This gives my age away, but anyway... A long time ago little me arrived in London from the country and discovered all sorts of strange things.
Certainly, the strangest - and most wonderful - was that I wasn't alone. It seemed that other people were getting a sexual frisson from corporal punishment, giving and/or receiving. Or a bit of both.
I have to say that it made me feel a lot less uncomfortable about some of the thoughts that crossed my mind. I decided that getting all hot and bothered about getting my bottom all hot and bothered made no sense and I vowed to stop giving myself a hard time about it.
How old was I when this revelatory moment happened? Well, I was somewhere between 22 and 23, would you believe.
But I'm taking you back to a pre-internet age. Today, a young person with even a hint of spanko spirit can Google and discover all there is to know about TTWD, but in 1989 the red-bottomed facts of life were far harder to discover.
What my hometown didn't have were the sort of newspaper shops that sold porn magazines. In London, the top shelf in my ordinary street's newsagent was full of naughty mags and in among them were copies of Janus, Roue, and the like.
I didn't do more than look out of the corner of my eye at that self (which I couldn't have reached even if I'd been brave enough to try). But it was pretty clear from the slightly ambiguous cover images that some of the magazines there were about spanking.
Janus covers were the ones that really caught my eye. I'm sure that the guy who owned the shop noticed my blushes when I was taking a peep at Janus (or a furtive look at a copy of Blushes) and had me sussed.
Dana Kane touched on the idea of a spanko good old days recently and questioned when that might have been - pre-interent, or post-internet. Personally, I say it's defintiely now. It was only after the internet that the content of that top shelf became available to me because I never had the confidence to buy one of those magazines.
The other London discovery that took me by surprise was that all of the city's phone boxes were full of cards selling sexual services - and it was pretty clear from the pictures that red bottoms were a significant part of the exchange. Ever the social historian, Richard Windsor had the good sense to collect some and save at least a few for posterity.
The phone people would turn up and rip down the cards and almost straight away someone would arrive and new cards would go up to replace them. As a cub reporter I had to use public phones just about every day and found those cards very distracting.
What a treat, an undiscovered Benson. Or undiscovered for me anyway, because you may have seen it before - I hadn't.
And that's a bit of a surprise as I'm a bit of a Benson obsessive. I really thought I'd seen everything there was to see of his work that's published on the Net.
So, it's nice to have come across it on a new-to-me photoblog. Though I have to say that, unfortunately, it's not going to make it onto my personal Roger Benson all-time Top 10 for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, there's the fact that her hands are tied. For me bondage and spanking don't mix, the spankee should accept her (or his) need for punishment. I need to be there by my own choice, however reluctantly.
And then there's the teddy. By the looks of things something pretty unpleasant is about to happen with that switch and I don't think that's something a Teddy should have to see.
Anymore than teddy bears should have to be on stage with a twerking Miley Cyrus. It's a messy old world and I think we have a duty to see that Teddy bears don't get to know that.
Whack! The noise was so unexpected that I nearly jumped out of my skin, but a quick glance in the direction that it had come from suggested that the damage was minimal.
The road had been narrow and I'd been intimidated by a man in a van coming the other way, but impact was definitely my fault. But it look like I'd got away with it - the passenger door mirror was upside down, not off.
A few miles down the road I stopped and went round to straighten the mirror out and was horrified to discover that the plastic housing was gone, shattered to smithereens. Bad, but what made it worse is that this was my first solo outing in our lovely new (to us) VW Camper.
SO had waved me away the day before with the words "now don't bring my van back crunched..." I have to say I felt terrible and spent the rest of the journey home trying to work out how and when to break the news.
What happens next? In the wonderful world of spanko imagination I'd be driving home to a woodshed whipping that I'd never forget, wouldn't I? Of course, that didn't happen.
It turned out that SO was very understanding - accidents do happen. But I have had to pay. As it happens the day I messed up that mirror was the last day of the long school holidays and the next morning was the first time in more than a month that the house was kid-free.
By mutual agreement yours truly was heading for a long overdue attitude adjustment that I just couldn't wait to collect. Lots of little black marks had been noted over the weeks and the time had come to straighten things out.
When I heard the school bus heading off down the hill I went back to bed to talk things over. I feel awful about the van, I said, and SO said I should.
I feel like a deserve a REAL punishment. "Yes, you do." Something that I won't forget... And that's what I got.
I never understand how DD couples untangle TTWD from the stick and carrot stuff. In our house I pay my dues to society by NOT being spanked. SO got breakfast in bed and I've resolved to drive much more carefully in the future.
