The Spanking Writers

I have spent the last 12 hours glued to the television, trying to snatch hope out of thin air, trying to convince myself that a Tory prime-minister is not an absolute disaster.*

While I’m trying to make myself feel better about the political events, I ended up having a rather anti-utopian fantasy. Two years from now, corporal punishment has been brought back as an alternative to a prison sentence. I have been involved with a radical liberal political campaign,** which has seen me taking part in a demonstration that has turned into a clash with the police. I’m arrested for throwing rocks at the PM’s car, and become one of the first people to be given a public flogging, to send the message to the others.

I haven’t got as far as figuring out how the flogging will be administered, but I think a permanent whipping platform will be erected in Trafalgar Square, with big screens to make the proceedings visible. I think a metal frame will be used, with two cuffs in its top bar, stretching me upwards. I’m not sure whether, for decency’s sake, it’ll be a back-whipping with a single-tail, or whether the government will opt for the birch or the cane on the posterior.

I’m not sure I like this fantasy very much, but it’s a very persistent image.

* I haven’t lived through last Tory government, having come to the UK at a time when Labour was well established in power. But my first English home, the North-East of England, was still bleeding from Thatcher’s thousand cuts all through my years there. Having seen the consequences of their rule, I don’t love the Tories.

** I know, I know. It’s a fantasy, right?

Oh my goodness, look what they’re selling on eBay:

Genuine Old Girls’ School Punishment Book (corporal punishment record)

This is a very rare and unusual item, a punishment book from a girls’ school recording all corporal punishment given from 1914 to 1972. It is an official printed punishment book. The title page includes the following printed statement: “Extract from the new code, 1900.-Appendix II, 32.-Quote: A separate book must be kept in which every case of corporal punishment inflicted in the school should be entered.” The book is priced at “Eighteen Pence Net.” (i.e. one shilling and sixpence)

Records occupy a double-page spread with columns for: an identification number for punishment, name of pupil, her offence, date of offence, punishment awarded, date of punishment, remarks, and initials of manager, clerk, or inspector

The book contains 25 completed double-page spreads with probably an average of ten punishments detailed on each page. At least one page is missing, and one loose in the book. However, this is a fascinating historical document recording corporal punishment given in this particular girls’ school, with details of offences, numbers of strokes etc. over a period of nearly seventy years, from the beginning of the First World War to the time when the school became co-educational and began accepting boys.

One can see the changing styles of handwriting, changing attitudes, and changing behaviour (interestingly, behaviour deteriorated considerably and severity of punishment increased in the 1960s). The school’s name changed slightly over the years and there seem to be no records for the early part of the 1940s – possibly the school was evacuated during the Second World War

There are even, helpfully, a few illustrations:

I guess this is something of a holy grail for those who collect spanking ephemera, and not surprisingly the bids coming in are already very high.

The auction finishes on 15 May, so there’s still time for anyone interested to bid. Sadly, the item’s way beyond my price range – but is it too much to hope that the winner might scan the pages and share them on the web? Pretty please?

I was surfing book reviews, and I happened upon an interesting blurb for “Fool”, a novel by Christopher Moore. Apparently, it is -

a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear from the point of view of the Fool, and it entailed much shagging, spanking, wanking, murder and, horror, several split infinitives “It was quite bawdy,” Moore understates.

Really? That bawdy? It may seem imprudent to put a book on your “to buy” list just because it’s supposed to be a quite bawdy, but the Fool has always been one of my favourite Shakespearean characters, so I can pretend I actually want to read the book for its theme, and not just for the promise of much spanking.

Though who am I kidding?

I smiled at the notice in my hotel room on the continent earlier this week:

Forget something?  If you have forget anything : toothbrush, toothpastes, comb, disposable razor, cotton wool, sewing kit, nail file, hairbrush, tawse, cane, arnica then please to contact reception. We will be happy to offer you replacements with our compliments.

I may just have added a couple of items into their list – the sort of thing that really should be on offer. For you never know when you might encounter a misbehaving girl on your travels, and it’s sometimes tough to fit everything in when travelling with hand luggage.

I was also rather curious as to what compliments they might proffer – “A comb, Dr Jenkins? Why, of course. And if I may say, what a very fine head of hair you have! A sewing kit as well? To keep your wonderful designer clothes in pristine condition…”?

Haron spends her time at the microphone reflecting on the books that formed her childhood spanking fantasies, and wonders how they influenced her current preferences.

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As the counts in constituencies around the nation are announced tonight following the general election, the BBC apparently plans to beam the results onto the Houses of Parliament.

Of course, we all know where they got that idea from…

That’s the delectable Gail Porter, who was projected (ever so disrespectfully) onto the Palace of Westminster by FHM magazine back in 1999. Shocking, I say. She should have been taken to the Tower and soundly whipped… (Actually, in fairness to her and in deference to her lawyers lest they happen to stumble across this post, I should point out that Ms Porter denied having had any knowledge of or involvement in the stunt!)

Anyway, I’m now prepared to bet that any readers here in the UK who stay up to watch the results will now find yourselves thinking about that delightful derriere whenever the cameras flick across to the outside broadcast unit to display the latest data. Ha! And the image will certainly cheer me up if the results go the way I fear they might…

My work schedule is quite intense right now. A freelancer’s workload can be quite overwhelming. Keeping track of it all gets challenging from time to time, and I keep wondering how I can incorporate spanking into my routine to keep being productive.

Now, the most obvious way to do it would be to get a spanking when my work wasn’t up to scratch. But this disciplinary method doesn’t satisfy me right now. When my work isn’t going very well, I get quite upset anyway, so adding a punishment spanking on top of it would be even more upsetting. Double misery doesn’t transform into great morale, so straightforward discipline is out for me right now.

I wonder if I could talk Abel into using spanking as a reward? Finish a story – get to play a school scene. That sort of thing. There’s an awful lot I would do for a really nice good-girl spanking.

The only problem would arise if I suddenly got so super-productive that Abel would have to spank me all the time. It could get really tiring for him.

But I’m sure that, seeing as he loves me so much, he’ll be able to cope with spanking me a lot. Right?

You know how it is: you wait ages for an interesting statue, and then two come along at once…

I’ve recent been reading Jeremy Paxman’s fascinating volume on “The Victorians”. Having long been fascinated by the Great Exhibition of 1851, I was curious to find this little paragraph, describing an item that hadn’t featured in the previous books I’ve devoured on the subject, namely:

a presentation of the American sculpture Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave* (1844), [which] caused a sensation. The sculpture… depicts a Greek maiden who has been captured by the Turks and forced to stand naked in a slave market. The statue was secreted in a curtained alcove but placed on a stand that could be rotated discreetly by gentlemen in order to reveal her delightful posterior.

The web is a wonderful thing, for as well as Wikipedia’s tantalising description (“the title suggests that she is some sort of captive, and is on display for sale as a sexual object in an unknown market”), there’s an illustration of the sculpture in the Crystal Palace itself:

This surely demands a closer look, so let’s peek behind the curtain of Victorian discretion:

And now let us reach for that legendary rotating stand:

Oh yes. Oh very yes. As one academic essay comments, “The treatment of the back especially, is one of the happiest efforts in modern sculpture.”

Apparently the original work lives in Raby Castle – not very far from where Haron and I lived for seven years – although there are copies dotted all across the States. I think we need to take a trip back up north, and contemplate how the young lady might have been punished by her new master… or in the harem, even.

One further online reference to the sculpture lists it with a number of other artworks classified as “Women as helpless, chained (and usually naked) victims”. This is a genre that, I feel, deserves further investigation…

*I typed that as ‘Geek Slave’ the first time around. That sounds intriguing, too!

It’s been a while since my last spanking dream, and I was wondering whether my subconscious was getting boring, or whether maybe I was just forgetting my dreams before I could write them down.

Before I could get worried, though, I was treated to a sweet dream based, quite possibly, on our visit to an Elizabethan country house, where some of the rooms we saw were guest bedroom for single male visitors.

In this dream I was a daughter of the house, with quite a crush on a male guest, who was showing no interest in me. So one evening I stole a maid’s uniform and crept through the house to try and seduce him in his bedroom.

To my profound disappointment, he was scandalised by my forwardness, and instead of introducing me to the intimate joys I craved, pulled me over his lap for a spanking!

I woke up from shock, but then it was a shame to leave the story without an ending, so I continued it in my fantasy: after the sound spanking, he revealed that just that evening he had asked my father for my hand in marriage, and that, although I had not been told yet, we were now engaged. So from now on he felt it was his right and duty to spank me as often as my naughty behaviour warranted.