Name: Women’s Institute
Age: 101.
Appearance: Upright. Honest. Sobersided stalwarts. Pillars of the community. Shh. Say nothing.
Say nothing? Say nothing about what? The rampant recidivism seething beneath the facade of decency.
Are you feeling all right? As long as the local chapter of WIseguys doesn’t hear me singing like a boid!
What are you talking about? Sergeant Colin Norden of the Cambridgeshire police has called the WI Britain’s biggest organised crime group.
Albion’s mafia? The WI? Is he feeling all right? Just dandy, thank you. He was noting in a talk to the city council about why not all anti-social behaviour is prosecuted that it is an offence to pick wild berries and then sell them for profit – for example, by using them as filling in homemade apple crumbles and pies for sale at summer fetes.
He wants to be careful. Whenever we refer to the WI as jam-makers and things, they write in insisting that they’re all coders and parkour experts these days and that we should all go jump in a lake with our stereotypes. Have they ever left a horse’s head in your bed?
Not yet, no, though clearly it’s only a matter of time. What does the WI have to say to claims that they are made women? The capo di capo of the Cambridgeshire Federation of Women’s Institutes Sally Kingman unleashed hell. “You pull a truncheon, we pull a spatula! You send one of ours to the stirring station, we send one of yours to blind-baking classes! That’s the WI way!”
Did she? No.
What did she say? She said: “I think it shows that WI ladies are very sensible and resourceful, especially as one of our recent campaigns is entitled Love Food Hate Waste.”
Sounds like war to me. She also pointed out that the WI was founded in 1915 to produce and preserve food in the first world war and that the police had been failing to enforce the law for over a century.
Oh, it is ON. Lock and load your spatulas.
Do say: Nothing. Haven’t you heard of the marmalade omerta?
Don’t say: “The Cosy Nostra. WIseguys.”
