By the time I’d finished spanking Sara, the palm of my right hand was almost as red, hot and stinging as the darkly crimsoned cheeks of her still-quivering buttocks. My arm was fairly tired as well, physically aching from having just administered similarly punishing punishment – forty or so medium-to-hard slaps – to the bare bottoms of Miranda, Julie and Sharon, all of whom had been equally in need of some stern discipline.

By now, I was all spanked out, even more beat than the girls were. Sadly, despite my exhaustive efforts, the bold Sara – a lithe, petite and darkly pretty Eastender in her mid-thirties – obviously still hadn’t learnt her lesson. When she finally got up off my lap, she continued behaving in a somewhat rude and truculent fashion, despite her tanned and tingling behind. You just can’t teach some people. Her bum was glowing more brightly than a neon sign in Soho, yet she was still being a pain in the arse.

“I don’t know why you even bothered pulling these down,” she moaned, readjusting her g-string under her white pleated tennis skirt. “I mean, it’s not like they were covering anything in the first place!”

“How dare you speak to me like that, young lady!” I snapped, in mock outrage and my poshest voice. “You’ve obviously learnt nothing at all from this little lesson! Now – get over Bill’s lap! And be damned quick about it!”

Like an oversized and underfed bird of prey, Bill was perched expectantly and excitably on a chair to my left. A sixty-something pensioner with enormous black NHS goggle glasses and a long yellowing beard, he epitomised the classic ‘dirty old man’ in just about every way – from the oily stains on his trousers to the even oilier leer on his face. The whole time I had been spanking Sara, he had played the role of her comforter – holding her hands, stroking her hair and whispering sweet nothings into her ear.

The moment she raised her skirt and cautiously positioned herself over his knobbly knees, however, something in his demeanour changed. As he placed his hand on her bottom and began to rub it in ever-increasing circles, a look of almost divine serenity and contentment came over his face. You could tell that Bill truly lived for these moments. It may have been the beard, but, for whatever reason, he reminded me of St. Francis of, em, wherever the hell it was St. Francis was from. He glanced over at me, rubbed his hands together and gleefully mouthed the words, “glorious arse!” Then, shabby shirt sleeves rolled up to his bony old elbows, he set to work and went completely medieval on it.

SMACK! He walloped her left buttock so hard that the white imprint of his hand was left clearly visible on it (right beside mine, which had yet to fully fade). “Ouch!” Sara yelped.

As his spanking intensified, he began to softly sing an old sea shanty, rhythmically striking her rear end in time with the lyrics: “Forgive my rough mood… SMACK! (“Ouch!”)… unaccustomed to sue… SMACK (“Ouch!”)… I woo not perhaps… SMACK! (“Ouch!”)… as you landlubbers do…” SMACK! (“Ouch!”).

The saintly St. Francis look had passed. Now, even without the peaked cap, Bill reminded me of nothing so much as a pervert version of the original Captain Bird’s Eye. As I sat there, stamping my feet and watching this all-singing, all-slapping sexagenarian’s show, it suddenly occurred to me that I could be witnessing the birth of a whole new musical genre – ‘Rhythm & Blows’.

“What shall we do with the drunken sailor?… SMACK! (“Ouch!”)… What shall we do with the drunken sailor?…” SMACK! (“Ouch!”)… What shall we do with the drunken sailor?… SMACK! (“Ouch!”).

Or perhaps it should be called ‘Bum & Bass’…

“Early in the morning…” SMACK! (“Ouch!”).

When it comes to the gentlemanly art of spanking the bare behind of the woman you love (or, alternatively, have just met), the English are generally regarded as world leaders, a nation at the very top of the bottom-beating league.

In fact, our British chums are so wholly enthusiastic about corporal punishment that they even have specialist clubs that are completely devoted to it. Not the only ones in the world, of course (the Americans are quite into it as well), but per capita they definitely have the most.

I’m not talking about S&M clubs, mind. Sado-masochism is too globally mainstream (in an underground sort of way, obviously) to ever be ascribed to one specific nationality. CP clubs, on the other hand, definitely carry English passports. A quiet backwater of the oceanic fetish scene, there’s no bondage, clamps, gags or masks utilised at these parties (though there are whips, canes, paddles and, erm, slippers). And although erotic by nature, there’s no direct sexual element to them either. It’s really all about the punishment, the administration of physical discipline. Naughty young girls (wearing various different uniforms) and dirty old men who like to spank their bottoms (with various different implements). And vice versa.

Or, come to think about it, maybe just vice.

Recently I got in touch via the internet with the organisers of a London-based club called Actually Spanking. Initially, Robert and Paul (surnames are never used on the spanking scene) were quite suspicious of my motives but, once I’d sent them some samples of my work, and chatted to them on the phone a couple of times, they eventually relented and agreed to co-operate. In fact, once they’d satisfied themselves that I wasn’t a tabloid writer, they seemed delighted with the prospect of the free publicity.

“We’re quite normal people really,” Paul assured me. “I’m not saying that what we do at our parties is particularly normal, mind, but it’s not abnormal either. We like to spank women’s bottoms – and what’s the harm in that, eh?”

They both agreed to go on the record with me and also said that they would try and organise interviews with some of the girls and, possibly, one or two of their veteran members. Their only stipulations was that I would fully participate in the evening’s proceedings, as an outside observer sitting in would spoil the informal atmosphere and make everybody feel uncomfortable. They ran several parties a month and I was welcome to attend one as soon as I wished. The only thing left to be decided was what kind of spanking party? Actually Spanking offered a choice of ‘sub-fem’, ‘dom-fem’ or ‘revenge’ parties. “What’s the difference?” I asked.

“Sub-fem is where you spank the girls,” Robert explained. “Dom-fem is where the girls spank you, and revenge parties – or ‘switch’ parties – are a combination of both.”

After brief consideration, I decided to opt for the sub-fem party (much to the disappointment of some of my work colleagues). It wasn’t that I was particularly squeamish about the prospect of being spanked. Just that I’ve been brought up to believe that it’s far better to give than to receive.

Having checked into my London hotel on the day of the party, I made straight for an address in Islington to meet the Actually Spanking organisers (I’d meet the actual spankers later). Robert greeted me at the door of his apartment and welcomed me in, explaining that Paul would be along shortly, as would one of the girls. A short, stout and rather wheezy 62-year-old, casually dressed in a yellow T-shirt, baggy tracksuit bottoms and trainers, he looked harmless enough. The only slight clue to his deviancy was the length of his straggly grey hair.

At least that was the only clue until you got into his cluttered living room, where the framed spanking pictures on the wall and wide selection of bottom-beating implements scattered around the place left you in absolutely no doubt as to the occupant’s abiding interest in life. He cracked open a bottle of wine and apologised for the mess, explaining that there had been a small party held there the previous night. Although most of Actually Spanking’s events are held in the upstairs function room of a nearby pub, they occasionally hold smaller parties for “old hands” in the flat. A retired civil servant, Robert explained that he had come to spanking rather late in life.

“I was married for twenty years and I found out about parties shortly after I was divorced,” he told me, distractedly cleaning his glasses on his T-shirt. “I’d never really spanked before that, but it was always something that gave me a bit of a frizz when I came across it in mainstream literature or whatever. About ten years ago I found out about spanking parties and I went to them for two, two-and-a-half years, or something like that.

“And then I told somebody that I was giving it up because I’d been to various different groups and didn’t feel that any of them were doing exactly what I wanted, so she persuaded me to start running parties myself. We ran them together for about two or three years. This was a girl called Kim who is no longer on the scene. We had a rather dramatic break-up at the end of a party and it’s usually voted the most memorable party in the history of spanking…”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

“Well, the details aren’t important now, but I’m told that I actually levitated with steam coming out of both ears!” he laughed. “And then I did nothing for a while and then, you know, kind souls sort of prodded me and said why didn’t I start doing more parties because they’d enjoyed them. And these things sort of grow. . .”

Although Actually Spanking run four or five events a month (charging £95 per head – or rather hand), it’s still not a particularly huge money-spinner for either Robert or Paul. Unlike most other CP clubs, they don’t sell videos, school uniforms, literature or equipment. Parties are their main activity, although they have recently begun selling CP CD-Roms.

“It’s basically a paying hobby,” Robert explained. “I have a part-time job as well. I work weekends in an Arts Centre, on the advance booking side, just to get a bit of money and keep on the right side of the national insurance people – just to keep pensions and things in order. So we do cover our costs, but it’s not a job. There was one man who did make a living out of it but he died recently in tragic circumstances. And the money he made came mostly from videos. But it was a full-time job for him. He’d have parties most weeks and make a new video virtually every month.”

When I asked Robert about the girls Actually Spanking used, he explained that although they get paid a minimum of £150 per party, most of them do it for pleasure as well, and aren’t hired prostitutes.

“They’re not from the sex industry, very few come from the sex industry. There’s two groups really. One are girls who have fairly high-powered jobs. For example, Miranda, who you’ll be meeting later tonight, is in PR. And I think that they do it more or less as a relaxation. And the others are girls who do this all the time – this is what they do for a living. But saying that, most of them are married or they have a partner, so they have a fallback, especially if they have a bad week or whatever. But it is all they do. The ones I use, I try very hard to ensure that they all are genuinely into it – that they have a scene-life with their own partners, they go to other clubs and, you know, they play otherwise.”

After about twenty minutes or so, Paul arrived looking slightly flustered, having just rushed straight from his day-job as an insurance underwriter on the other side of the city. A tall, bespectacled and not unhandsome 33-year-old, Paul explained that he first got into the spanking scene about four years ago, when he attended one of Robert’s parties, which he had seen advertised in a specialist magazine. A relaxed and likeable kind of guy, he could obviously see the humour in the whole thing and fully sympathised with my nervousness.

“It took me ages to work up the nerve to go to my first party,” he recalled, grinning. “I was very nervous when I eventually went, but I was amazed to find that it was real. You know, it does actually happen and I wasn’t gonna get ripped off, I was gonna get exactly what I expected. The girls and the guys were all perfectly normal people. I had a brilliant time. In fact, a person I met at the very first party I went to was later to become my fiancee. Unfortunately, we’re not still together but that was nothing to do with spanking, just the usual personal differences.

“But I started going to a few different parties and the girl I was with decided that she wanted to run her own club and asked me to do the MC-ing, so that’s how I got into it in a big way. Then she gave up, and Robert and I had become good friends by then, so we decided to restart the club that he had had. It used to be called Saffron, but, obviously, we changed the name to Actually Spanking.”

The doorbell sounded. “Ah, that’ll be Julie,” Robert announced, getting up to buzz her in. My heart quickened slightly. I was about to meet one of the girls whose naked derriere I’d be reddening a little later on, but I had no idea what the correct etiquette was. How should I act? Should I be friendly or firm? Shake her hand or playfully smack her butt? What was I supposed to say?

As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry about making conversation. A bright, bubbly and slightly hyperactive blonde in her mid-forties, Julie barely let me get a word in edgeways from the moment she walked through the door. Casually dressed in black leggings and a loose top, and with her hair tied up in pig-tails, you could tell that she used to be stunning. Now she was just extremely attractive. She told me that she’d been into spanking – or, at least, the idea of it – since her early adolescence.

“I’ve always fantasised since I was twelve years old about being spanked by people in authority, so I’m quite submissive really,” she laughed. “And I used to draw little pictures of me being spanked by the doctor or the dentist and things like that, and hide them from my mother. I often wonder to this day if she ever found them. And I kept my fantasies to myself, like most people do, and got married very young – at eighteen.”

As it happened, her first husband was a schoolteacher. Unfortunately for Julie, he was more into spanking young boys than he was his gorgeous wife.

“He was a PE teacher and, funnily enough, the boys used to get sent to him to get the slipper when they were naughty. And he used to come home and tell me stories about the slipper and I always thought, ‘ooh, gosh! I wish you’d give me the slipper!’ But he never knew how I felt. He never knew that it really interested me and turned me on. And, of course, I never let on.”

Julie’s first ever spanking club experience is indelibly etched on her memory: “It was May 1st, 1984,” she recalled, with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’ll never forget it. I was dead nervous and I went round the corner beforehand and had a double brandy before I dared walk in. And I went down to this basement and the people were all really nice and they all introduced themselves and they took me through into this underground room. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven – all these people dressed in black leather and rubber. I was just like, ‘wow!’, and I got introduced to loads of really nice people – people I still see to this day. And that’s how I met the man who’s my husband now. Because he was there that night and he was the first person ever to spank me.”

Although still happily married, with two grown-up children (who know all about – and are highly amused by – their mother’s rather strange part-time job), Julie regularly seeks her spanking kicks outside of the marital home, both at spanking clubs and at what she calls “one-to-one’s.”

Tonight’s party was being held in a large, wood-panelled function room, set above a discretely fetish-friendly North London pub (which I was asked not to name in this article). We got there shortly after 6PM to find that a few of the spankers had already arrived and were waiting in the bar. Paul and Robert went upstairs to prepare the room, while Julie went over to say her hellos. For my part, suddenly struck with a bad case of spank-fright, I skedaddled to the other side of the lounge and ordered a stiff drink.

I peered over the rim of my glass and took a proper look at the guys Julie was talking to. There was Bill, in his soiled Mac, surrounded by a trio of middle-aged nerds, all of whom looked like the kind of guys who tucked their shirts into their Y-fronts. In fact, on closer inspection, I could see that at least one of them definitely did.

A couple of minutes later, Julie came back over with another girl in tow, introducing her as a fellow spankee. Miranda was a plump, pretty and fairly in-your-face 23-year-old, who, upon hearing that I was a journalist, immediately produced a business card identifying her as a fairly high-ranking employee of a prestigious London public relations firm. “I don’t usually get an opportunity to network at parties,” she giggled. After a brief, friendly chat, she agreed to talk to me afterwards, and then went off with Julie to get changed. Clutching my drink, I sneakily circumnavigated the nerds and went upstairs.

The room was spacious, high-ceilinged and L-shaped. Robert sat at a table by the door, collecting money, selling CD-Roms and distributing Actually Spanking newsletters featuring details of their forthcoming events. Paul was busily setting chairs out into a wide circle and closing all of the heavy curtains over (“I don’t want to give the people in the hotel across the road a free show!”). Not wanting to appear conspicuous, I took a seat in the corner and pretended to study one of the newsletters, whilst surreptitiously checking out the spankers as they gradually slunk in. In fairness, they weren’t all dirty old men. A few of them were dirty young men. In the main, however, they were dirty middle-aged men.

Somewhat surprisingly, there was also a woman present – a very stern, sexless and extremely scary-looking schoolteacher type (also wearing glasses) in her late fifties. Tall, thin and anaemic as virgin snow, she arrived on the arm of a portly American gentleman in his mid-sixties. Paul didn’t look too happy about her being there – not because she was female, but because he felt she was unlikely to participate.

“I actually met her in Robert’s last night,” he told me, “and I know she’s submissive. They’ve come over from the States to see how British parties are done. We do occasionally get women coming along – usually with their partners – and we’ve no problem with them being here, once they’re willing to get involved. I don’t think that she will, but… ah, fuck it, she’s here now.”

By about 6.45 the room was filling up, and Robert signalled to Paul that everybody they’d been expecting had now arrived. He clapped his hands together, announced that proceedings were about to begin and everybody quickly took a seat. A hush fell over the room. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then Julie and Miranda walked in through the door and straight into the centre of the circle of chairs, accompanied by two other girls. Sara and Sharon were dark and blonde, respectively, and both in their mid-thirties. All of the girls were wearing white tennis outfits and behaving quite childishly, pushing, shoving and laughing amongst themselves. “BE QUIET!!” Paul yelled at them. They bowed their heads and pursed their lips in an attempt to stop giggling, but to little avail. “GIRLS – I WON’T TELL YOU AGAIN!” They shut up, and he playfully shoved them into a straight line.

“I’d like to call this meeting to order,” he announced sternly, and the room went quiet again, save for the nervous sniggering of the girls and heavy breathing of some of the older members. It being the week after Wimbledon, the first scenario was tennis-orientated.

“We, gentlemen, are the disciplinary committee of the Wimbledon Tennis Association,” Paul explained, walking slowly around the line of girls, the floorboards creaking noisily with each step he took. “We have watched the developing professional tennis careers of sixth form schoolgirls Miranda, Sharon and Sara with mounting horror. They have behaved disgracefully.”

“But sir…” Miranda attempted to interrupt. “Be quiet, Miranda!” he snapped, quickly raising her skirt and striking her hard on the bum. SMACK! “Ouch!”

“Sharon and Miranda played in the opening rounds of Wimbledon,” he continued. “Both of their matches were abandoned, with much disrespect shown to the officials. Sharon’s 80mph serve was used to good effect on one particular line judge. Three times!!! As he was carried away on a stretcher you were heard to say something like, ‘now whose balls are out?’”

“Sir, I never did!” Sharon protested. SMACK! “Ouch!” she yelped.

Paul continued his torturously slow orbit of the girls. “Miranda’s attempt to influence the match was no more subtle,” he announced. “Umpires are used to cheeky young ladies bending to tie their shoelaces in front of them, but this one wasn’t at all prepared for your choice of underwear – NONE!!! It’s quite some distance from the chair to the ground and, as the casualties mounted, that match too was abandoned. Both girls were fined.”

“But sir…” they cried in unison. SMACK! SMACK! “I told you to BE QUIET!!” he roared. The girls quietened down, grumbling inaudibly to themselves as they rubbed their stinging behinds.

“Gentlemen – it’s time for the punishment to begin!” Paul finally announced. “And remember – be severe with them! It’s the only way they’ll ever learn!”

Not having been apportioned a girl to punish myself, there was little else to do but watch as, all around the circle, the spankings began in earnest. Well, they didn’t all begin in earnest. One took a while to get going. Julie had been placed over the lap of one of the younger and better-dressed participants, who looked like he might be a junior stockbroker in the City. Judging from the look of sheer helplessness on his face, it was obviously his first time.

Wearing an embarrassed expression that lay somewhere between extreme amusement and horrified disbelief, he tentatively raised her skirt and slapped her gently a couple of times over her knickers. Julie wasn’t even slightly impressed with his efforts. “Ow!” she said, sounding really bored. He continued on in this feeble fashion. “Ow! That really hurts.” Sadly, he still didn’t seem to be getting the message. Not even when, from between gritted teeth, she hissed, “harder please!”

After a minute or so of this, she looked over at Paul and raised her eyebrows to heaven. Sensing her discomfort (or, rather, her lack thereof), he stepped in and briefly demonstrated exactly how – and how hard – to spank her. A few moments later the City guy had got the hang of it and immediately began making up for lost time. Julie closed her eyes and gladly took her punishment, sighing slightly with each smack. Now that he’d finally got going, she was obviously enjoying herself almost as much as he was.

Sara, Sharon and Miranda’s spankers needed no such instruction. Experienced hands all, they got stuck into their task with great gusto. All around the high-ceilinged room, the sounds of meat slapping meat echoed off the walls. SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! It sounded like a non-stop round of lacklustre applause for someone who had just cracked a lame joke during a particularly dull Questions & Answers debate. SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! SMACK! The sound was almost hypnotic. It was completely surreal. I found myself drifting off, suddenly not quite believing that any of this was going on. The whole scene resembled something you might see in a particularly warped Carry On movie. That, or an episode of Eurotrash. It certainly didn’t resemble anything you might reasonably expect to see in real life. But there it was, happening right before my very own eyes. They were actually spanking. Robert and Paul could never be accused of false advertising.

After about five minutes or so, Paul called for everybody’s attention again and announced that the girls would be rotated in a clockwise direction, until they had been passed the whole way around the circle; done a full lap of laps, as it were. Rubbing their sore bottoms, the girls duly rose from one set of knees, pulled up their knickers and moved on to the next. The American woman also stood up and repositioned herself to the left of the junior stockbroker, so as to avoid any unnecessary embarrassment. Within less than a minute, the spankings recommenced. Some of those members who had just administered discipline, moved over to the table of food in the corner and began stuffing their faces with chicken legs and vol-au-vents. Spanking was obviously hungry work. The rest of us just sat and watched, waiting our turn.

Obviously all of this punishment was gradually having an enormous effect on the colour of their bums. The first girl to cross my lap was Miranda and, by the time she got to me, her cheeks were already quite red.

“Miranda, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,” I assured her, before getting down to business. Determined not to humiliate myself like the young stockbroker had, I tried to mentally utilise Paul’s scenario as I spanked her, imagining that I really was a member of the disciplinary committee of the WTA and she really was an errant tennis player. To be honest, it wasn’t doing very much for me. My heart just wasn’t in it. Then I suddenly remembered that, in reality, Miranda actually worked in PR. I thought of all the PR girls who’d regularly given me a pain in the head over my years in journalism. When I thought about it properly, I realised that PR girls had actually been the bane of my life. Suddenly it wasn’t so hard to spank her with genuine enthusiasm. In fact, once I got to thinking about all those mini-bar bills I’d been forced to pay, it was the easiest thing in the world. Needless to say, by the time I’d finished with her, Miranda’s rear end was several shades of red darker than it had been previously.

“You’re very hard,” she complained, when I finally let her up. As it happened, I wasn’t, but then I hadn’t particularly expected this to be a turn-on. In truth, I was finding the whole thing far more humorous than sexual, and couldn’t really take it seriously. A few of the other spankers looked suspiciously like they were getting their jollies though, judging from the awkward way they were sitting with their legs crossed and their hands folded in their laps.

Obviously, because they were moving clockwise and being spanked in rotation, it was much the same with the bottoms of all of the other girls. Ten minutes later, Julie was my next victim. She lay over my lap with cheeks the colour of wild salmon, and rose again with cheeks the colour of wild strawberries. Sharon’s were initially the colour of cherry blossom but, by the time I’d finished with them, they were closer to beetroot. Sara’s were the worst. By the time she got to me, she’d already been spanked by ten others so her bottom was practically scarlet. Still, I did the best I could and, when the deed was done, I was pleased to see that her glowing arse now closely resembled the rosy red hue of Jackie Healy-Rae’s neck. A job well done.

Once the girls had done the full round of the circle, they were made to stand in the centre of the room once again. Amazingly, they were all still in very high spirits. In fact, they were even more boisterous than they had been previously. Still, their punishment was far from over. Paul and Robert divided both the spankers and the girls into two separate groups, and each group went to opposite ends of the room.

My group was headed by Paul and bottomed by Miranda and Sharon. Without too much ado, he produced a long hooked bamboo cane and instructed the girls to raise their skirts and bend over the backs of two chairs. He gave a brief demonstration of the correct use of the cane – holding it about twelve inches away from Miranda’s ass, before expertly flicking his wrist and stingingly landing it straight across the centre of his target – and then opened it up to the floor. Bill was one of the first to have a go. Unsurprisingly, he sang while he caned as well.

“Fifteen men and a dead man’s chest…” SWISH! CRACK! “Ouch! Thankyou, sir!” “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum…” SWISH! CRACK! “Ouch! Thankyou sir!”

Paul looked over at me and grinned. “Bill’s singing is quite famous in spanking circles,” he told me. “The funny thing is that he’s never been anywhere near the sea in his professional life. He used to work in the Department of Trade!”

After about ninety minutes or so, there was a fifteen minute break to allow the girls’ time to change into different uniforms (and, presumably, let their bottoms cool off a bit). I went downstairs to get a drink – the barmaid kept me for a while, wanting all the gory details – and arrived back up just in time to witness a sight that will undoubtedly haunt me to my dying days. The scary-looking American woman was standing in the centre of the room with her skirt raised up her back and her white cotton panties at half-mast, while her husband gave each cheek of her bony white ass six of the best with a black leather strap. She didn’t make a sound throughout, despite the fact that he practically took a run at her with each spank. When he’d eventually finished, they embraced passionately, and the whole room gave a collective shudder. Amazingly, she was still able to sit down afterwards.

A Fred Elliot lookalike caught my eye and grinned. “Didn’t know there was gonna be a ‘alf-time show,” he said, in a strong London accent. “Still, them Yanks are into all sorts of things, they are.”

United in the brutal aftershock of what we’d just seen, we swiftly struck up a conversation. His name was Alan, and he worked as a security guard at the offices of a well-known, right-wing London evening newspaper. Divorced several years ago, he had been attending spanking parties for well over a decade, and reckoned that Actually Spanking was one of the better clubs he’d been to. He was certainly qualified to judge. When not working or attending spanking parties, Alan liked to spend most of his spare time watching spanking videos. You might say, he was a bit of an expert.

Alan told me that he also occasionally treated himself to private “one-to-one” CP sessions with girls he’d met at spanking parties. Perhaps rather nosily, I asked him if these sessions ever culminated in sexual intercourse. He looked at me with utter disgust.

“Nah, not at all,” he said, aghast. “I mean, most of the girls make that prerogative before you start and it’s nothing that I want anyway. I mean, if you wanted that, you wouldn’t go to these sort of girls, would you? That doesn’t appeal to me, it doesn’t interest me. It takes all sorts, it really does. Some people are into all sorts of things. Like, I’m not into the bondage thing whatsoever, that leaves me entirely cold. I don’t even like the bloody pictures. All that chained up, tied up, leaving gags in your mouth stuff. That does nothing for me whatsoever. They love it, some people, but it’s not for me. I’m really just into spanking.”

When I told him that this was my first ever spanking party, he asked me if I was enjoying the experience. I explained that I was finding it more amusing than anything else, and really couldn’t see the point of spanking unless it was as a prelude to sex. It was the wrong answer to give…

“Yeah, well you get out of it what you put into it,” he said, rather sniffily, and then walked off.

We remained divided into the same two groups for the second half of the party, but swapped the girls around. Paul set out another scenario - this time they were naughty secondary school students who had been caught supplementing their income by selling nude photographs of themselves to pupils at the nearby College for Young Gentlemen – and the spankings began in earnest once again. To be honest, I was getting really bored with the whole thing by then. Still, true professional that I am, I persevered.

Now dressed in school uniforms, Sara and Julie remained bent over the chairs throughout the second session, and first received 24 hand slaps and then another 24 with implements from each individual spanker (I used a worn slipper and a leather tawse, if you’re interested). By the time it was all finished, I’d calculated that they’d each received over 1,000 individual spanks to the bare ass over the course of the evening. It really showed as well. By now, their bums were so red that if they’d raised their skirts on the street, they would’ve stopped traffic. It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that the round of applause they received when it was all over was extremely well-deserved. They bowed, blew kisses and threw imaginary flowers, laughing till the very end.

Everybody hung around for a while afterwards, the girls giving out their private numbers to anybody that seemed interested. Brief chats with Sara and Sharon quickly convinced me that they were in it solely for the money. I went down to the bar with Miranda to have a talk. She claimed to be “very sore”, but actually seemed quite happy about it. Although she denied being a true masochist, she did tell me that pain was something that she was really into.

“I think you just get used to it after a while,” she said. “I mean, obviously it still hurts you. Like, the caning really hurt me today because I hadn’t had it in a while. I think you must get a morphine-rush when you’re actually being smacked, similar to being drunk or having had chocolate or something. It’s particularly weird with the cane because sometimes, when something as hard as a cane hits you, there’s a sort of moment where there’s no pain at all, and then suddenly – ooooff! – it all floods through you. It’s very intense sometimes, that’s why you sway forward. It does hurt you, but you feel really nice afterwards. And that’s the main thing. And there’s a certain pride in getting over the pain.”

Still in her early twenties, Miranda told me that she had been “a very ugly teenager,” and, in fact, had only lost her virginity three years ago. However, if even only half of the wild stories she told me about her sex life were true, then she’s certainly been making up for lost time since. She got into spanking – amongst various other things – through her current boyfriend, whom she met when she posted an Internet ad reading, “Girl, 20, wants sex and domination” (she received 2,500 replies, incidentally).

“I really do love sex,” she gushed. “And I particularly love these parties. I do get really excited during them. I probably shouldn’t say this because it isn’t very professional of me, but I do have to go into the toilets sometimes and have a quick wank during them. It’s very erotic being spanked but it’s also nice to have an orgasm at the end of it. I don’t normally have them at the parties because it wouldn’t be appropriate, but I’ll definitely go home and masturbate tonight.”

I wondered if she planned on continuing her spanking activities indefinitely.

“Oh yes, as long as I possibly can,” she nodded enthusiastically. “In fact, I often think it’ll be a bit depressing when I’m sixty, because then I’ll be all wrinkly and nobody will want to spank me any more. I don’t know what I’ll do then.”

Paul collared me just before I left the pub and demanded to know what I had made of the whole thing. I told him more or less exactly what I had told Alan – it had been an interesting, amusing, enlightening and vastly entertaining experience, but overall corporal punishment wasn’t really for me. Chances are, I wouldn’t ever be back. He wasn’t the least bit offended, but said that he hoped that I would give an honest and open-minded account of the evening’s proceedings.

“Personally, I was actually really delighted with tonight,” he said. “Because what you saw tonight is exactly what we do, the way that we do it. It was a brilliant party, everybody enjoyed themselves and that really is the name of the game – to send people away having had a brilliant night and having experienced exactly what they expected to experience, exactly as we advertise it. Particularly with the new guys to make them believe that, you know, it does happen, it is real. You know, they’re not perverts, they’re…”

As if from nowhere, Bill suddenly appeared at his side, tapping him on the shoulder by way of goodbye. “Cheerio, see you next time,” he chirruped happily, before heading out the bar door.

Paul and I watched him disappearing off into the night. “Well, alright,” he finally admitted. “Maybe they are perverts… but they’re not dangerous perverts.”