Yesterday’s slippering post has drawn a few comments, from “slippers are weird” to “slippers are hot”, and I feel the need to give my perspective.*

The slipper and its relative, the plimsoll, are not my favourite implements just because they are so damn painful. “So what?” I hear you ask. “Tawses and belts are painful. Canes are painful. Haribrushes are painful.” That’s right, and I like tawses and belts a lot less than I like the slipper, which is why I said it wasn’t my favourite, rather than that it was my least favourite.

The slipper has lots of advantages, which make it one of the hottest implements to fantacise about, to imagine other people get, etc.

Top 5 Reasons Haron Likes the Slipper:

  1. It’s authentic for school scenes. It belongs in a school scene. I know people who’d been slippered at school. And I like school scenes.
  2. Unlike the cane and the tawse, it’s a hell of a lot easier to aim, due to not being whippy. I’ve never heard of a slipper landing somewhere it hasn’t been aimed.
  3. A slipper is all “thud” and little “sting”. I like “thud”.
  4. It looks really hot laid across a round bottom encased in bottle-green school knickers, preparing to strike.
  5. You can slipper somebody really fast, which makes them reach the state of “Oh My God” (identified by the culprit hanging limply over your knee) that much quicker.

Come to think of it, that last one can also been seen as a disadvantage.

Top 5 Reasons Haron Is Apprehensive About the Slipper:

  1. When you get slippered really fast (impossible to do safely with other school-specific implements – a cane or a tawse) holding on to a degree of control is completely impossible. As part of said control is the ability to keep down the noise, the slipper is, therefore, not very neighbour-friendly.
  2. It’s really bloody painful! (I can’t emphasize this enough. It is. Very painful.)
  3. It may be hard for a top to judge just how painful the slipper is, because it looks fairly harmless. It’s imperative that you let the top know by every verbal and non-verbal communication method in your collection the impact of each individual thwack.
  4. Thick rubber creates little raised blisters surprisingly quickly, and knocking heads off them can draw blood. I don’t get unduly freaked by bleeding, but it does put a stop to any further play, even if you’ve only just started, and it hasn’t actually started to hurt that much.
  5. Man, are those freaking’ things *ever* painful!!

However, if you’re lucky, you may get cool tread marks. (I did once, before Abel – sorry, sweetie, I don’t believe that’s possible any more; that train’s done departed now.)

So there you are. Make your own conclusions, really; as you can see, I haven’t quite made up my mind on the issue of slippers, other than they are hot, and also painful.

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*Not the need need, you understand, just something I feel like writing about for the next few minutes.