My spanking dreams don’t often wake me with a start, but one such did the other night. A maid – neat in a black dress with white trimmings – had been happily cleaning the chandelier in the dining room of a large country house, after it had been carefully lowered to the ground using a clever system of pulleys. (Hey, you wouldn’t expect a maid to climb up a ladder and polish the glass as it hung from the ceiling, would you? The other staff might see up her skirt…)
She’d been warned on numerous occasions not to attempt to hoist the heavy lights back into place herself, but she’d seen the butler do it on numerous occasions, and it couldn’t be that difficult – could it? So she’d taken the ropes, started to pull, watched the chandelier rise – and then lost her grip, bringing the precious crystal crashing to the ground, shattering across the floor*.
The shock of the impact woke me immediately. Dazed, I blinked at the dark bedroom around me, and realised that there was no maid, no broken chandelier – but that there was plenty of potential for a spanking. Before I dozed back off, the master and numerous footmen had both rushed into the room. The girl had been sent to her tiny attic bedroom in disgrace, whilst the debris was cleared. And then the butler had fetched her to the drawing room, where she’d received a double birching – the first from the master for the damage done, followed immediately by a second from the butler for expressly disobeying his instructions.
* This may well have been inspired by our recent visit to ‘Love Never Dies’, the sequel to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wonderful ‘Phantom of the Opera’ (in which a chandelier features prominently). For those of you curious about LND, the cast’s great and the music really is brilliant in parts: the problem is that those parts are slightly too infrequent, and that some of the lyrics really are quite ghastly.
It also sounds like your brain was processing an alternative ending to that famous “Only Fools and Horses” episode.