Cottia Thorowgood

I still feel ambiguous about whether or not I should have done it. There’s something awful about playing with other people’s trust, and yet I was too intrigued to turn down the opportunity to try out Brennan’s experiments in socially frigid Cambridge. We began with the harder-to-justify of the two tasks: approaching random members of the public with recent photos of ourselves entitled ‘Missing Person’. Expecting to receive insulted outrage as a 2D and 3D version of myself, apparently suffering some identity crisis, intruded on innocent Sunday strollers, I was surprised by the reactions. I selected teenage girls as my first guinea pigs, in the hope they’d find me more weird than socially intrusive, but they simply looked with concern at the photo and apologised without looking at me. I was unnerved by a smoking male who smiled when I showed the picture, saying, "she looks a bit like you, doesn’t she?" before explaining that he worked in a local café and had never seen the likes of ‘her’ around. There was intimacy created between me and my victim: they’d been head-hunted from the masses to look at my paper, and intimacy in jest is deeply insulting. When asked by one man if I was playing a joke, I confessed it wasn’t just him but everyone. It was noticeable in both experiments how people have learnt to avoid eye contact, for fear of being sold something, whether a meal deal or charity. There’s a sense that the public forum has become a place in which people seem increasingly wary to interact, something well demonstrated in the second experiment: holding hands with strangers. On asking boys how they would feel if we walked down King’s Parade holding hands, most felt it was "just too weird". Disappointing and also rather crushing. It took two Czech bikers, both called Peter, to embrace the challenge almost literally. So along we went, the three of us talking about how sad it was that there was such taboo on intimacy between strangers. Does it take foreigners, with a little more carpe diem in their outlook to break down British social mores? Is it a reflection of our age, of Cambridge, or of a Sunday afternoon that there is reluctance to get a little closer? But we are not truly free individuals. It’s not appropriate, as a young female, to go and ask a married man to hold hands, with or without his wife’s presence. Young children also seemed a little off-limits. Ultimately this experiment became rather introspective. Through one action, every decision as to who one does and doesn’t select exposes an increasingly complex system of social mores, and to ignore them is perhaps more an act of naïvety than social liberation. No (wo)man is an island, and it can be problematic to act as if that were not the case.

Lydia Crudge

It was in the computer room, printing out my profile picture under the heading ‘Missing Person’, with freshers staring surreptitiously at the screen and then with incredulity at me, that I realised how awkward the afternoon was going to be. Accidentally accosting anyone who’d actually had to make the posters I was faking was a hideous thought, but once we started it became apparent how few people actually notice each other in the street. Standing in front of someone who categorically denies having seen you, despite scrutinising the clear photo you proffer, is a really bizarre sensation. A few cottoned on: one girl burst into giggles to her apologetic boyfriend’s horror, berating him as I walked away with, "It’s her, you idiot!" Yet the majority couldn’t be drawn out of their journeys and nobody offered to help us, which was a sobering experience. Once the barrier of a tragic photograph was withdrawn, and we began literally throwing ourselves at people, the quality of interaction improved. My first attempt to get a stranger to hold hands with me elicited a horrified "NO!" and the woman bolting. I toned it down, and found that a friendly "hello, how are you?" was never rejected, though the wariness in people’s eyes didn’t abate until I dropped some hint it was a social experiment. The longest journey I managed was with a lady who took me from Ryman’s to her bike outside St John’s, where allusions to the romance of the situation ended our trip. Other highlights included clasping the blood-stained palms of an actress; and Dave from Trinity Hall, cradling his ice-cream tub of couscous, who worried about holding hands in case people assumed he had a new girlfriend but was perfectly happy to link arms: "Gentlemanly, isn’t it?" Most people thought we were weird but they seemed to enjoy the strangeness.

Vicky Nwosu-Hope

t had been fourteen years since I had walked hand-in-hand with two people at once; but as I found myself strolling down King’s Parade, a body either side, steps synchronised and fingers interlocked, I realised the feeling hadn’t changed much. The situation differed only in that this time my companions were: a) complete strangers, and b) presumably disinclined to swing me over puddles – a desire I fought hard not to voice. I never asked, so perhaps their compliance wouldn’t have been such a long-shot after all. There’s a lot to be said for child’s play. Aside from dwelling on the allure of ‘1-2-3-ah-whoop’, Ryan Brennan’s ‘Living Exercises’ provoked nostalgia for the bygone days of high street cricket and ‘I dare you...’ At the age of seven I didn’t care whether people I didn’t know thought I was bizarre, nor did I have to justify my interaction with them. Public reaction to Brennan’s exercises – gauged by facial expressions and intermittent gasps – revealed that I was perceived as whimsical and bizarre as I offered my mitten to passers-by, suggesting they might like to hold my hand. Few agreed, though most laughed, albeit nervously. However, when appealing for help with finding a missing person whilst brandishing my own Facebook profile photo, the response was very different. I had anticipated this would be received as a childish game, but was met instead with grimaces of pity. One man wished me luck, but admitted it was unlikely I’d find the girl this way, as "no-one really looks properly at people in the street, do they?" Apparently not. Faced with involvement in a missing person search, almost everyone avoided eye-contact and no-one recognised that I was looking for myself. It was only when I was as an amusingly eccentric paradigm of child-like naïvety that Brennan’s bid for social cohesion bore any fruit. "Hold hands with a stranger" was a conversation starter. This apparent child’s play was magnetic for people, drawing them in so that the city really did become our playground.