A room with a canal view

Amsterdam’s full of canals, right? Rather like Venice, only colder and less enchanting – but full of the most amazingly cute girls!.

My suite overlooked on one of the main stretches of water; tourist boats plied up and down, and the hotel even had its own launch. What interested me, though, was the number of privately-chartered vessels – frequently hosting parties of slightly inebriated, terribly over-exhuberant locals. I wondered how long it’d be before I’d spied a Dutch girl being soundly shagged in the bottom of one of the passing craft.

And then I thought of one of the ancient uses of the canals, sadly little recorded in history (mainly because I’d just made it up). Public floggings were commonplace across Europe; some jurisdictions took that further and had offenders whipped through the streets.

Only, in Amsterdam, with its canals…? Outside the courthouse, the convicted girl would be stripped and tied tightly to the frame atop the whipping boat. The captain would set sail – a meandering route, from one canal to the next, the punishment officer lashing the prisoner periodically as they went. Justice could not have been more clearly seen to have been done…