Just for fun, I thought I’d share my lists, which are each in order (favourite first):

THEATRE

Black Watch

Jerusalem – Rylance

Breaking the Code – Jacobi

Richard III – Russell Beale

Equus – Radcliffe

Richard III – Spacey

Frankenstein – Cumberbatch, Miller

The Entertainer – Lindsay

Hamlet – Russell Beale

Never So Good – Irons

FILMS

The Third Man

Brief Encounter

Before Sunset

Lost in Translation

Schindler’s List

Ratatouille

Romeo & Juliet (Luhrmann)

The End of the Affair

V for Vendetta

Waterland [or does 'Of Gods and Men' creep into the list?!]

 

BOOKS

The Great Indian Novel

Gilead

The Remains of the Day

Pride and Prejudice

The Night Circus

I, Claudius

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Indian Clerk

Middlesex

The Weekend

It’s amusing to reflect on some of the characteristics of the lists: eight of the ten movies have reduced me to tears, for example, and a fair few are a retelling of the same story (“Brief Encounyer”). Yet the books and plays tend to have moved or impressed me in different ways.

I’d be really interested in any comments on my lists, and on what’d appear on yours… But I warn you: if you embark on writing your own lists, you will find yourself refining them for months to come! (Books, for example: how can I possibly leave out “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” or “Little, Big”?!). And huge, huge thanks to Nic for playing along – and for such a lovely lunch on Thursday!

* yes, “High Fidelity” was written with me in mind; no, that didn’t quite make the lists!

How to stop feeling sorry-for-myself, especially when faced with a succession of cheerful tweets about folks’ fun on their days off in the UK and US? Partly, the cynical tactic: thinking of the money I was earning and the fun I could have spending it if, as I’m contemplating, I head off to South-East Asia over the Christmas period.

That still didn’t work, so more creative tactics were called for. Over the morning coffee break, I moved into schoolmaster mode. This was no longer a training course, but a weekend detention; the delegates no longer senior managers but a room full of boarding school girls. Their friends and classmates would be enjoying a lie-in, before wandering into the local town later for a weekly taste of freedom. Yet this group? Up at the usual early hour; in their neatly-ironed (and especially carefully-inspected) uniforms; copying page upon page by hand from the dullest books in the library, each wondering whether her name was on the list of those worst-offenders who’d be called into the headmaster’s study at the end of the morning to be caned.

Frankly, it didn’t really work: as soon as I walked back into the classroom to be faced by a nearly-all-male group of middle-aged senior managers from across north Africa, the fantasy was unsustainable. But it did rather bring a smile to my face for a few moments…

And now I can add another to the best-loved list, perhaps almost the very top of it: the freshly-published debut novel by Erica Morgenstern: “The Night Circus”, which I finished a week or so ago.

Ever read a book, love it, then read it again immediately from cover to cover? That.

“The circus arrives without warning.” It’s about magic; about love; about a challenge – a girl and her father, a boy plucked from an orphanage and his tutor. Some readers here might even find that hot, although there’s no kink involved.

It’s about destiny:

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held,” Celia says when he approaches her. “Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”

It’s about storytelling:

“There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves, at least the ones worth something, in any case… And there never are really endings, happy or otherwise.”

It’s erotic, usually implicitly, on one occasion not quite so:

While she undoes button after button, he pulls blindly at fastenings and ribbons, refusing to take his lips from hers. The meticulously constructed gown collapses into a puddle around her feet. Wrapping the unbound laces of her corset around his wrists, [he] pulls her down to the floor with him.”

And them, with fingers stained from a fallen ink bottle, he makes love to her, “leaving faint traces of ink” marking his naked girl.

And it’s utterly, utterly brilliant.

Read it. Read it now. Please?

“I would dearly love to read the reactions, the observations, of each and every person who walks through the gates of Le Cirque des Rêves, to know what they see and hear and feel… We add our own stories, each visitor, each visit, each night spent at the circus. I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.”

It came about because, on the one hand, I wanted to write an M/f school spanking story, as that was what I thought the anthology needed based on the balance of other authors and subjects, but on the other hand I was very wary of falling into the cliche trap and writing a story we’ve all read many times before.

The way to deal with the cliche issue – while still keeping the story recognisably within the M/f school genre – turned out to be using a boy as a protagonist, and have him observe the girl’s punishment. I’m far from thinking this is actually a really original move – there’s no such thing as an original move when you want the story to be arousing within the bounds of a specific fetish. I’m sure others have written stories along these lines before. But I hadn’t, and that was good enough.

I think it’s an okay story as a result.

Late-ish in the evening, after much fun play during the day, EJ (aka George, or Georgina) found herself led upstairs by HH (Uncle Quentin) and yours truly (her tutor) to play a short scene. As she describes it on her blog:

I had the upper hand of knowing the back story. Of Mr Rowland spying on Uncle Quentin’s work and George finding him snooping where he shouldn’t. In essence she was being punished for her rudeness to her tutor but refused to apologise. It was a lovely scene with all the righteousness in the world on my side, Uncle Quentin being strict but fair and Mr Rowland being very mean.

There’s always a wonderful dynamic when the three of us play together, and this was no exception. Such scenes always seem to make me extra-mean, too – albeit on this occasion, even a fairly light whacking was enough to be cruel given the state of EJ’s backside from her play early in the afternoon. And having suggested to HH beforehand that a hand-strapping with my new light(ish) tawse might be in order as the main part of the punishment, I was happy to take a back seat and let him do the honours, knowing how much that works for the two of them and enjoying watching EJ’s face as she took the six painful strokes.

What was strange, though, was that my character was clearly something of a villain. George may have been rude – but her allegations that I was spying on her father were (as I understood the back story) actually true. It was hugely disorientating in the scene. I’m used to my characters  having having clearly-defined authority, being in the right about the girl’s misconduct, and being justified in administering the punishment – or, very occasionally, simply being utterly and callously mean and cruel (say, as an evil prison guard, pimp or kidnapper).

The latter option really wasn’t appropriate with these characters. Yet I couldn’t slot completely comfortably into the former either – the tutor’s spying on Quentin meaning that my character’s hold on the moral high ground was tenuous, to say the least. Spanking a girl, when you know she’s in the right – and you’re not actually playing a dark, abusive scene? It was perhaps the first time I’d come across that in a  roleplay; I wonder whether it’s actually really possible to do convincingly and well?

Yesterday morning, I took the second – still well before I needed to be at work. It pulled in at a minute before eight; the smartly-dressed young lady in front of me set off up the hill in haste.

I pictured the conversation a few minutes later, in her senior manager’s office, the door firmly shut behind the new graduate and her mentor. “Remind me of your contractual start time, young lady?”

“Eight o’clock, sir.”

“And your arrival time this morning?”

“Almost at eight…”

“Almost. But not at. And not for the first time this week. Your colleagues can make the earlier train: why can’t you?”

She’d have no good answer, of course. It’d be a simple choice: a report to HR with a formal warning noted on her employment record – or he’d deal with the matter there and then. She’d have seen the cane hanging on the wall on her very first visit to his office; it had silently dominated every conversation since, and now her fears and curiosity would be satisfied.

“Eight strokes would seem an appropriate number,” he’d explain calmly, patting the top of his desk. “Bend over…” And they’d be administered slowly, thoughtfully, across her tightly-stretched black suit skirt.

Afterwards, as he made her dry her tears before venturing back to her desk, he’d offer words of support: how well she was doing, how much they liked her. And then she’d be gone… until the next time, which would naturally be on the bare.

–

Now, of course, my mind’s wandering deliciously. He’s her ‘mentor’ as well as her senior manager, offering her encouragement as well as discipline. She’s been curious about the cane. There’ll be a next time. Oh dear, my nice non-consensual fantasy may just, you know, have deeply consensual undertones… And that wouldn’t possibly do. Oh no…!

Now? I would rather be pampered, spoiled, brought treats, and under no circumstances caused any pain at all. Not even a little bit.

Isn’t it strange? It really does feel weird.

Well… I’m unhappy now. My mother has just been diagnosed with cancer, and while there’s not yet much information upon which I could base my obsessive worrying, things don’t look very good at this point. I know that, unfortunately, there are many of you who know exactly how I’m feeling right now.

Abel has, as usual, offered to help me out with the blog while I go away to deal with the situation, and I may well take him up on this. However, it struck me that to keep my unhappiness and confusion as pertains to my spanking kink away from the blog this time, would be dishonest and unhelpful. Part of my reason for having a spanking blog at all, is to show people that kink can be integrated into the daily life of an ordinary person, with all that life entails – with all, indeed, that kink entails. Keeping to this purpose is incompatible with keeping my happy little corner perpetually happy.

Emma Jane wrote last month about how the news of a family bereavement left her disgusted and alienated from the same kinky activities that she has previously enjoyed. I can only nod sagely, and say, “Yep, yep.” That’s what I felt in the first hours after learning after my mother’s illness: an overwhelming sense of revulsion at any mention of spanking, role-play or fantasy.

Kink is an escape, a root to joy. It felt like my mind was saying, “Oh no, you’re not going anywhere: you will stay right here, in your unhappy reality.” I had a very physical reaction of disgust at anything that suggested that I might, in fact, be into spanking. I wondered whether this was what it was like to be a dyed-in-the-wool homophobe faced with a picture of two men kissing – like a kick in the gut. (It didn’t make me feel any sympathy towards homophobes, though; my psyche has limits.)

It was enormously consoling to know that this passes, and I know it does because I’ve felt like this before. The times of low kink-drive can hang around for a while, but at least this nasty reaction goes away pretty swiftly. I know that. And I seriously can’t wait.

In the meantime, I’m taking spanking in very small doses, hoping to get inoculated against the ick factor.

This one comes from Jessica and Lord Fawcett. I can only imagine what the printers thought, when asked to produce it:

And this card is from Bandree and Master Retep, drawn by Bandree’s own fair hand. I bet you won’t be able to resist spending the next 20 minutes meditating on the intricacies of her cool spanking alphabet:

FIL prowls though the carefully dekinked house; comes into the kitchen, where the planting ruler is leaning against the wall as an artefact of rustic charm.

Him: “Oh, what’s this, Haron?”

Me: “Uhhh, that’s for my… planting. I’m going to grow things. Yes.” Cringe, cringe, anybody who knows me would be rolling on the floor laughing by now.

Him: “Lovely. What are you growing?”

Me: “Um. Tomatoes! Definitely.” Don’t blush, don’t blush.

Cue a long conversation on gardening, FIL’s eyes caressing the big ruler with his eyes.

He doesn’t know I know how kinky he really is.