This Summer we got a new car.

It is an old new car. Phil paid considerably less for it, because its last not-very-careful lady owner reversed it on several occasions into sundry bollards.

It is a useful old new car, because the resulting dents mean all who drive anywhere near me, fear me.

In my car, I am Mars, the God of War. My children spend their time counselling me: “Mummy, that wasn’t very nice. Mummy: that was a bit rude. No, Mummy, that man did not deserve that comment at all.”

It is a Citroen, that sophisticated French comfortmobile which has a place specially built-in for chic French housewives to put their feet up on the dashboard while their dashing husbands drive across the agricultural vastlands of that great country.

It is one of the bigger Citroens, which seats eight in plush comfort and requires a king’s ransom paid to the petrol tank every fortnight. We love it greatly. But when my husband first told me we were getting it, and described it to me, I simply couldn’t place the model.

So I did as all of us do: I looked around on the roads as I drove.

At first I could not spot one. It took ages to pick these great French buses out in a crowd, peering through the windscreen at an endless parade of vehicular eye candy.

After about five days of peering, I spotted one picking someone up from school. Ah, I thought, Eureka.

From that moment on, I saw them everywhere. Suddenly, my mind had woken up to them and picked them out, nimbly negating the need to peer.

It prodded a recollection of something our friend and psychologist  from The New York Times, Daniel Goleman, said in a book he wrote: it’s called ‘Vital Lies, Simple Truths’. He said we dance a dance between attention and inattention. Some things are just too painful to perceive, and others are just plain irrelevant.

And my car had just become relevant. It was as if the scales had fallen from my eyes.

Today I was planning a post about the speed at which we communicate these days. And where better to start than with a winged messenger-god?

Off I went to delve into all there was to know about Mercury. And I stumbled upon a concept which stopped me in my tracks: because I recognised it, although I had never seen it before. It has been used as a tool by storytellers for time immemorial.

Mercury, it appears, was one of a fleet of entities which spans religion and culture and even time. He was a psychopomp.

The word, which comes from Greek roots, means ‘guide of souls’. The traditional job description of the psychopomp is to escort souls from this life to the next one.

And, faithful to Goleman’s dance, now I have found one psychopomp, I am seeing them everywhere

I see one in Dante’s Inferno, where the poet Virgil leads Dante through Hell and Purgatory. And again, Death himself occasionally takes up his scythe and becomes the tour guide.

Now I digress, and confess to a little foible here, because I have a soft spot for the mediaeval, cloaked metaphor that is Death. I always have.

When everyone else was five years old, making fluffy snowmen and Father Christmases to hang on the tree, I was making gravestones.

All through my childhood my long-suffering parents faithfully hung the tombstones on the Christmas tree, looming sombrely behind the baubles to remind us of our own finality.

My favourite Deathly psychopomp – and there are many – is Terry Pratchett’s prosaic cloaked philosopher. In a stroke of genius, this psychopomp does not use speech marks, but always speaks in capital letters, and with a certain down-to-earth fatalism which sits comically at odds with the levity of his profession.

From eternally final to eternally young: Peter Pan had psychopomp written on his curriculum vitae. JM Barrie writes: “There were odd stories about him; as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened.”

We have a wonderful drama here on the BBC. In it, one of the most compelling, and loveable, psychopomps I have ever encountered takes us through four television series, based first in the seventies and then in the eighties. The first set is called Life On Mars, and its psychopomp is named Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt.

For those of us who know this bombastic old-style DCI, he is as much of an icon as Mercury himself. Any word-portrait will be paltry, because it is impossible to put together the elements of his blunt, acerbic wit, a short fuse and propensity to use unnecessary force, a passionate devotion to right and an unexpected warmth, and come up with the whole Gene.

Moreover, anyone who has not yet experienced it should be left alone to watch his role unfold.

So I will leave Gene to his incident room, and nod to Mr Jung as I head for the exit.

Because the great man himself referred to psychopomps: in a rather original incarnation.

And this is by far my favourite way of portraying the psychopomp: as a mediator between the conscious, and the unconscious mind. Jung posited that these characters haunt our dreams: a wise man, or a woman, or sometimes an animal.

Jung’s own psychopomp was a powerful figure indeed: his own father.

In life, Paul Jung was not an academic who could answer the young Carl’s vehement questions. But one can see very clearly that Jung is using his father in his dream life to work through the important issues of his life.

Paul Jung appeared in two dreams just after he died, insisting he was fine, and coming home; and Jung felt ashamed that he had thought him dead.

Much later, in the last dreams, his father is an accomplished biblical academic; everything he was not in life; and finally, he becomes someone with whom Jung can discuss and find answers to the theological questions which, when his father was alive, had taxed him so.

So, it seems, psychopomps are everywhere, swathed in story.

At their most fanciful, they are a fairy tale to help us puzzle over the very business of death.

But Jung found the psychopomp within himself, buried there in his unconscious mind.

And his psychopomp was there to help him wrestle with life.