BBC radio played straight into my hands in its morning broadcasts yesterday. I’d already started fantasising when they reported that store managers are outraged at the lenient sentences being doled out to shoplifters: one commented that thieves deserved “the ultimate sanction”.

Later, a government spokesperson, commenting on the same story, spoke of the need for “swift and effective justice.”

Strange how one’s mind works: it’s not any old store that I pictured, with the young woman bent over the flogging block, wrists tied, for a very public meeting with the rattan. No, it was specifically the branch of Woolworth’s in London’s Edgware Road, the thrashing taking place just inside the front windows! (I’ve not even been there for a year or more: strange how the mind works).

A small crowd had gathered: they gasped as her buttocks were bared, and winced collectively as the strokes fell. No gentle spanking, this: full-bodied blows, red stripes clearly visible for all to see…. Swift and effective justice, indeed.

And then the sobbing offender was untied, and was free to go, pushing her way tearfully through the crowds and out onto the street.

P.S. Will the girl who got two very hard smacks from her boyfriend by the chocolate stand before the Keane gig in Newcastle Arena yesterday please delurk?