The Laundry Room

The preview clips from this new Girls Boarding School movie really sparked my imagination. A ping pong bat was the first paddle that was ever used on me, by my boyfriend when I was 16. At that age we only had access to the most domestic of implements, but thankfully his family had money, so their house included a stables with real horses and real riding crops, and there was a ping pong table in the garage (and an exercise bike, which I always thought could be put to more interesting uses than we ever tried out). I have fond memories of that house, but not of the ping pong bat. It stung more than I could possibly have imagined, and he only gave me three or four swats before it became too much and he had to stop.

We stuck to the riding crops after that, but for years paddles were a huge part of my fantasy life – the implement that I'd never had the chance to get used to. I have slightly more experience of paddles now, but they still scare me. And I haven't been spanked with a ping pong bat since that day.

It was the washing machines rather than the bat that got me thinking this time, though. There's a lot of mileage in the idea of a girl being spanked for messing up the laundry. Say she mixed the whites with the colours, put the wash on at too high a temperature, and when his white shirts came out to be ironed they were all a deep shade of crimson pink. The best method of teaching her the lesson would be immediately clear: to spank her until her bottom was a matching shade of cerise.

I love scenarios revolving around that kind of objective inevitability, the helplessness of knowing that no matter how much you struggle and plead, you're not going to be released until your bottom is cherry red – particularly if neither spanker nor spankee are quite sure how long that's going to take. And if the punishment were administered with a ping pong bat – well, so much the better.