Nothing Scary Here

Roger Hayes from Nantwich in Cheshire owns one of the more controversial number plates we have featured. It is not surprising that some people cast wary glances in his direction as he drives around in his blue Ferrari sporting the registration LU51 FER. But Roger is no devil worshipper or black magician and there is no sinister reason for his ownership of the number.

Roger is used to enlightening the curious: not only about how he came to own the plate, but also on the subjects of history and religious mythology. As he points out, the popular association of Lucifer with the devil has no firm, undisputed basis in scripture. The Lucifer-as-Satan concept seems instead to have arisen from questionable translation of the biblical
Book of Isaiah combined with the poetic licence of Dante Alighieri in Inferno from his Divine Comedy and of John Milton in Paradise Lost (these not being written until the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively).

The path that led Roger to his unusual number was a rather compIicated one.
He had been searching for a suitable number to display on the Ferrari for some considerable time, and had exhausted most of the options he could think of. He had trawled through listings of registrations containing his initials, but decided that none of them were striking enough to grace his nice car. Next he searched for names:

his, his wife’s, the children’s… eventually, desperation moved him to search for the last family member’s name: that of their white Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Lucifer (Luci for short).

Roger says, “The great thing about the Regtransfers.co.uk site is the ‘make your own plate’ section which is where I found LU51 FER. I put in ‘LU’ and ‘51’ and then wondered if ‘FER’ was available. I typed it in and… click! up it popped as available.”

So, nothing devilish involved at all. Lucifer is a lovely white dog, and LU51 FER is a striking blue Ferrari. Nothing scary there.