The Spanking Writers

Amazing how my little Roman slave fantasies of the other day keep cropping up again.

Last night’s dream, for example. A writer sitting by a window, high up, looking out as a young woman is led into the courtyard of a neighbour’s house.

She catches his eye, as she struggles: a defiant look.

Her tunic reveals her to be a slave. Her master removes it, roughly, and ties her hands above her head.

She’s positioned facing the writer. She looks up at him again, realising that her ordeal is being closely observed. She averts her eyes, ashamed.

Her master proceeds to lay on the strokes: hard, fast, purposefully. The writer can no longer see her eyes: they’re downcast, the girl absorbed totally in her flogging.

She’s untied. She grabs her costume; covers herself; runs inside.

And the writer records what he’s seen, and reflects on what he doesn’t know: the girl’s name, her offence. Whether it was her first whipping. Given she was facing him during the flogging, how she’d marked. Who’d comfort her afterwards.

Being away, I missed the Doctor Who episode in which he caned an entire class of Edwardian schoolgirls. (At least, that’s what I’m hoping happened, given the photograph that Haron published).

My beloved describes a couple of the fantasies that the episode idea stimulated when we heard of it, including one in which the Doctor rescued a girl from the bench outside the Headmaster’s study.

In my mind, the scene finished differently. The girl and The Doctor go through all sorts of adventures. As the time for him to return her draws near, she starts to worry about the impending caning. The Doctor comforts her, but apologises – the Tardis rules are such that he must return her to the precise time and place from which she had been taken. The episode ends with the Doctor disappearing, and the girl knocking nervously on the Headmaster’s door.

And why stop at one girl? Perhaps there were three, queuing up in pyjamas and dressing gowns for a late-night scolding. The Doctor rescues them; time-travelling escapes follow; he returns them safe and sound. They knock on the door, walk in – and realise his error: no longer is it 2007, but an earlier age. It’s a different Headmaster who faces them, armed not with the modern threat of lines and a grounding, but flexing a cane…

When I saw a review of a book called “The Plimsoll Sensation”, I got terribly excited. Wow, somebody has written a whole book about what it feels like to be whacked with a plimsoll! But wait, why is the review in “The Observer”?..

Unfortunately, the book is not about the gym shoe you get smacked with, but about the person, Samuel Plimsoll. Apparently, he invented the “Plimsoll line” on a ship, that is, a line that shows how low a vessel can sit in the water while loaded. Hmm, fascinating. :-/

I wondered if he had also invented the proper plimsolls, you know, the shoes. He had not. But the connection is not entirely random, either!

Apparently, the plimsoll shoes are so called because ‘the band around the shoes that holds the two parts together reminded people of a ship’s Plimsoll line; sense perhaps reinforced by sound association with sole.’

Tired, jet lagged; waking this morning was a slow process. My mind wandered, dazed, to the day ahead. I’m heading out with a colleague; we’ve agreed to meet at 9 for breakfast, with pen and paper to scribble notes for the conference presentation we’re giving later in the week.

I recalled, in my sleepy state, that I’ve brought with me a small notebook perfect for the purposes. Purchased in Japanese store Muji, it’s the same size and colour as a passport. I picked up several the other week – thoughts of girls being caught with ‘forged’ documents sparking some fascinating scene ideas.

I daydreamed back to a scene we’d played the evening before I left for the US. There were six of us in total: some of the very best spanking role players I know. Three girls, three teachers. Fighting outside the common room; sound spankings, carefully-administered canings – and a superb rapport between the members of the group.

And then the logical leap. I pictured the same group of six; the girls with the forged papers, on the run from the authorities, possessors of some clever code that the State needed to know. We caught them, of course; interrogated them; flogged them, but to no avail – silence prevailed. So each officer took a sobbing girl away into a separate room: used fair means and very foul to extract confessions. (I’d better spare your blushes with details of the precise methods used!).

Two gave up their secrets: the third did not. They were brought back into the main room: the girls tied facing each other. We alternated strokes between them, the one unco-operative girl’s resolve tested by her own whipping and that of her friends, until she finally gave in.

I guess I ought to dig out that notebook and head off for breakfast…

PS if any of you happen to be at a conference in Savannah this coming week, feel free ti play “guess the pervert” and by trying to work out which of the participants is yours truly! (No, you’re not allowed to do a room-to-room search to see which suitcase contains a cane and a tawse!)

Oh, but this is beautiful. Thank you, BBC, for providing me with eye-candy fantasy fodder:

A site interviewing high achievers talks to the first female member of the elite “Red Devils” freefall parachute team. She recalls her days in the ‘A’ stream at school:

I was too scared not to be a good student…I must admit to getting the cane on a few occasions but that was only because I told lies when they did the register on a Monday morning asking if I had been to Confession, Mass and Holy Communion.

I remember once saying I had been to Mass. Sister Mary Imelda asked me what time mass? I said 6pm. She must have known I was telling porkies as she wanted to know what colour vestments, and which priest took mass. I said Father Ryan and Green. Then she told me we were in Lent and it was purple. I said I wasn’t sure because I was stood behind Mr. Skillen and couldn’t see past him.

She didn’t believe me and I got the cane on both hands…I only went to church because of the fear of the cane on a Monday morning.

Interesting how fear temporal (the cane) outweighed fear spiritual (burning in hell for skipping services).

From the previews for tomorrow’s episode of Doctor Who, it looks like he will be disguised as an ‘ordinary schoolteacher in 1912 England’.

We had great fun the other day discussing the adventures you might have if you land the TARDIS in a school.

Abel suggested that the Doctor’s assistant would need to infiltrate her mother’s old school. There she would find out why Mum was always so paranoid about her daughter wandering out of bounds: after a night-time monster chase, the girl is brough to the Headmaster for six-of-the-best.

Or how about this: the Doctor steals a girl straight from the bench in front of the Headmaster’s study. After many adventures, he returns her, but his usual sloppy driving makes him miss by a few months, and corporal punishment has been abolished. I quite like this one, actually…
————————
* I know, we’ve just been through this with Abel.

Oh, thank you, dear Times for cheering me up this morning after last night’s Greek tragedy. (Football, dear readers. Don’t ask. It’s too painful to discuss).

Their comment page leads with a phrase that is music to my eyes:

‘What we need is new borstal-style education.’

It goes on to praise the Conservatives’ call for “a ‘zero-tolerance’ approach to school discipline” and demand the re-introduction of reform schools.

Now, I am a modest man. I hesitate to take credit in this instance. But the evidence really is overwhelming: they just have to be taking inspiration from our blog!

And, dear policy makers, if you need to pilot the scheme, I’m happy to volunteer my services – and nominate a few of our readers to experience the new system.

“Be cautious in dealing with slaves, and remember that Romans regard slavery as an unfortunate affliction that might happen to anyone… Some slaves even go on to become the adopted children or heirs of their former owners.”

So wrote The Independent recently, in an extract from ‘Ancient Rome on Five Denarii a Day’, a fascinating new ‘travel guide’ that is surely destined to be added to the large pile of as-yet-unread books on our living room floor.

Where to start with such a theme? My mind’s spinning…

“Will you whip me now, sir, in the same way you did when I was a slave?”

Or “Take off your slave’s dress, young lady.”

Or even, “We have one remaining matter to deal with before I sign the paperwork confirming your new status. Bend over the table.”

Oh for a toga party…

According to Friday’s Independent, since Paris Hilton was sentenced to a jail sentence, the local media in LA has:

‘whipped up hysteria over the affair, speculating furiously over girl gangs, lesbian rape, judicial floggings and other horrors at the Century Regional Detention Facility.’

OK, OK. I admit it. I may have got carried away with my transcription and added just a couple of words to the original text. But the more demure Ms Hilton tries to look during her court appearances, the more my mind wanders.. In common, it seems, with most of California’s journalists.