Shopping plans

Just beyond the top of the stairs four small, circular indentions mark the carpet - their presence, an absence.They indicate where a single chair usually stands, back to the wall.

Simple, straight-backed, armless and possibly an antique, it was a junk sale find. It's style is a little at odds with our other furniture, but it serves a purpose.
It's absence can mean only one thing, that it's placed ready in our bedroom. And that I'm about to get the punishment I know I deserve.
Do you have a spanking chair? I don't, that stuff above is just my dark little daydream, but it looks like that could soon change.
Out of the blue today SO announced that we were going to have a Spanking Chair, with a cap S and a cap C. Quite an impressive reading of my domestic discipline mindset for someone so resolutely vanilla.
Clearly, the Spanking Chair is very much part of spanko iconography (spankonography?). I've just googled 'spanking chair' and it comes up with all sorts.
For example, D's is 'a big, wide wooden chair' and he adds: "Just seeing that evil Spanking Chair always makes me nervous." And Ireland's Daughter says "the spanking chair sits in the corner of our bedroom, a wooden chair without arms, used only for that purpose..."
A simple, straight-backed wooden chair is part of the before, after and during of corporal punishment role-play. How have we managed without one?
Now SO's stated intention was all wrapped up in the pillow talk that we play with when we're in bed playing, but can't actually play (because there are big-eared kids in the house). It involves lots of talk about what's going to happen to me, what should happen to me and what I NEED to happen to me.
And, of course, most of those intentions never actually get carried through. But I reckon the chair is going to be different - and think this weekend we're going to be going to a furniture store. 

Shades of consent

Sorry that there has been so little to read here lately, but I've been trying to keep my real-life, vanilla book projects on track. One went to the publisher a week or so ago, and now I feel a little bereft - life seems a little empty. 
But I know there's book no. 2 still to write and it's way behind schedule... So, now's the time to show some self-discipline and get working.
Which is why I'm messing around looking at spanko blogs and tumblrs at 11.25am. Self-discipline is difficult when the d-word sends a little tingle jingling around the nervous system, isn't it? 
While I'm here I feel I have to share yesterday's experience with you -  I've had a spanking that I didn't want. Yes, our consensual spanking relationship edged a little towards non-consent and it has left me a little confused (and a little bruised too). 
It happened like this. I'd been bratting about for a day or two, all sloppiness and pout. SO picks up on the signals and decides to make adjustments to attitude. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
However, by the time the opportunity for a private moment arrived my SQ had plummeted to a record low.  Like everyone I know here I'm a bit under the weather at the moment and feel distinctly post-viral.
But SO wasn't going to be put off track and I figured I'd warm to the moment once my bot was getting warmed. It didn't happen and I ended up taking a belt-whipping I had little or no appetite for.  And thinking about it afterwards it occurred to me that this was the first time ever that I had had a spanking that I wasn't absolutely desperate for. It hurt, I wanted it to stop, it wasn't arousing. 
Of course, I could have used our safe word. It exists, but after 20 or so years I'm not sure SQ would have recognised it. 
I took it my medicine bravely. Then it came to me that this was as close to a proper punishment spanking that I've ever been - strange.

Marked improvement

It's a spankless task being me. Up late, our morning fun date turned out to be unilaterally cancelled; SO is working away and was more interested today in getting onto the motorway than playing with me.
It meant that I didn't get the attitude adjustment that I was utterly sure was coming my way. Not good given that my SQ is at max at the moment.
So, I'm stuck in pouty, brattiness mode now knowing that's what I'm like, knowing what would smooth it out - and unlikely to get the antidote any time soon.
Anyway, enough of my moaning. I'm thinking about marks. Why is it that I don't get marks? SO is a reluctant disciplinarian, but over time has overcome soft-heartedness to some degree and can occasionally lay the brush on with gusto.
But a few hours later there's not often much sign that I've been punished. It's disappointing, by the time me and a mirror get together it's 'move along folks, nothing to see'.
l look at pictures like these here at Reflections on Red and can't understand how they can be so thoroughly marked, while I escape with a bot that's completely blemish free. They must be utterly fearless - or very naughty. 
Then I remembered a great post I read from the insightful Secret Spanko some time back that said that for spankees a marks selfie is like one of those pix that mountaineers take when they get to a summit. It's a record of experience - and personal achievement.
I reckon he's right, but personally I don't want the selfie - I just want the marks! And if I get them I'll be the spankee exception to his rule that we all post our spanky selfies (it has to be said that my bot hasn't been in shape for public exposure any time during this century, sadly...)

Twelve ways of Christmas

Are you feeling the Christmas spirit yet? It seems in short supply around here, but I did just catch myself humming 'Jingle Bells' while I was clearing away breakfast things in the kitchen.
The problem about working on your own from home is that you miss out completely on the whole Xmas run-up thing. No party, no secret Santa, no Christmas cards from people who dislike you - but can't afford to make it too obvious.
I think maybe I should print this 12 Days out and put it on my office wall. Perhaps I should see if I could persuade SO to get involved in a re-enactment.
Not sure where it's from originally (I just saw it here while doing a little random tumblr-ing), but I do like it. The style of penpersonship seems familiar, but I can't place it.
Isn't "rulers rul'ring" clever? But I'm not sure of the pay-off: "And a switch from a hickory tree..." Does it need an extra beat to scan, or do you just stretch hickory to fit?

Literary pursuits

Expect to hear a lot about the wordy Welsh wizard Dylan Thomas next year because it's the centenary of his birth and it's going to be all over the media. That's my prediction, anyway.

Dylan and Caitlin

In the last few weeks I've been working on commission from a magazine that has involved going to see the home of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas at Laugharne in Carmarthenshire. And it has resulted in a couple of discoveries that I won't share with the magazine's readers - but thought you might like..
In case you don't know it the 1940s radio play has become a classic of Welsh writing in English. It's at its best on the version voiced beautifully by Richard Burton and was also a film with Elizabeth Taylor and Burton.
Have a look at the trailer here. The topless girl in the pink pants is at Fishguard Old Town, Pembrokeshire, and I think she's the lovely Angharad Rees (who went on to star in the BBC's Poldark series).
 Anyway, startles.The first is a line or two from 'Under Milk Wood' that I can really relate to. It comes in a section that describes the sleeping townspeople's dreams; this is it:

SECOND VOICE: Willy Nilly, postman, asleep up street, walks fourteen miles to deliver the post as he does every day of the night, and rat-a-tats hard and sharp on Mrs Willy Nilly. 

MRS WILLY NILLY: Don't spank me, please, teacher,

SECOND VOICE: whimpers his wife at his side, but every night of her married life she has been late for school.

Every night... such commitment. Then when I was reading up about Laugharne I spotted this article. It's in section two about the corporation.
I'd heard about the tradition of beating the bounds before - it happens in lots of other British villages. But I particularly like the detail that the owner of the bottom that gets beaten at Laugharne is 'usually a young lady'.
There was a whole spanko world out there back then, but you're usually only aware of it through the odd nudge or wink. 

Take that

What happened next? I reckon the Woman in Black cornered her adversary, threw down the riding switch and then wrestled her over her knee. Under a barrage of spanks guilt was admitted - and only then were a dozen good stripes with the switch applied.
Maybe not, but I do like the way spanking art lubricates the imagination. I came across this one at The Spanking Art Blog and it caught my eye.

I've done some searching for pages about Sarah Bernhardt and there's plenty to read. She does sound like a bit of a brat, but I can't find any mention of Marie Solombe - wonder what the real story was?

Good old days?

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.