My Solstice In England – Abbreviated Version

England never has snow like this, according to my well-placed and not terribly (so far) bratty source, not since the minor ice age of Dickensian times at any rate, but in honor, or honour, of my visit Nature laid on a proper snowstorm. That event made our sunny Monday morning walk through a nearby woods most enjoyable, the shush of snow under our feet, the glister of white on tree branches,  the big Labs’ breath coming in plumes while they ran pell-mell before us down the track.

Now we’re home reading the Sunday Times, the dogs crashed round us as is their wont following a gambol. I’m having a pre-lunch whisky with my pre-lunch tea, and dinner tonight will be at the Red Lion pub (every community in England is required to have at least one pub called the Red Lion) where our table will be next the fire. Yes, I know. If I weren’t me I’d be so jealous I could spit.

So have a happy Solstice everyone. I’ve started my celebration early.

(The picture above is what someone’s bottom doesn’t look like yet, but I’ve only just got here.)

Highjacked: Trials and Tribulations …

Dave at Cherry Red feels my pain … !

And not only does Dave feel my computer pain, but I’m guessing he’s feeling my snow accumulation pain this morning, as well.  He’s in my neck of the woods and I bet the man has about a foot of snow in his driveway right now.

Looks like I’ve got some major shoveling on my agenda because Renegade is out of town.  He’s in New York, looking at a 6-hour commute home this evening.  … Hmmm.   I bet that somebody won’t be in a very playful mood upon arrival after a drive like that.  But I could salvage this weekend yet!  A little snowball dropped tonight from a second floor window as he approaches the front door perhaps?

Oh yeah.  Nothing says ‘Spank Me!‘ better than dumping snow down the back of your guy’s shirt in a late night ambush, right Ladies?  *G*

(Thanks again, Dave!)

xoxo

Highjacked: Should Spanking Go Mainstream?

Is Tiger Woods A Spanko!?

 

 

photo credit: mediaswirl.com

By now I’m sure everyone on the planet including Devlin O’Neill, our sports challenged leader, has heard about the scandal involving golfer Tiger Woods and his extramarital affairs. I’m not going to discuss that sordid business other than to say a vow is a vow, and unless that includes having an open relationship where such actions are condoned and encouraged one should respect their spouse or partner and in Tiger’s case his children, whether you are a blue collar worker, a white collar worker or a billion dollar athlete. But what caught my attention in the Sunday December 6 New York Post  was a front page headline next to a photo of one of Tiger’s alleged mistresses blaring Tiger in the rough -  New lover reveals: ‘He Wanted to spank me’

When I shared this tasty bit of spanking information with the woman I love and spank her response was that spanking is moving more into the mainstream. That gave me pause as I reflected whether that is a good thing or not. While our community’s love of spanking is special and should be enjoyed and celebrated do we want it made into the everyday and mundane? To be dismissed as just another kinky act in a long list of sexual variations. This view reduces spanking to just the physical act and ignores everything else it entails. While the purely physical aspect may be true for many people, especially those in the party scene where a Top/bottom & switch culture is more prevalent rather than a Dom/sub relationship, that is not the case where I am concerned.  For me spanking isn’t the end result, but rather a byproduct of a relationship which carries much deeper meaning. I’ve never been one for casual hookups so when I enter into a relationship I lead with my heart.

photo credit: brickartist.com

Presently, I am seeing an amazing woman who is beautiful both inside and out, and while spanking is part of our union, albeit a very big part, it is not the sole focus. I love this woman with all my heart and just as important I trust her completely as I believe she trusts me.This total assurance allows us to open up to one another and share our innermost needs and desires. For her not just to be spanked but to willingly submit, and for me to not only spank her but to accept, care for and satisfy her desires no matter how much she protests.

 

 

 

So again, I ask the question, do we want spanking to become more mainstream? I’m not advocating going back to a time when we pushed those feelings deep down and didn’t discuss them with even our most intimate friends and lovers, but neither do I want to see the day we converse about spanking at the dinner table with Grandma Helen and Uncle Ned.

Current technology has had a huge impact on communication evidenced right here on this blog and across the Internet where like-minded adults can find compatriots in answer to the disquieting question “Am I the only one who has these feelings?”

So, my answer to should spanking go mainstream is NO!  I never want to see spanking lose its exciting freshness, naughty rebellious nature, or exquisite charm.

~Michael

Highjacked: I’m Baaaaack!

I’m almost back.   I’ll be up and running by Wednesday … and my tale involves a Dom cable company, a bratty wireless router and my wicked hammer.  (Oh yes I did!)   So hot. I don’t want to overexcite you.  *G*    Hope everyone has been well!  I’ve missed you!

xoxo

A Picture And A Hundred Words

“This is so not fair!”

“Hush, girl. You wanted a bath, you’re having one.”

“But I wanted to bathe ALONE, not with you watching me and making me … do things.”

“I offered to spank you before your bath, but you had to stall and put it off, hadn’t you? You had to have your own way, and now you’re having it, or having your bath at any rate.”

“Well I hate it! And I hate having to bathe with my bum in the air!”

“I rather like it. Now try not to slosh when I put my finger in.”

“… this earth, this realm … this Christmas …”

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,–

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

-King Richard II; II, i

No one who reads this blite – really reads it and not just for the photos – doubts that I am an Anglophile. I speak and write the English language, more or less, to the exclusion of nearly all others. Even when I speak or write in French or Latin I blame it on the people in Lubbock. That’s all right. They’ll never notice. And if ever I talk about another writer, in a hundred percent of cases that writer also writes in English, or else his work has been translated into the language.

I have a four-year university degree in the study of English literature, which is at once the most useless and most valuable item I own. That certification has never got me a job, and in fact has kept me from qualifying for grant money to pay for a trade school so I can get one, but still I treasure the document above pearls because it is my physical link to that precious stone set in a silver sea – the England where my heart lies.

That last phrase is more or less a line from an American songwriter, Paul Simon. I have no idea to whom he referred when he wrote the line, but I can play the guitar accompaniment and sing all six verses – on a good day. I never was sure why that one line about England attracted me, or spoke to me, or made me wistful in a way that made no sense, because I didn’t know anyone in England at the time, and often wondered if Paul did.

I think now I have figured it out, nearly 30 years after committing the song and the chord progressions to memory. The name of the tune is “Kathy’s Song,” and I expect I could find a novel’s worth of background on it now, somewhere on the internet. But what I figured out has nothing to do with a Kathy, or a song, or Paul Simon, and yet I will be visiting England ere long because a girl invited me.

My flight leaves Florida on December 19^th. That’s 19 December in English time, which is something the girl always is quick to point out. So I will be in England at Christmas.

I never thought it possible that I’d be in England at Christmas. I have been to London twice, but that really isn’t England, more its figurehead, and I often imagined what the real, non-London England would be like, especially around Christmas.

I played Scrooge on stage years ago in a really awful children’s theatre rendition of the classic, AND played Dolittle in ‘My Fair Lady’ in a truly fine production, AND Mr Mayhew in ‘Witness for the Prosecution,’ which was somewhere rather in the middle of those two, production wise. But that was so long ago I’ve forgotten how to even mimic an English accent, though I have got better at saying “tomahto” and “in two hours’ time” of late.

The big church house depicted at the top of this post is one place we’ll be going, the girl and I, along with visits to a stately home and a couple of castles – well, three in fact. We will have digital cameras along so no doubt you will see photos pasted here over the next few weeks of the American Anglophile with the English degree grinning like an idiot from many an ancient and elegant venue.

When you see that idiot grin, please smile along with it – because he has, against all odds, found the England where his heart lies.

That is all.

Devlin out.

Did I Forget To Spank Her AGAIN?

Several years ago, at least a decade and a half though I can’t recall exactly for reasons that soon will be evident, Dave Barry wrote a column called “The Incredible Shrinking Brain.” Dave is my favorite living author, as evidenced by the raft of his books on my shelf. He is even older than this living author, if you can believe that, and scads funnier, Pullet Surprise-winning scads in fact, than I am, which is why I think it’s perfectly all right to steal his stuff or at least mimic his style now and then in order to make myself sound funnier. He has so much extra funny he can afford to share a bit of it, so thanks, Dave!

In the column I mentioned, which is very funny indeed, Dave talks about a research study by someone or other at the University of Pennsylvania, which wasn’t terribly funny although it did, unfortunately, support a theory that some of the girls round here, one in particular, have espoused for a long time, and that is that men’s brains shrink as they age.

To make matters worse, according to the study, this does not happen to women. Perhaps that is Nature’s way of evening the disparity between relative upper body strength, and the fact that once a month, like clockwork, women are required to have their nails done.

However, gentlemen, guys, fellow Tops, forewarned is forearmed, so make note, and I mean that literally. Write a little reminder on the back of a business card that your brain is shrinking, and put it in your wallet where you used to keep that Trojan with the expiration date sometime in the Carter administration, and refer to it often.

The note should say something along the lines of “Your brain is shrinking! Make a list! Read it!” I can’t remember (naturally) how many times I’ve written milk and cereal on the grocery list but still forgot the milk. This isn’t a big deal in itself and I can always have eggs instead of cereal for breakfast, but what if that happened with something really important, like beer? (To date this never has happened with beer, on or off the list, but you see my concern.)

This sort of written record keeping applies to everything, and not just the grocery or hardware store. It’s often good to have something in writing about where your money is, if you have any, which bank, where it’s located, and so on.

Then too, and this is very important indeed, there is the matter of keeping tabs on your girl, or girls, for whose behavior you have responsibility. We will take it as read that such a girl will make use of this empirical evidence as ammunition with which to tweak us, but that’s all one. Fact or fiction, a girl telling her Top about his “teeny, tiny brain” is impertinent, impudent, and bratty, and must be dealt with accordingly.

But my point, and there is one I promise, is that we must take steps to make sure we don’t let anything, or anyone, slide where discipline, comeuppance, and/or sorting out are concerned. If you haven’t time to tell her off and spank her at the moment due to a pressing engagement or major coronary event, write a reminder to yourself of what she has done to deserve a good hiding, or have the EMT do it, and then make certain you follow through at the first opportunity. Girls don’t do well when their discipline is neglected.

However, girls are notoriously bad about reminding you of such things, so as obvious as this might be to some, never rely on your girl to jog your memory as to why she might be in trouble.

I once forgot to spank my girlfriend. It was a preventive spanking, something I had done every day for a while, but this was a Saturday and my mind was elsewhere because we were off on adventures. And before you ask, I have no idea what preventive spankings are supposed to prevent, and have often thought they should be called attentive spankings instead – something one does daily so one’s beloved will never even imagine that one is being inattentive.

In any case, her fellow brats sometimes can assist in the area of reminding you that someone needs a spanking, in a throwing a girl under the bus way, but that can’t really be counted on either, so keep your tracking log up to date.

As to the log itself, keep it in a safe place and ONLY in that place, so if it goes missing you’ll know exactly whom to ask where it’s got to. Such an event should be treated as any other theft of, say, a wooden spoon, Flexi-Ruler or other implement, though a bit more strictly I should think, in part because she will no doubt claim that you simply forgot where you put it because of your shrinking brain. We all know how best and how strictly to deal with that kind of nonsense, as does she, though for some reason having nothing to do with the size her brain (see above) she never remembers until she is bottom up getting spanked.

If she keeps harping on that one note, the tiny, shrinking brain one, then it will behoove you to react as forcefully as you can, say by making a long afternoon of her comeuppance, such that she is truly remorseful by the time you’ve done with her. Then of course you can forgive her and carry on, with nothing more needing to be said. Neither of you will forget the event so the log book isn’t necessary, though she might write a blog post about it as warning, or perhaps suggestion, to other brats as to the consequences of such effrontery.

One bright spot in all this is that no matter how much our brains shrink, gentlemen, there always will be some functioning synapses left as long as we draw breath. And if we do happen to lose bits and pieces that have to do with spanking our girls and this thing we do in general, we can always rewrite that over the remaining bits that we don’t need anymore, like the recipe for magic brownies, or the titles of every John Travolta film.

So if by chance you do forget to spank her, you can always make it up to her later. But if she EVER tells you that you already spanked her for something and just forgot, don’t you believe it!

That is all.

Devlin out.

Flash Fiction Friday – 88 keys, 200 words

“You must remember this …”

or, Where Has Dooley Wilson Got To Now That I Need Him?

It’s a good job he’s pretty, Elspeth muttered in her mind.

I love dressing like this for him, but does he have to take all these ruddy photos of me posed about the house like a domesticated Playboy bunny?

Doesn’t he know the wood is ruddy hard on my knees? He knows it’s ruddy hard on my bum when he’s got me bent over it for a smacking, and I’d as soon be doing that.

God, what am I saying?

But where will he put me next? And what does he do with all these flipping photos anyhow? He says he doesn’t show them to anyone, so why bother? Except maybe he looks at them and …

No, shan’t think that or I’ll go stroppy and land up over this stupid bench. I just want to do that in my special way, and I said he could play the piano whilst I knelt between his legs.

“Later,” he says, but why not now?

Why can’t I get my way with him? He’s an odd fish sometimes yet I do love him dearly.

Just goes to show, I expect, that you can tune a piano but you can’t tune a fish.

The Portrait, or Who Was That Picture of Loveliness I Saw You With Last Night?

Photo credit unknown but borrowed from Fesseur

A couple of lifetimes ago, or roughly 30 years, I saw a film called “Cutting It Short.” That’s what the film was called in the United States but its title in Czech is “Postriziny.” That really isn’t right either because the word should have a bunch of diacritical marks that I have no idea how to put in.

The Bell Museum of Natural History on the U of M Minneapolis campus showed a great many foreign films and during my undergrad years I frequently attended the showings. So impressed was I by the subtitled Czech movie that I returned twice to see it again. This was long before I became a writer in a certain genre, and Lisa Carlson, Mr. Swayne, Cameron and their fictional cohort were scarcely a gleam in their author’s eye.

However I still was me, regardless how green and unformed, and there is one scene in the film that especially attracted my attention. I’m sure you can guess its nature, but the entire work is quite well done also, humorous, and eloquent in its simple story of a quaint Slovak village being dragged unwillingly into the hectic pace of the 20^th century. Then too there was the film’s star, Magda Vásáryová, who attracted me like few actresses did before or since. Her cherubic, pixie-like face and long red-gold hair delighted me, and her soft voice was violins and harp strings to my ears.

When I got my first VCR I searched video stores for the film to no avail, and as the years passed I gave up looking. But relatively recently I have seen online a few stills from the movie, especially of that special scene, and even a few video clips, though the quality of the outtakes has been far less than sterling. So I’m sending a huge thank you to the owner of Fesseur Blogspot, listed in the Blog Roll to your right, for finding not only a very good and very long clip of the film, but also a marvelous portrait of its star, which appears at the top of this rant.

I think perhaps the photo was shot a few years after she made this film, but her elfin energy and joie de vivre still are superbly manifest in the photo, and my eyes widened gleefully – you may not realize that I’m capable of glee but I am – with both remembrance of Magda and the happiness she gave me all those decades ago, and also with a shock of recognition of quite another kind.

I met my girlfriend a year ago. We started talking by email and then moved on to Skype, the terribly Buck-Rogers sort of video-phone computer system, and still speak that way almost every day, so we were able to see one another before we met in the flesh. I can’t say for certain it was love at first sight for us, although the passage of time has shown that might in fact be the case, but from the beginning I felt I knew her already, or at the least I knew someone who looked exactly like her, and was already quite taken with either her or the person she looked like, or both.

Then when we met in person and I could spend time close to her the feeling only increased. When we were together I had no need to look very far to see her face. I had merely to look down most of the time to find her looking up at me, tucked under my arm as we strolled the Las Vegas Strip, hand in hand on Pensacola beach, lying in bed with her head resting on my chest, or even tramping through a live oak grove in Florida or trudging the Nevada desert, except that then she usually was six paces ahead of me, grinning back and urging me to stop dawdling and catch her up.

Magda doing a quite credible and similarly almost innocent impression of my girlfriend about to put salt in the sugar bowl.

I told her a couple of times, maybe more, that she reminded me of a film star but I quit doing so because it was awkward to admit that I couldn’t think who it was, yet often when she turned her face a certain way or tilted her little nose in a certain direction, for an instant I was sure I knew where I had seen her before. Then last night I found the photo above and it finally made sense, and all the months of nagging almost-certainty came to an end.

If you put my girlfriend’s photo next to Magda’s you would see only some or even a fair amount of resemblance, but you don’t see my girlfriend as much as I do, or in as full dimension, or remember Magda as purely and fondly. To me they could be identical twins. Not that this makes any difference to how much I love my girlfriend, which is a blooming lot, Magda or no Magda, but I can’t tell you how relieved I am to be rid of that occasional feeling of unresolved déjà vu when I see my girlfriend’s cherubic, pixie-like face.

So now that the fog has lifted I know exactly whom my girlfriend resembles. She looks exactly like the girl I have longed to cherish forever since the day I was born.

That is all.

Devlin out.

Highjacked: Ukrainian Protest Rally Gets Your Attention

Yesterday, while perusing the online edition of The New York Post newspaper Opinion page I came across this delightful picture in their ‘Today In Photos’ section. Turns out it is from a protest rally against sexual harassment of  female students by male professors held in Kiev, Ukraine in front of the Education Ministry. The protesting group is FEMEN, a Ukrainian activist organization who defend a woman’s place in society. I say more power to them. Sexual harassment is deplorable and perpetrators should be strung up by their….. thumbs. But I must say that I admire the way these young feminists display their civil disobedience. Here is another site with more information and photos of the protest.

~Michael

For those who can’t see the link – http://englishrussia.com/?p=6310#more-6310