Anyone spot the omission? Yeah: damn: they forgot the “Galloping Foxley” stamp. Dahl’s account of public school life – featuring a savage prefectorial caning – was one of the earliest accounts I read of school corporal punishment. Indeed, in many ways, swapped mentally to an M/f scenario, it still shapes much of what lies at the core of my school kink.

I’ve never actually recreated the exact scene, though – with me as the prefect, caning a younger girl: it really rather sounds like something I should try to arrange… although finding somewhere with space for a run-up might be challenging!

Here are the two comments that took me aback:

“It’s believed that the… beating and back massage stimulate Tash…”

followed shortly by:

“Having mated with both males, she’s not sure just who goes with who right now…”

She makes her choice and before too long, “they’re at it again”. (Oh, and did I mention the rape scene?)

Anyone care to guess the context?

We were considering going to a local fireworks display tomorrow so I was reading through the info about it on their event website. Included in the safety section was the following line:

“The firing and throwing of your own fireworks is strictly prohibited and will be dealt with firmly by the Stewards.”

Now if that doesn’t have “topical SW post” written all over it, I don’t know what does! Or, put another way, it made me think immediately of you!

Indeed. I shall go and buy a high-visibility vest immediately and head straight to the nearest fireworks display, ready to pretend to be a Steward and to spank any girls who might be behaving unsafely…

I picked it up from the showroom this morning, and the salesperson handed me the paperwork to sign. There, in big letters, I read:

Owner name: Mr A Jenkins

I nearly fainted on the spot – how on earth did they know my kinky pseudonym? And then I realised – that was the name of the first owner. Absolutely honestly! As startles go, it has to be the best ever.

A table in the corridor in my hotel in Italy that just looked so empty without a naked, tied girl being caned:

My new cufflinks, from Malaysia:

The old album cover, displayed (rather bizarrely) in a Berkshire clothes shop…

A paddle shop – quite literally – in Colorado (*such* a shame I was there with a work colleague):

A girl out gathering birches, with which she and the other girls in the reformatory were presumably to be whipped, from the tile museum at Ironbridge:

A girls’ school building in France, which just looked so evocative:

And, perhaps best of all, an advert outside a clothes store in Belgium, spied after a lovely dinner last month with Olivia Crowe:

(I was just disappointed not to be there once the underwear concerned had been taken down 50%)!

Um. Fascinating, I guess.

Don’t look at me like that, aren’t you even vaguely curious about what goes on at something called a spanking party in Tokai?

I would have gone purely out of curiosity. I just have so many questions. Like what happens at these things? Is there sex involved, or is it purely the act of spanking? Is everybody naked and is it debauched? Or is it all reserved and polite pinkie-raised cocktail drinking downstairs, and upstairs folks are squirreled away in the bedrooms going crazy? And what kind of person is going to these things? Couples or singles, oldies or youngies, hippies or yuppies? And will there be snacks or should I eat before I go? And most importantly, why, why and again I ask you, why?

I have a different question: who in their right mind invites a completely vanilla journalist to their spanking party? South African kinksters, what were you thinking? What would she have been writing if she’d gone?

It includes such lovely things as this anecdote:

In one notable incident that must have been in the early 1940′s [the Headmaster] was part of the team in a Staff v. Old Boys match. The pupils were obliged to spectate. It was a wet day and, as fate would have it, Mr Tucker came down face first in a huge patch of mud. The boys’ reaction was predictable. They howled with delight and no doubt some less than sympathetic comments were made. Mr Tucker’s failed to see the funny side and the next day he caned the whole school.

This reminds me of a boys v. staff basketball match at my old school, during the course of which the universally hated maths teacher took a ball in the eye, and was sporting the most fantastic black eye for the next week. There wasn’t much sympathy for him, either. No universal canings, though.

Back to High Wycombe, though, where prefects also had the right to use corporal punishment, which they recorded in a book later found behind a cupboard. There, the senior prefect had written:

Redgate, Justice and Bolton were brought in by Ives for ragging on their way home from school as they were going down Amersham Hill. This was considered serious as it would bring discredit upon the school. The worst offenders, Bolton and Redgate were given three strokes while Justice received two.

Mmm, it reads like poetry. What’s “ragging”, though?

Mrs. Catt was an 81-year-old veteran suffragist who was addressing the opening of Women’s Centennial Congress. The gist of her message was that war was bad.

Here’s what she said (this is during World War II, right?):

Perhaps what we most need is an international mothers’ Gestapo whose business it will be to hunt out the world empire dreamers in infancy and use a spanking machine on them.

Excuse me, she wants to organise what?

…I think language has changed since then, just a bit.

A 20-year-old Australian schoolteacher wanted to see her boyfriend, a Californian sailor, so she stowed away in an admiral’s cabin on an American missile cruiser. I gather she got caught before the ship left port, but some sailors clubbed together to get her a plane ticket to see her beaux.

What followed was this:

There’s an actual OTK spanking picture of Bud and Sandra and the link above, just in case anybody had any doubts that he did it properly.

Aww, the sixties, you were so cute.

Now, we could probably argue about whether the floggings listed in the article are actually the best you can find – my view: meh, some of them are good, but where are all the girls? – but it’s jolly nice of the Guardian to publish the list in the first place.