My first spanking went like this.

At first, there were several months of anticipation. I was still living with my parents in Ukraine when I discovered the Internet world of spanking. I made friends, but they were all English-speakers, far away in the States and the UK. They may as well have been living on the moon, for how inaccessible the spanking scene looked to me, a 19-year-old student with no funds of my own.

A friend and regular correspondent Monty invited me to visit him in the summer holidays. I don’t know how I convinced my father to let me go; he knew of my online friendships, but couldn’t fathom what those older, respectable and foreign people could have found interesting about me. (“I love you, darling,” he’d told me, “but teenagers are just not very interesting; it’s a fact.” I resented that at the time; 10 years on I begin to see where he was coming from, though I’m not sure I’m old enough to agree with the sentiment.) Be it as it may, I was allowed to go. Even then it wasn’t just a matter of buying a plane ticket: I needed to apply for a British tourist visa, and wait, and go to an interview, and wait, and wait. Monty had to provide a sheaf of personal information to the visa people, but he didn’t balk at writing on my behalf, and sending in papers that they really had no business looking at. It was a soul-melting bureaucratic hell, but I pushed through it, knowing that on the other side there was a magical prise waiting for me: finally, finally, I was going to get a spanking.

“You don’t have to be spanked if you don’t want to,” Monty told me repeatedly, both online and in person, when finally I walked through the gate in Gatwick. Now I know how responsible and safe he was being, giving me control of the pace of my explorations. At the time, I thought he was insane. Not have a spanking? Not wanting to be spanked? After having craved it, reached for it, fought for it for months? I could barely wait, and might have thrown myself over his lap there in the airport.

We were both sensible, though, and waited until the excitement of the first day of my visit had dampened a little. The following morning he turned into my Uncle Monty, a familiar figure from our chatroom role-play. He sat on the chair, and pulled me over his lap, and it felt so real and natural as though I’d been doing this my whole life. Monty’s lap was the most comfortable place in the world, even when his hand slapped down onto my bottom, stinging quite a bit. I was so happy, I didn’t even dare cry out our kick, because I didn’t want to spoil the perfection of the moment. He let me up eventually, and gave me a hug. I couldn’t keep to the role of a naughty niece: I was grinning like mad, the happiest girl in the world.

There were more spankings that week, of course. I was introduced to implements, and wore a makeshift school uniform, though it hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that people might dress up when they role-played. I was given some spectacular first-timer bruises, even through my knickers, which I was still too shy to take down at any point. I misbehaved a little. I reported about my joy at the message board where Monty and I had met, and felt warmth and support from the more experienced players, all of whom had been there before.

This was all later. My first spanking – that perfect moment of joy – happened exactly 10 years ago, today.