Wicker Men

Twenty three baskets were woven outside the Houses of Parliament today in protest against the Iraq War, and eight baskets against the War in Afghanistan, in one of the biggest – and deftest – displays of basketry and wickerwork ever to oppose the twin conflicts, which have claimed the lives of half a million.

The country crafts went off largely without incident, although police sources confirmed that at least one lass nicked the tip of her index finger while attempting to rand bramble, and a lad got a callous off willow rods from waling his staths too hard.

“And in both cases,” Special Constable Culpepper Mordant told reporters over a pint later, “adroit weaving on the part of a nimble minority meant that our efforts to exert calm with our big police-sticks were significantly hampered.”

The braiding, which included both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ basketry styles, employed a range of pliable twigs, from hazel and clematis to honey-suckle and sloe, and – in some instances – wild broom, while the younger agitators twisted reeds.

According to organisers, the creels will be left in Parliament Square as a wattled testimony of the futility of war.

Afterwards, when business was concluded, the cabinet came out to sit with demonstrators in Saint James’s Park for an afternoon picnic of seedcakes, plum loaf and dandelion wine.

Foreign Secretary David Milliband asked if they thought it was better to broker a provisional truce between death-squads intent on avenging the blood of their martyrs going back to the beheading of the Infallible Imam in 661, on the one hand, and vigilantes loyal to the secret police of a despotic theocracy, on the other, or whether a preferable solution would be to strive for a settlement that included the sworn enemies of both sides in a loose affiliation of tribal interests and criminal gangs against Al-Qaeda backed militants, so as to prevent either of the former factions (and if so: which?) from imposing an extremist dictatorship until such time as one or other of the latter (and if so: how?) were powerful enough to engage them openly in a war of religiously motivated extermination.”

Protestor Ambrosia Hollyhock said she didn’t rightly know, but she felt sure the demonstration had sent a powerful signal to the mandarins in Whitehall.