Each of the many gaols, reformatories, courthouses, disciplinary centres and police stations that I’ve dreamt up over the years has featured a punishment room – with some form of whipping bench and plenty of space to swing a cat (or birch, cane or strap).

Note the singular here: punishment *room*. Not a suite of identically-equipped chambers, allowing for the simultaneous spanking of several girls. One room per building, one girl being dealt with at a time: a very solitary experience.

Wandering around a client’s ‘university’ the other day, past rows of well-equipped training rooms, it occured to me that some establishments might similarly be laid out with long corridors of punishment chambers. Rather than a single, isolated cell, there’d be a chair outside each room – on which the next girls would wait – whilst the whacks and sobs of their predecessors’ floggings would be all too audible to those in the corridor.

I’m not entirely sure which scenario I prefer – the lonely girl, led to the single cell to be punished, or the certain knowledge for the miscreants that others were sharing through the same painful experience. I shall have to ponder the problem further… closes eyes, drifts off into daydreams about judicial scenes…