Freedom c.100,000BC-2006AD

A fun-loving child of the swinging one-hundred- thousand-BCies, Freedom was always known for her liberating, devil-may-care attitude and easygoing views on everything from drugs to sexual morality. Often caricatured as something of a hippie by her opponents, beneath her happy-go-lucky persona there lay a resolute fighter for liberty and a believer in the inalienable rights of each and every being. From her time hanging around with the notorious hairy hominid group "Homo Sapiens" to today, Freedom always campaigned for the downtrodden, beginning in her youth with such simple campaigns as for the right to pick fleas off one's mate (a right still enjoyed today by many Glastonbury Festival-goers).

Far bigger things were ahead. By the second millennium BC, Freedom was encouraging the Israelites to say goodbye to "the Man" ("the Man" being, in fact, "the Pharaoh") and "find themselves" by going on a walkabout amid the dunes and deserts of the Middle East. Only two millennia later she was staging her next major "happening", persuading young Goths and Vandals from all over Europe to come to Rome to hold a sit-in and "express themselves" ... something that they succeeded in doing with great gusto and pretty much all over the place.

In the centuries that followed, Freedom wandered across the globe, "fighting the power" wherever it could be found. By the latter part of the eighteenth century she was to be found dancing the night away with the likes of Thomas Paine and the heroes of the American War of Independence. During this time she also fell in with a group of French exchange students, going off with them to Paris to hold a mindblowing (or, more precisely, head chopping) Revolution. Not long after she was wigging out with newly-freed slaves before going on to explore her womanhood with the aid of suffragettes (and later Mars bars) before ignoring her advancing years to don a pink cowboy hat and chaps (and very little else) to march for gay rights.

Such a controversial lifestyle could not help but to attract enemies. Over the years Freedom found herself assailed from both left and right and by powers temporal and spiritual ... all of whom wanted to have as much freedom as possible for themselves (often including the freedoms to amass vast luxury for themselves, to oppress anyone they didn't like at all and, strangely enough, to sleep with any member of the animal kingdom they chose) while denying it to everybody else. Despite their attacks, Freedom carried on untroubled.

While Freedom managed to come through her wild life unscathed, not all of her friends were so lucky. Many of her oldest friends began to show increasing signs of paranoia, perhaps due to the bitter experiences of centuries fighting oppression, perhaps due to a massive intake of alcohol and cocaine in their youth. Several developed an obsession with ensuring Freedom's safety. Fearful that she might be attacked by "evildoers", and despite the protests of Freedom herself, they insisted that she leave her home on fewer and fewer occasions and then only with an armed escort. Eventually, those who claimed to be her closest companions confined her to her room, where they kept her under constant surveillance by CCTV. Deprived of the liberty she always craved, Freedom began to drift away.

Freedom will be buried this weekend. She is survived by her complete biometric data, surveillance files and CCTV footage, which will remain on a centralised database for all eternity.