quiet drink as a prelude to the main event of their night, instead of crowds of people moving between pubs and well on the way to oblivion.

We ate in the Cock & Hoop, a relatively quiet pub that serves excellent food and probably isn't really a stop on most people's pub crawls. Dinner was good, but what really caught my eye was the group of ladies who were gathering in the main seating area where we were eating. At first I took them to be the other halves of some boxing fans; they were a little bit older than your average hen party, and they were clearly having a fairly quiet drink rather than slinging back the Bacardi Breezers. After a bit, I noticed that they were all wearing some kind of a uniform. As one of the ladies turned her back to me, I got a good chance to have a look at the large logo on the back of her fleece. There was a large picture of a star, a website address and the company name:

Central England Paranormal Investigators.

I looked them up when I got home, and apparently they were having some kind of a "do" at the Galleries of Justice, just opposite the pub. If you've seen "Most Haunted", then you probably know the drill: set up loads of infra-red cameras and thermometers and stuff, and spend the night giving your paying customers the heebie-jeebies in a really creepy old jailhouse in the wee-small hours of the morning. A quick scan of their website reveals that they guys I was looking at in the pub were the core team who would be leading the night's investigations. Now, I personally don't really believe in all that stuff. It's not so much that I don't think there's anything else out there, but rather that I'm prone to be a bit sceptical of someone selling their services as a psychic or a spirit medium. I'm open-minded though, and I'm sure these guys are really good at what they do and that their clients have a really interesting night out..... but the thing is, I'm not sure if I would really trust in the expertise of someone who had put a six-pointed star as the focal point of their logo. Everybody knows that the pentagram is associated with magic and the occult, but surely most people also know that a pentagram has five points. The clue's in the name. These guys had a six-pointed star - a hexagram - on their backs. The Star of David. Um. Doesn't that mean something completely different?



We had a good laugh about it on the way home, anyway. Can you imagine summoning a demon and thinking you're protected by the symbols you've drawn on the floor inside a chalk circle... only to discover that the six-pointed star you've drawn protects you rather less well than the pentagram you thought you'd drawn? You'd be a laughing stock in all of the circles of hell.

Or perhaps I should try not be such a smartarse - a quick glance at wikipedia tells me that the hexagram (not necessarily the same thing as a Star of David, apparently) is commonly used both as a talisman and for conjuring spirits in the practice of witchcraft.

Ah.

That being true, then I am forced to admit that those people I'd been quietly laughing at might well be right. Anyway, it definitely means that I was wrong to infer from the logo alone that they must be idiots. Just because I didn't know the hexagram's associations with the occult, doesn't mean that no one else does, and it certainly doesn't mean that they made a mistake.

*does more research*

Ah, but then again, they were using the "Star of David" form of hexagram - two overlaid triangles - rather than the Unicursal hexagram, which is drawn in one continuous line and is more commonly associated with the occult....



So they could have known of the hexagram's associations with the occult but chosen the wrong form of hexagram for their logos, or they could simply have mistaken the hexagram for the a pentagram. Or I could be wrong.

Or I could be thinking about this too much.

......Actually, don't answer that.