The Spanking Writers

A few weeks ago we went into a gift shop in a country house we visited, and happened upon an implement we hadn’t heretofore owned: a planting ruler. This being a 40 inch thick ruler, with holes and also with notes on how far apart different types of seeds need to be planted.

Ow, it looked painful. Of course we bought it.

Abel now amuses himself by translating the numbers on the ruler into slang for the numbers of strokes in a punishment. “Beetroot” for 4, “Lettuce” for 8, and so on. “It’s the parsnips for you today, young lady!”

Despite all the simple rustic hilarity, the ruler actually feels quite nice.

Come with me to a rather unusual establishment: an exclusive University campus, for the country’s very brightest girls. Only a small number are accepted – fifty per year, perhaps, hand-picked after careful scrutiny of those recommended in confidential letters from their schools. They’re guaranteed high-flying jobs in the State administration when they leave – this being a country where the State controls everything.

The place is run along boarding school lines: uniforms, strict rules, girls required to remain on campus at all times during the term. There’s the ever-present (but rarely-used) threat of the cane for those who under-perform.

It’s the end-of-year examination for the first year students. The exam takes place over three days: three papers per day, each incredibly testing. Each paper can pose questions on any of the topics studied during the year.

Exactly 48 hours after the final paper is completed, a league table of results will be published on the University noticeboard – a percentage score against each girl’s name, with the top student at the head of the list. And, to focus them on their studies throughout their first year, there’s a long-standing tradition that whoever who finishes bottom of the class will be caned.* Twelve strokes on the bare, in front of her peers – the only time a punishment is ever given in public.

We’re in the exam room. It’s the morning of day two. The students are writing away, feverishly. The invigilator roams from desk to desk. Something catches his eye across the room – a girl behaving strangely. He walks on, closer, behind the girl in question, observing without being observed. Closer still, and his suspicions are confirmed.

Suddenly he’s next to her, taking the wooden ruler from her desk, turning it over and seeing (as he’d suspected) tiny hand-written notes: formulae, dates, names. He breaks the silence: “Stand up and explain yourself!”

She rises to her feet, but can only offer a mumbled excuse: “I…I used it for revising, sir. I didn’t mean to bring it into the exam with me.”

“Sit down and continue your work,” he tells her. “You’ll keep working on this and the other papers, as usual. But be in no doubt that you will be accorded a score of zero per cent on this year’s examination.”

He walks away, leaving her to try to concentrate again on her work – tears staining the ink on the page in front of her, as the shock and shame of being caught gives way to the realisation that a zero score will inevitably leave her at the bottom of the class…

–

* I’d usually struggle with this concept – the idea of whacking a girl because she’s not naturally bright seems unfair. But remember – this University only takes the very best students!

That’s my punishment I’m talking about – it was entirely self-inflicted, and I’m not talking about self-flagellation here.

A few days ago I drove to see some friends, an hour and a bit each way. I got there fine. I got back fine.

I might have driven a bit… fast. The motorway was moving at well above the speed limit, and I decided it was safer to go with the flow than putter along at 70 behind a cement mixer, letting everyone in the world overtake me.

After Abel came back from the US, I expressed to him the surprise that everyone drove so fast here in the South, and admitted that I felt a little naughty for having followed the crowd.

It was immediately clear that he didn’t feel I was only “a little” naughty. In a very dangerous voice, he ordered me to go straight upstairs, to his study.

I must say that I wasn’t terribly disappointed at this turn of events, because hey, we’d been apart for a week, and there’s nothing like a spanking to bring you closer together. Still, I might have liked it better if he hadn’t reached straight for a massive frat paddle of doom.

That paddle? It hurts. I got five swats, all uniformly crisp and burning through the seat of my jeans. I might have howled a bit, and I definitely jumped up in a very undignified manner – but it hurt! I don’t usually strive for dignity under such circumstances.

Still, I can’t help thinking that the whole thing was my own silly fault for mentioning it to Abel in the first place. It’s not like there’s speed traps on the motorway, or anything. He would have never known.

The resort I stayed at last week was full of the friendliest, most helpful staff. In particular, the female members of staff seem to be either:

a) a member of the local Native American tribe
b) a cute girl-next-door type
c) a student working for the summer vacation
d) all of the above.

One of the final category knocked on the door of my suite one evening in one of my little flights of fancy. “I’ve been sent by my manager to apologise to you,” she explained, and so I asked her to step inside. “I know I should have been more careful,” she continued, avoiding my eyes. (Careful about what scarcely bothered me!).

There was a long pause.

“Has the manager dealt with you, young lady?” I enquired.

Another long pause. “Yes, sir.” I waited patiently for her to continue. “He gave me the strap, sir.”

“Very good. And what have you learned from that?”

“To take more care in my work, sir, or I’ll let the hotel down.”

“Precisely.” I paused again. “So you’ve been punished for letting the hotel down, and you’ve now been sent here so that I could punish you for inconveniencing me. Is that right?”

“Yes, sir. But, I mean, you don’t need to…”

“Yes I do.” And I did, taking her over my lap, baring her bottom, running my fingers over the weals left by the manager’s strap, and then spanking her hard until I was convinced she’d learnt her lesson.

Last night we were discussing a particular TV presenter, an old gentleman with a lot of gravitas.

Abel said: “Can you imagine him giving you a caning? Although no, he’s more likely to be a form master who will regretfully send you to the Headmaster for your caning.”

“No,” I said. “He is like a Housemaster, who will give you a slippering over his knee in loco parentis, and then will be very nice about it and give you a cup of tea to comfort you.”

Abel said he’d never before considered cups of tea from the hand that’s just punished you. To me, this is one of those nice things I often fantacise about housemasters doing. I like nice housemasters, who are the antithesis to the cold authority of the headmaster.

How about you – what small comforting things work for you, if any at all?

By the time this pops up on the blog, I’ll be half-way across the Atlantic, coming home after my conference. I can’t wait to be back – to cuddle Haron, to meet up with the big group of spanko friends who are coming for dinner on Tuesday night, to be able to have long conversations without worrying that the mobile phone is costing me £1.35 per minute…

I stayed over at the resort for a couple of days once the event had finished, given that the international flights cost £1000 less if the stay included a Saturday night. And, with time to kill, I took a few of my team out to the local baseball stadium to watch a game. It was a great evening out – beer, hot dogs, popcorn (and even a game to watch, not that I know the rules).

One feature of the stadium was a huge, huge video screen. Alongside a wealth of information about the players were pictures of people in the crowd, and messages sent from one fan to another.

The two might be combined, I speculated. A father, out with business colleagues, would see a photograph of his daughter and her friends – in the stadium, playing truant. The note would appear on the screen a few moments later: “Jessica in block 309. You should be at school. Go straight to your room when you get home. I’ll deal with you when I get back. Love from Daddy.”

Or maybe he’d summon her to his executive suite; the next time the camera roamed around the crowd, it would focus in on the young lady over her father’s knee – shorts and panties down as he spanked her. Each swat would be cheered by the 30,000-strong crowd, her reddening bottom filling the screen and quite distracting the players…

My dream landscape has righted itself again, serving up a lovely, though brief, dream of a girl punished by her older brother. She was still at school, whereas he nobly came home from college to watch her for a few weeks while their parents were on holiday.

The part that I dreamed of was where she challenged him: you can’t spank me! You’re not a grown-up! And in response he offered her a phone, and asked whether she liked to call their dad and ask him about it.

She very, very quickly decided that a spanking from her brother would be preferable to that particular discussion.

In the morning I realised that in all my vast role-playing career I’ve never once played a brother/sister scene. Initially, this would have been because I didn’t know any tops close enough to me in age for this to work. Now I do, though, so maybe I should see what I can initiate…

On the flight over to the States, I finally caught up with “The Young Victoria”, a movie I’ve been really looking forward to seeing. And, for sure, it deserves to win awards. “Most boring costume drama”, “Dullest film imaginable” and a special prize for “Romantically-engaged characters with the least on-screen chemistry” all come to mind.

I did, though, like the scene in which the young princess was made to hold the hand of a courtier every time she walked downstairs. “There are people out there who would wish you no good,” her mother explained. They, presumably, would therefore have left invisible banana skins on the stairs or placed tripwires across the middle step. And, to emphasise the risk to the future queen’s life, the holding-hands-downstairs scene was repeated at least three times, in case we’d missed the point the first time around.

I think they only showed the “teenage Victoria was really a rebel” scene twice, though – although I may have fallen asleep by the third, or indeed tenth, time it came up. This constituted her reaching the top of the stairs, holding her lady-in-waiting’s hand, walking down, then deliberately skipping down two stairs at once in an act of blatant defiance the boldness of which has rarely been seen on camera.

And then they missed the important scene. For in real life, of course, Sir John – evil pantomime villain of the piece, controller of the household – would have been informed of her wrong-doing. She’s have been ordered to go and see him in a drawing room and informed of her uncle, the current king’s displeasure at her repeated disobedience. “His Majesty has commanded that you be disciplined,” Sir John would explain. He would pick up the birch from the table, and ring a bell for Victoria’s maid: after all, a noble girl could hardly be expected to undress herself prior to her thrashing.

She’d be instructed to bend over the arm of a chair. Given the evident inadequacies of the lead’s acting skills, the director would take the difficult decision that the birching should be administered for real. The camera would dart between images of her increasingly-red bottom and her increasingly-tear-stained face, as two dozen strokes were administered with full regal authority. Afterwards she’d be seen sitting at a writing table, quill pen in hand, composing a sincere letter of apology to the king.

Sadly, that scene didn’t make the final cut. Such a shame to think that the director would have had his lead actress birched for no reason…

Sometimes a kinky dream just doesn’t work.

Or, it works at the time. In my dream I had a younger sister, who was married to a strict (but fair) man, who disciplined both of us in Abel’s absence.

I woke up with a grin on my face.

And then realised that, according to dream logic, this spanker in my dream had been our former prime-minister Tony Blair.

Ewwwwwww!

In the States for the past few days, I’ve been staying at a rather lovely resort hotel that’s owned and managed by the local Native American tribe. In the relaxation room in the spa (my back was sore after the long flight, OK?) was the autobiography of a woman who described life at the local Indian School in the early 1900s (a “semi-military institution”):

The matron’s bunch of jingling keys always warned us of her presence. She was strict and frequently used her strap on us.

In the evenings, the girls would whisper the matron’s nickname “to signal that she was coming into the dorm … Then we would jump into our beds and pretend that we were soundly asleep in order to escape the strap.”

The girls spent half their time in academic study, the other half learning trades. One such was working

“in the dining room, washing dishes and scrubbing floors… If we were not finished when the 8:00 A.M. whistle sounded, the dining room matron would go around strapping us while we were still on our hands and knees. This was just the right position for a swat — all the matron had to do was raise our dresses and strap.

The bakery was next to the dining room, and the bakery boys loved to see us get a strapping; they would always stare and grin.”

I want a job in that bakery…