The Spanking Writers

We received one of those horrible documents inserted into a Christmas card the other day, in which a vanilla acquaintance described the travails of their past twelve months in immensely boring detail.

I started giggling after a few moments, though, and Haron asked why. “Just imagine if these things were really honest,” I said. Like…

Our garden was particularly lovely this spring. The joyous sense of spiritual renewal at this time of year was clouded, though, when Sophie was called before her Housemaster for truancy and given her first caning. Sadly, the three strokes he administered across her skirt were insufficient to drive home the message, for she found herself back in his study in October for a further taste of corporal punishment. This time, he gave her six of the best on the bare, and we are pleased to report that her conduct has been impeccable ever since.

You may be interested to find that today has been designated as Red Stripe Monday: the last Monday before Christmas, the day when families assemble to discuss the behaviour of the daughters throughout the year.

How does Father Christmas know for sure who had been naughty or nice? He finds out on the Red Stripe Monday. Of course, everybody can do things that are a little bit naughty, but today all the indiscretions can be wiped clean with a sound caning.

Nothing too severe. No extended lectures. Just a quiet discussion, followed by a girl touching her toes, and her father painting a few red stripes on her bottom.

Now she is ready to receive her presents.

Such is the ancient tradition, but in the modern world the caning is frequently substituted with spanking, or other disciplinary techniques, while a father may be swapped for a husband if desired.

Haron and I had been out in London for the evening – seeing the brilliant Tracy Chapman. (Her own songs were wonderful, twenty years on from her landmark début album, but it was her interpretation of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ that stole the show).

The tube pulled into Leicester Square, when the journey back to our hotel suddenly got more interesting.. Three young ladies boarded the train, wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns, in a state of giggly end-of-term intoxication. They proceeded to sit down in the middle of the carriage; one leant gently against my leg for support.

They’d be caught on their return to their college, no doubt, as they climbed over the fence (the gate having been locked for the night at its usual early hour). The porter would note their late and unorthodox means of entry in his logbook, together with the fact that they had evidently been drinking; that would sober them up almost immediately. They’d spend a sleepless night before their 8 a.m. appointment with the principal, who would lecture them sternly.

He’d ask two of them to step outside before informing the girl left in front of him that corporal punishment was the only option in the circumstances. The six hard strokes of the cane would be clearly audible to her friends on the other side of the door; they’d follow her in turn for their own private audiences, touching their toes for their canings.

(Seems a shame really: they were so sweet).

The rather wonderful book “Schools of Hellas” that I mentioned earlier, appears to have been written especially for me.

Floggings were exceedingly common at Sparta. Any elder man might flog any boy. It was not etiquette for boys to complain to their parents in these cases; if they did so, they received a second thrashing.

But the triumph of the system was the flogging of the ‘epheboi’ yearly at the altar of Artemis Orthia, in substitute for human sacrifice. Entrance for the competition was quite voluntary, but the competitors seem always to have been forthcoming. They began by practice of some sort in the country. If the floggers were too lenient,.. the statue, according to legend, performed a miracle to show its displeasure.

I love that there was a statue with such specialised miracle powers. ‘The statue is not amused! Thrash them harder!’

Actually, I would be tempted to be lenient on the sacrificial boys just to see the statue do some cool tricks.

We took our friend L to lunch in our local hostelry last weekend. No simple Sunday lunch, this: though, for we’d stumbled into “Santa’s Super Sunday”.

And, dear readers, the man himself was there. I’d have thought that, ten days before Christmas, he’d have been busy ensuring that the elves took a suitably disciplined approach to the present-wrapping process. Oh no! Here he was, in the north-east of England, ho-ho-hoing for all he was worth. (And it was amazing to see how like the publican he looked: quite uncanny).

Haron and L. watched with interest as Santa ordered himself a pint and headed off to his grotto. The barman called over, conspiratorily: “Ladies, you’d be very welcome to sit on Santa’s knee, if you’d like to.”

I feigned surprise as I paraphrased the invitation. “Wow: you girls can go over Santa’s knee if you want to.” The shocked glances from neighbouring tables made me realised that I’d perhaps been speaking a little too loudly. But I’ll never see a sign for a Christmas grotto again without some delightful images flashing through my mind.

Fenwick’s department store in Newcastle has a cool window display for the holidays: mechanised figures dressed up in old costumes are moving through scenes of everyday life.

I was particularly charmed by the window in which one figure, naked to the waist, was locked in a pillory and flogged to cheery Christmas music. The other figures were crowding around, looking on: some in shock, some obviously approving of the event.

OK, not really. There was no public flogging there. But I thought there should have been.

There is actually a scene of a man with a big stick chasing some boys across a humped bridge, but he never does catch up with them.

A certain frisson always results from photographs of whipping benches in judicial museums around the world – the one I took in Edinburgh’s police museum last year certainly provoked lots of comments!

But “Le Monde de la Fessee”, a French spanking blog, must win the prize for the best such photo in a recent post:

The birching table at Votinsk women’s prison”? How evocative is that? I can picture the prisoner trembling as she was tied down; pleading for mercy as they bared her; quivering as the guards stepped to the side of the room to pick up their birches. I can imagine the pause as they took their positions, measured the rods to make sure their aim would be true. The officer presiding would wait until he was satisfied that all was well, before giving the instruction: “Begin the flogging.”

It’s nice when a newspaper helpfully finds and prints spanking references in the literature for us. Thus, from a recent edition of the Standard we found that -

Eighteenth century lexicographer Dr Samuel Johnson enjoyed being thrashed by his mistress, Hester Thrale… says Jeffrey Meyers in his well received new volume, Samuel Johnson: The Struggle. Hester’s ‘ritualistic whippings’ gave Johnson ‘masochistic pleasure in pain and humiliation, which both satisfied and punished his sexual urges.’

It’s good to see another piece of proof that, in the C18th, it wasn’t just the Marquis de Sade who knew which end of the stick goes where…

We’re feeling just a tad proud of ourselves this morning. See, we started posting here on Spanking Writers back in March 2006, and a quick calculation revealed that today is our thousandth day of posting here.

One post a day, sometimes more, for 1,000 days. Wow. Have we really come up with so many different spanking-related ideas? It seems like we have.

Thanks for all of your support thus far: it’s been wonderful to make so many friends, online and in real-life, as a result of our musings.

Next stop, 10,000. But that celebration will be some time off.

This weekend we have a friend staying, whom we’ll call L. (She has previously earned fame on this blog for earning “A Licking For a Licking”) Yesterday the three of us settled down to watch the final of the talent show X-Factor, when Abel announced that we would have a bet riding on the results.

“If Alexandra wins, you girls will get no punishment at all. If GLS win, it’s six strokes each, and if Eoghan wins, you get twelve each. Clear?”

It was pretty clear that Abel didn’t like Eoghan very much.

L. and I agreed and crossed our fingers for Alexandra, and squirmed our way all through the hours and hours of singing. We supported her so fervently, that I’m sure her victory was cause as much by our channelling of good thoughts as by the voting of the Great British public.

A well-deserved victory, L and I agreed.

Lest you think Abel is getting soft, what with giving us the option of no punishment at all, I must add that in the interval L got her first birching, which looked pretty painful; I then had a mini-birching with what was left of the rods.

Still, the X-factor bet? We won. Thanks, Alexandra.