When artistic souls collide

Once again we are in a state of war in Husborne Crawley. There's been border clashes in the past, but it's never reached this pitch before. It all started when Katja in the Beaker Quire bought that serpent. Not a large snake, nor the mythical representation of the one who brought all the evil into the world. But rather the traditional musical instrument.

Now it's a fine instrument, is the serpent. A deep, rich note as a wise man once said. Sure, Katja can't actually play the serpent. But then she couldn't play the clarinet either. So it's not that we're any worse off.

But the salient point about a serpent is that it's substantially larger than a clarinet. And that's what caused the trouble. Because at practice before yesterday's Feast of the Restoration of the Rump Parliament, Katja had to move a display of larkspur and late bluebells back six inches to fit in.

Well, with three minutes to go till it all started, Dora the flower arranger came in, did a last-minute checkup of alignment with her laser measuring device, and discovered that the overall symmetry had been wrecked. She kept quiet about it at the time, reserving herself to occasionally shooting random musicians in the eyes during their contributions. A form of attack that is illegal under the Geneva Convention, and also caused us to lose the kazoo part once or twice. Of course, since I was busy lighting tea lights and pouring water in and out of Beakers I never noticed this - although I did notice when, at one particularly solemn moment, a tambourine flew out of the Quire and clocked Dora on the temple. It ricocheted off and hit Hnaef on the nose, something which was later pronounced by the Music Leader, Morgulf at his press conference as "regrettable collateral damage. But quite funny".

It's a fact known to few, but tit-for-tat violence can spiral out of control. After those skirmishes we'd hoped that it was all over. But we came in this morning to find out that a chemical weapons attack had been launched. Or, to put it more simply, the pot plants were all dead and there was an empty "Roundup" can on the floor. The flower arrangers blamed the musicians, of course, but the conspiracy theorists reckon that the flower arrangers did it themselves, to give themselves an excuse for filling the euphonium with soapy water.

It's been more or less open war this morning. The Rosemary for Remembrance display has just been found in the compost heap, and Morgulf ended up on the business end of a particularly spiky display of teazles and cactuses. None of which was helping our celebration of the song "Give Peace a Chance". It was a lovely moment when we rolled out those balls of wool, passed the wool from hand to hand, and celebrated the network of humanity (to the accompaniment of "Bind us Together"). We had a real sense of a spirit of togetherness and forgiveness and everyone-is-everyone-else-ness.  It wasn't so great when Angelika set fire to the mesh of wool nearest to the music group. Although once again the wisdom of having beakers of water on standby was shown.

I've been trying to act as a raisonneur. To instil the words of NT Wright and Rowan Williams into the combatants. But for now, to patch up a fairly flaky ceasefire, we've drafted in the most effective and fearsome peace-keeping force known to humanity. Still, it's only a matter of time until the  Scout mistresses are going to be needed back at their packs, and who knows what will happen then?

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Serpent image "Gaius Cornelius" @ Wikimedia Commons