Hidden Spire Collective | Our Freedom: Then and Now

Phase 2, session 3, 6 October 2025

Polly invited us to warm up by channelling our inner aerobics class leader, which came more naturally to some than others, and to stimulate our voices with chants about leather in alternative primary colours and calls of smaller and larger mammals.

We then recapped the party scenes we had devised in session 2: smokers’ balcony, bathroom vomitorium, buffet scrum, diffident dancers; all of which suggested that some of our number had been witness to (I’ll say no more than that) some pretty decadent goings-on.

After that, Hamish, drilled us on rhythmic aspects of ‘Freedom Train’ in which your chronicler added to his previous week’s tone-deafness a graphic demonstration of his inability to hold a beat; thankfully, everyone else has satisfying musical ability and Search sounded uncannily like Paul Robeson.

Following a break Polly proposed to us an outline for the eventual show comprising a group of travellers along Freedom Road encountering, in the course of their progress, situations imagined in Phase 1. I know we conceived of these itinerants as related to Alice (we are in Oxford, after all) but in her story she is the only traveller whereas the idea of a group put your diarist in mind of Chaucer’s pilgrims gathering at the Tabard although they seem to make no progress towards their professed destination (a useful theme, perhaps). Nonetheless the skeleton structure seems highly promising.

And we were given a handout with features to consider in working out the characters of our individual Freedom Road aspirants. Finally, we played a game of GP waiting room musical chairs in which distressing signs of competitiveness, pomposity, authoritarianism, and bolshiness emerged.

Hoping for more altruism next week.