The Spanking Writers

I’m busily taking notes on this lad’s solution to the pain from a military school birching (found on the history pages of the Duke of York’s Royal Military School):

The Commandant nodded and the birch rose and swished down six times - once for each stolen stamp. At each stroke, the assembled throng expected to hear Flippant cry out in pain. But he never did. Even after the punishment was over no sound escaped his lips. The Sergeant-Major untied him and shook his hand. The Commandant declared how courageous he had been and gave him a half-crown… Speculation ran rife as to how Flippant had taken his punishment so well. Had he managed to cheat somehow?

He hadn’t cheated, of course. The six red-purplish weals were there plain to see and the next day he was racked with the pain of it all. But on the morning of his punishment, Flippant had managed himself very well. … The punishment had been in December when the temperature was below zero…

From the time Flippant got up until the time of his punishment he had taken his trousers down and sat bare-bottomed on the freezing lead. After an hour or so he began to lose all sensation in his buttocks. He persisted and continued to sit there until the very last moment just before noon. When the punishment was administered, Flippant felt nothing because of his self-administered local anaesthetic.

This all sounds very clever, until you remember that a spanking (or, indeed, a birching) hurts much more on a cold bottom. So if you don’t freeze your bum for long enough to lose all feeling, you’re in for an even worse punishment than what you’d originally get.

I wonder, how long it would take to anaesthesise myself that way?

I wonder, how do I come by a sheet of lead I could keep in the freezer without Abel noticing?