Police Aware aware

A few years ago I was driving down in the West Country, the first time I had been there for a while.  At one point I notice that there was a car by the side of the road.  Nothing odd in that, except that it had a sticker on it: 'Police Aware', it said.  A little later on the same journey I was surprised to see a second car off the road, this time in a ditch.  It too had this mysterious sticker.  I was even more confused to see yet a third car later that day, also off the road with the same sticker.

I thought to myself: one car off the road marked in this fashion is clearly an accident; three of them can only be art.  I remembered reading about one of the artist Christo's latest ideas.  Bored with wrapping up entire buildings and bridges across the Seine in plastic and ropes, he had progressed to constructing hundreds of miles of giant metal sunshades along American and Japanese roads.  Could this be something similar? I wondered.  Some local exponent of this large-scale art? 

But no, it seemed unlikely.  Perhaps the explanation lay in those mysterious words 'Police Aware'.  Was this some phrase in the local Devonian dialect, the equivalent of 'Police Awa' in Scotland?  Was it some terrible West Country imprecation that had so disequilibrated the normally mild-mannered Bobbies in their patrol cars that they had forced off the road the three cars I had seen?  But this too seemed unlikely, not least because there were no obvious scratch marks down the side of the bodywork - the customary hallmarks of automobilic self-wounding, analogues of the mysterious bruises which spontaneously appear on prisoners in custody. 

The common feature of a sticker with the words 'Police Aware' suggested some kind of fraternity. Perhaps hereabouts there was a club of drivers intensely aware of the Police - so aware, so worried, in fact, about the possibility of transgressing the Highway Code in some way that no less than three of them had driven off the road in sheer panic at the sudden awareness of the propinquity of Police, cars, and driving.  Or perhaps the 'Police Aware' signs were cries for help: look, they seemed to say, we are incapable of driving, we are liable to career off the road at any moment.  And indeed, they had done so.

The idea that the words were apotropaic, designed to ward off the Police, was also attractive.  After all, it was quite true that I saw absolutely no Police around any of the cars that had gone off the road, so in that sense the stickers seemed to work.  But following on from this thought, I had a brainwave.  There could be another reason that the Police were nowhere to be found at the scene of these accidents: the stickers meant that in fact the Police themselves were aware of these cars, and had left their marks there to indicate that they already knew as much as they wanted to about these incidents, and had no intention of doing anything more, thank you very much, so would the public be so good as not to bother them further.

At last I felt that I was there, I understood.  But as I drove past my fourth crashed car marked 'Police Aware', inspecting it with a certain satisfaction, I nearly joined it as I luxuriated rather too fully in this new 'Police Aware' awareness and forgot to look where I was going.

(15.3.92)

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