Mum's The Word

I told my mother. I'd been thinking about it for a while. She and I have always been pretty close, at least close enough that she's got a fair idea of my movements, and the names of my friends, if not what I get up to when I'm with them! So it was feeling increasingly awkward answering questions with one word answers, not elaborating on details, and just generally feeling as though I was being dishonest, which I don't do particularly well. I knew that if I didn't tell her eventually we would drift apart a little, and I didn't want that to happen. Also, this is something that has made me immensely happy in the past few months, and I wanted to share that with her.

Of course, I was worried what her reaction would be. After all, I was telling her that her darling daughter was into sexual practices which would not be deemed normal by the majority of the population, and that I had a whole new group of friends who were into the same sorts of things that I was, and who would probably be seen as "perverts" by most people (sorry guys!). Not exactly the sort of thing any parents is going to be particularly thrilled to hear.

Bless her, I didn't exactly give her much choice in the matter either. I said that I wanted to tell her something, but I knew she didn't need to know. That she would probably be shocked, even though it was a good thing for me, and that it would probably change the way she saw me. So if she didn't want to know what I had to tell her, we could finish the conversation there and then, and never speak of it again. Obviously she said that she had better hear what I had to say... so I told her.

Nervously, and with quite a lot of stumbling, I explained to her what I liked, and why I liked it.(Um, not the details, I hasten to add. It's enough for her to know that I like to be spanked. She doesn't need to know that I prefer straps to canes!!) I explained how happy it had made me over the past few months, and how I had some amazing new friends to share this with, and that some of the names I had mentioned were not friends I'd met through work, or through my Am Dram activities, but through my love of spanking.

Much to my relief, she seems to be OK with it. I'm sure, deep down, she would probably rather I was not "like this", but she was supportive, and said that as long as I was happy (and safe, how very "mum") that was all that mattered. She also said that she had noticed that I seemed happier over the past few months.

So it's all good. I'm very glad I told her, and that my faith in her was justified. Of course, I will probably never have in depth conversations with her about it, but I can at least now be honest about where I am and who I am with, and our relationship will not be driven apart by my secret. And knowing that has made me even happier. So here's to my mother. Who won't be reading this, but nevertheless is a fabulous and understanding woman.

An Etiquette Tea Party

I had a very strange dream last night. I had to attend a tea party, which was basically some sort of etiquette test. We were all supposed to behave perfectly throughout this tea party, make polite conversation, eat the sandwiches and cakes in the correct manner, and drink our tea appropriately. All while wearing extremely frilly, flowery dresses, which even I (and I'm totally girly when it comes to clothes) thought were disgusting.
All of this was conducted under the watchful gaze of two very prim and proper ladies, who were assessing our performance and making little marks on a sheet for every error. Each little mark would equal a cane stroke.
The really strange part, though, was that the prim and proper ladies were my aunt and cousin..! Luckily I woke up before I found out if they would be wielding the cane as well. That would have been a strangeness too far, I feel.

Bottom Survey

In a corner of the Times a few weeks ago, I saw a survey, done by Andrex, on what people really think of their bottoms. I wonder what the results would be if the survey was targeted at this blog's readers rather than the general public...

73% of women hate their bottoms apparently. I'm no longer in that 73%. I now just don't like mine very much, rather than actively hating it.

56% of men prefer round, peachy bottoms to flat ones... I imagine if a bunch of spankers took the same poll that percentage would be considerably higher: round, peachy bottoms having more for a top to get his teeth into, so to speak.

54% of people won't look at their bottoms in the mirror. Well, I don't know about you but I LOVE looking at my bottom in the mirror after I've been spanked, or even better, caned. (I can't stand getting the tramlines, but boy do I love looking at them afterwards. Maybe I should just paint them on, save the hassle).

Lastly, only 39% of women don't mind having their bottom pinched. The person who commented on the poll said: "Who on earth are the one in four women who like having their posterior pinched? Be kind to my behind, please, and no touching."

My first comment would be that someone should be spanked for poor arithmetic. 39% does NOT equal 1 in 4. Try 1 in 3, or better still 1 in 2.5, my dear. The second comment would be: no touching?? Seriously, that's what bottoms were designed for!

Ranting and Raving

What I really want to do: Have a temper tantrum, rant, scream, throw things, and so on. Just for a few minutes be righteously indignant, have it acknowledged that I have a point.
But I won't. Because that's not what I do.
Which is a shame, because I imagine it would make me feel a damn sight better.

The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

In a Sunday Times supplement on children's fiction the other day, someone was singing the praises of "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase" by Joan Aiken. I too would like to sing its praises, but possibly for slightly different reasons. The synopsis, very briefly is as follows:
Young orphan gets sent to live with Aunt and Uncle, who promptly sod off on some sort of overseas trip by boat, leaving orphan Sylvia and cousin Bonnie in the "care" of a strict governess (oh yeah..!), various things happen and eventually the girls get packed off to an orphanage cum workhouse in a city, where again they are terribly harshly treated. I don't actually remember there being any sort of spanking just other (probably nastier) treatments like bread and water for dinner, being locked in cupboards etc. Despite, or perhaps because of the lack of what I was really looking for, this book fired my imagination as a child and I whiled away many an hour dreaming about governess and workhouse-type fantasies, all of course where I got a good spanking or dose of the belt or cane or whatever, for the most minor mistakes....
Ah, good times. I must dig that book out again.

Will Power Or Lack Thereof

It always amazes me how I can have so much will power in some situations and none at all in others. I decided that when I went back into work after the holidays I wasn't going to eat chocolate, and apart from a dessert in a restaurant when we were having a set menu and both options contained chocolate, and a hot chocolate on a particularly cold day, I haven't eaten any. Despite the fact that I have a load from Christmas still just sitting there in my kitchen, and I work in one of those office environments where there is always an absolute ton of chocolate sitting around waiting to be eaten. Pretty damn good willpower, right?
So why can't I apply that to everything? I decided I was going to go to bed at 10pm this week. So how's that going for me, two days in? Well, I went to bed (not sleep, mind you) at 11:45 on Monday night, and 12am Tuesday night. Hurrah for me... not. So why the difference between chocolate eating and bed time? Wish I knew!

Getting into trouble

Various conversations with like-minded friends over the past few weeks have got me thinking (again..!) about why I like spanking, and I've decided that one of the reasons goes back to my childhood, and more specifically my school days.
I never got into trouble at school, and with "never" I exaggerate only a little. I was once kept in at break time when I was 10 because I hadn't finished a piece of work. That's it.
The reason I didn't get into trouble was because I was scared. Not so much of punishment, but of letting people down, of disappointing then. I was terrified of people thinking I wasn't nice, or good. I fundamentally am hard wired to please people, I think. (And no, that is *not* a submissive trait. Let's just not go down that path, OK? For all our sakes!!)
I was also, somehow, scared of losing people's love and respect if I misbehaved. So I didn't. I'm not saying I was never moody, or rude, especially at home: I have been a teenage girl, after all, but I was a Stepford child at school.
So, wandering back towards the point: I think that one of the reasons I like spanking, is that it gives me an opportunity to "get into trouble" in a safe environment. I can misbehave, get into trouble, be "punished", but without the fear of letting people down, or losing their respect. And that, for me, is something very freeing.

Go To Bed!!

I'm writing this to myself as a reminder that 5 or even 6 hours sleep does not work for me, and that therefore if I need to get up at 6am, and it takes me an hour of faffing from when I go to bed to actually go to sleep, I need to be going to bed at 10pm to go to sleep at 11pm and wake up at 6am.
Otherwise I get bad-tempered, unreasonable and generally horrid. Oh, and am frequently late for work. So, this week, unless I'm out, I'm going to try and head off to bed every night at 10pm and see how well I do. Yeah, I know, I'm laughing too. And no suggestions about spanking please, some things I just need to do on my own!

Overheard

"... and then he took us into the garden to show us where he had got the twigs from. He was really excited...."

As this was overheard in a busy Underground carriage, I didn't catch anything else, but boy, is that one conversation I would have loved to have heard the rest of!!

I'm Bored

My default positions in life are "nice" and "good". I don't generally do things I'm not supposed to do, never have done in fact. I am blessed, or possibly cursed, with the ability to see pretty much any issue from both sides. I would have thought this would have been a common trait, but it amazes me how many of my friends and colleagues don't seem to be able to do this. The result of this is that I actually find it quite difficult to have mean or nasty thoughts about people, as, if I pause for more than a few seconds to think about it, I can probably at least have a stab at understanding why they are feeling or acting like they are. And it DRIVES ME MAD.

I'm sick of being nice, sick of being good, sick of being able to justify everyone's points of view and behaviour, sick of being sensible. I just, for one day, want to go crazy, be the naughty girl, in fact be the BAD girl, be mean about people without feeling guilty about it, go out and get horribly drunk without thinking after two drinks that it's a bad idea. I want to be rude and cheeky and stick my tongue out at people: and if I don't do it soon, I think I might just explode.

Art on the Underground

I was at Baker Street station, getting on to a south-bound Jubilee line train. I got in the carriage and turned round to face back to the platform. And there, on the wall, was a very large picture, a blow up of a pen and ink drawing, it seemed, of a man brandishing a riding crop or a switch or something, standing next to a woman who looked like she was gagged! I nearly fell over! Unfortunately at that point someone else got into the carriage and blocked my view, before I could figure out what was going on in the picture.
Baker Street is famous for being the home of Sherlock Holmes, and the underground station does have a lot of references to the fictional detective, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that the drawing was an illustration from one of the stories, but what I want to know is how many other semi-kinky pictures are there on the London Underground system?! Trying to spot some will certainly make future journeys more interesting.

Assume the Position

I take private singing lessons and I do wonder whether my teacher is "one of us" or at least kinky in some way. It doesn't help that she starts every lesson by telling me to "assume the position". (Which, for those dirty minds out there, is standing in front of the mirror getting ready to do warm up exercises!) One of these days I'll forget where I am and bend over ;-)

Spanking Songs

Oof, today was my first day back in the office after three and a half weeks of being sick/off for Christmas/"working" from home. (For working from home, you may correctly infer the following: surfing too much on the web/doing Kakuro/playing on the Wii/napping). So anyway, that's a long time to have NOT been in the office or, let's face it, have done any proper work. It nearly killed me today! I think I may need to find a nice, rich husband who can pay for me to sit around as a lady of leisure. Obviously he would need to be rich enough to pay for the army of cleaning and kitchen staff we would need so that I didn't need to worry about any of that. Any volunteers, please step forward quickly. I'm not sure I can cope with another day actually having to exert myself in such a mentally taxing manner.

So to relax this evening on the drive home, I was listening to music and yet again happened upon what I think would have to be my number one song for having sex and being spanked to. In all fairness, I have not tried playing it while doing either, but I'm not generally into having music on in those situations. If I were though, this would be the song I would pick. Just the right amount of drum beat, incredibly sexy lyrics, even the guitar in it sounds slightly naughty. So that's my nomination for the best spanking/sex song out there - what's yours?

(By the way, I tried to find a video of this everywhere, but to no avail. If anyone knows a site with the video to Semisonic's Completely Pleased, let me know!)

Pride And Prejudice Spanking

Flicking through the TV channels I can across Pride And Prejudice. The sublime 1995 BBC version, complete with wet shirted Colin Firth, of course, not the more recent film adaptation where Donald Sutherland's scary, shiny white teeth took a starring role.
In the way that it seems to do constantly this last few months, my mind turned to spanking, and more specifically which Bennet sister most deserves to be spanked? Is it Lydia, by far the naughtiest of the five? Kitty, for being so empty headed and easily led? Mary, for lets being frank, such an utter bore, Jane for just being too nice and never seeing the bad in people, or everyone's favourite sister, Lizzy? Or possibly it could be the Bingley sisters, for being, to not put too fine a point on it, snobby b*****s. (I do realise my readings of characters here are somewhat shallow..!)
I'm not a top, but putting myself in a tops shoes, I certainly think that, if not most deserving of a spanking, Lizzy Bennet would be by far the most fun to spank. She is sparky, intelligent, lively, playful and impertinent. In the nicest possible way, a brat! What's not for a spanker to like?!

Old News

It seems I've been in the mood to torture myself tonight. How, you ask? Well, for some reason I decided to go and read up a bit on the Max Mosley case. This was mostly prompted by Abel and Haron's end of year post, which talked about the decision in the case by Justice Eady, and rightly stated that it was an important judgement for all kinky people. If you don't know much about the case or its outcome, go and read Abel's summary of it.
So, why am I reading about something that happened six months ago? Well, firstly, I was at the beginning of my kinky journey when the case was taking place, and it didn't register as fully on my radar as it would have done now. Secondly, I was actually on holiday when the judgement came through (staying in an old boarding school, oh the potential!) and so missed much of the media coverage around that time.
So tonight, in an attempt to avoid the call of thank you letters (I'm a well brought up young lady, I'll have you know!) I ended up online, reading quite a lot of the media coverage, and also stumbling on to some of the forums out in the vanilla world about the proceedings. I'm now thoroughly depressed.
Yes, it's great that he won, and that Justice Eady gave such a clear statement in favour of people's rights to pursue their own sex life in the privacy of private locations, regardless of whether that sex life involves the missionary position with the lights off, or something altogether more interesting. What saddens me. though is the way the case was covered in so much of the mainstream press, even the broadsheets. The women involved were, pretty much without exception, referred to as prostitutes, despite the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, none of them was offered or took money for having sex with Mr Mosley, or indeed anyone else they met with. They were spankers and spankees, nothing more. Worse still were the forums where generally these women seemed to be referred to as hookers or whores... there seemed to be a general level of disgust and incomprehension of the lifestyle that the protagonists were leading, and an assumption that anyone who was into spanking or being spanked was a dirty, depraved person, not fit to hold any high level job.
I think that is what depresses me most on a personal level. Yes, it's great that he won the case, the judgement was a work of art from the little I've read, and a victory for us as a community, because the implications of the judgement having gone the other way, and Justice Eady saying that the News of the World had every right to expose kinky behaviour between consenting adults are too frightening to contemplate, to be honest. Even for someone like me who does not work in a high profile profession. BUT, and for me it's a big but, the newspaper coverage and comments from the general public on forums proved to me that what we do is still hugely frowned upon and misunderstood. Yes, probably frowned upon and misunderstood by a small but vocal group of people who claim to stand on the moral high ground and speak for our society on how we should all live our lives, and who speak out of ignorance and fear, but views like that have a habit of being infectious. People are quick to condemn what they don't understand, and it was a very depressing feeling to realise that no matter how much I may love this new lifestyle that I have found, there seems to be a large section of the community that would be ready to condemn me in an instant if they knew what I did, and label me as some sort of evil person. And, to be honest, that knowledge hurts. I know it shouldn't, I know that people like this are often nothing more than ignorant bullies, and God knows I've had to deal with enough of them over the years, but nevertheless, it does hurt.
So now that I have thoroughly depressed myself, I need to stop reading back over stuff that happened six months ago, and hold on to the fact that coming out into this spanking "scene" has made me happier than I've been in a long, long time, and no one, above all not people who have no ability to tolerate anything outside their own narrow sphere of experience, should make me feel bad about expressing my sexuality in the way that feels best for me. After all, the only person that gets "hurt" is me!

(PS, I hope this makes sense, I'm writing it at 2am and I'm slightly drunk!)

New Years Eve Party

Well, the party went very well, despite my stressing about the cooking and cleaning. I cooked lots of yummy goodies (quite a lot of them from Delia Smith's How To Cheat At Cooking, don't sneer please, it's a fabulous book!) Among other things I did Spanakopita, a) because I like them and b) because they always make me snicker because drop that second a and you have spankopita!
I successfully managed to dekink the place, apart from one Spank Me decoration I left at the back of the tree. I even (and this was quite impressive I feel in my postage stamp sized flat that was filled with 8 people) managed to drag my dear friend Porn Star off to my bedroom to show her the collection of implements stashed in the wardrobe, and the decorations that had been removed from the tree. She blanched a bit at the cane. Can't think why!! There were also several moments when comments were made that if your mind is of a dirty persuasion (as is mine) that were very funny, and every time someone said something along those lines, I could feel Porn Star's eyes on me as I was trying not to laugh!
So all in all, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves lots, and it was a lovely way to ring in the New Year, even if there wasn't any spanking to count down to midnight!

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009!

Well, 2008 is over, and not without a tinge of sadness on my part, because it truly has been one of the best years of my life.
This was the year I admitted to myself that I was kinky, and that I needed to do something about that. This was the year I discovered a whole new world out there in terms of the spanking blogging community, the year I became part of that community myself, the year I got spanked for the first (and many more!) times, the year I outed myself to several of my vanilla friends, and the year I met, through the blogging world, some amazing new friends, both online and in real life.
If I try to remember back to what life was like at the beginning of 2008, before I started on this journey of mine, I have trouble. My kink has become such an integral part of who I am in such a short time, informing my choices on where I spend my online time, what I read, who I socialise with, what I think about, that it's hard to remember what life used to be like before all that. More boring, definitely!
But I won't be sad about leaving 2008 behind, even though it was such a wonderful and pivotal year for me. 2009 holds even more possibilities for fun, frolics and new friendships, for exploring my kink further, and for, if I have anything to do with it, a whole load more spankings!
So Happy New Year to everyone out there, I hope 2009 brings you everything you wished for, and most importantly, of course, many, many sore bottoms!