RIP Computer and Another Inspiring Email Gratefully Received

On Friday my main home computer finally and sadly past away following a long illness. Those of you who have followed this blog since its inception will have heard before how throughout last winter on the coldest days the thing would be reluctant to start and – once persuaded to cooperate through fair means or foul - would then grind along sounding like an old tractor or diesel generator. I traced the fault to a dodgy cooling fan on the power supply, but as the problem rectified itself once warmer weather came and showed no hint of recurrence throughout this last summer, at least until relatively recently, I never got around to doing anything about it. The irony is that on Friday last I had agreed to help an old school mate with a problem on his machine, the idea being that I would ring him up and talk him through the fault-finding process while sitting at my computer and following his progress by duplicating his actions. I duly called him up, then went to boot up my machine...and you can guess the rest. My mate found it hilarious – the joke somehow escaped me! I was forced to adjourn to the pub for the reminder of the day – oh dear!

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My magazine scanning project has of course had to be shelved until repairs are carried out – which will probably be in the new year now, as I will be away from home over the Christmas and New-year period (staying in a hotel in Rye, East Sussex). My work on the new book will continue on paper and also using my new portable machine. But it is an annoying development as I only recently rediscovered my enthusiasm - and part of that revolved around my having developed some interesting ideas for the cover design, which I was itching to get started on. The portable machine I have is fine for writing but the screen size is far too small for any serious graphic work, whereas my desktop machine now has two large screens (as of a couple of months ago) across which I can distribute all the various elements I intend to use.

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Meanwhile I am still working through my email backlog; which brings me to today's subject. I received the following email around eight to ten days ago. I copied and pasted it to MS Word, intending to compose a answer later, then deleted the message - something that would not ordinarily be a problem, as it can be resurrected from the 'trash' folder...Except it can't! said folder is empty for some unaccountable reason and I have some how managed not to copy the writer's identity; probably because I had intended to double it up as a blog entry and so would have wanted to assure the correspondent's anonymity. Under the circumstances I am left with little option other than to reply as an open letter in any case. But I am incredibly keen to do so as the writer touches on so many points that I plan to address in the new work - it is almost as if he / she has been reading my mind!

“Hi Garth,
I have read both books and am looking forward to reading #3 in the series. Will that be available in early 2010?
If I may be allowed to do so, I would like to offer some constructive criticism and a few ideas. I think you could be a little more graphic in your descriptions of the canings. Reading about the preparation, dress being folded back, knickers being pulled down, the recipient waiting anxiously for the first agonising stroke can be very erotic. I think the lash of a cane is a more erotic description of a stroke than slash. That word conjures up something completely different. And speaking from experience, there is no delay in feeling pain from a cane stroke. It's agonising and instantaneous. When the inmates are using their bedpans, are these on the floor? Or are they placed on a chair? You could describe what a girl feels like to sit doing her ablutions in front of other patients and sneering or laughing nurses.

How about uncomfortable, larger sized suppositories, and ones that cause constipation with hard stools difficult and painful to pass, leading to punishment for irregular habits with strap and cane? You could be a little more descriptive in describing the insertion of these. The embarrassment of bending over legs apart, Knickers pulled down, the nurse slowly pushing them in one after the other. "Take a deep breath sweetheart, here comes the first one" Perhaps making the recipient squirm with the discomfort of being stretched and feeling them inside her bottom. “I know it's uncomfortable dear, but it's for your own good" Perhaps you could enlarge further on the discomfort of wearing plastic bloomers. I'm sure they become very warm and sweaty. Noisy when walking? You didn't enlarge on the fitting of anal and vaginal dilators. Having these fitted would be excruciatingly embarrassing for a girl surely.
But can I congratulate you on these books. As a great fan of Victor Bruno I never thought I would ever again read books so very well written and enjoyably erotic. And I speak as one who is more usually interested in classroom discipline, not 'toilet' sort of things.”

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There are some really interesting ideas broached here. I'm not too sure I like the term 'lash', though, as relating to a caning. I understand the eroticism involved - evoking as it does some sort of analogy with the use of the tongue in intimacy - but I feel happier with its association with the tongue-like action of a supple leather strap or tawse applied to the buttocks and thighs, especially with a girl positioned and pinioned over her mistress's lap, or a multi-stranded sauna-whip or martinet applied to the breasts.

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The point the writer makes about the potential eroticism inherent in descriptions of the folding back of a girl's skirt or dress and pulling down of her knickers prior to punishment is, I think, very true. In the new volume I expect there to be several instances of what I hope will be sufficiently vivid accounts written in the vein suggested - two such I have already completed and one of which incorporates a carefully worked through and detailed description that includes such attributes as the sound of skin-tight latex bloomers, adhering to the skin through the tackiness of perspiration, being pealed back with the girl lying across a nurse's lap.

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The section of the new volume through which we will be brought up to date with Lavinia's continuing tenure in the clinic's 'schoolroom' unit is planned to give ample opportunity to explore, in greater detail than has so far been possible in the series, the deeper feelings of the girls in view of their lack of privacy, though I can say little more for fear of giving too much away - other than it will be quite inventive. Remember that the introduction of bed pans, like so many refinements, has been at the whim of the staff. These are women who, unlike the supervising staff in the original so called Stanford experiment, who were selected at random from within the cohort of volunteers, have been carefully vetted and selected from within a group of psychiatric nurses based on their predisposition toward dominant lesbian tendencies and given free rein to develop the regime and innovate as they see fit.

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I have to say that, like the correspondent above, the 'toiletry thing' is not really my 'bag' either, but it lends itself to the medical fetish aspect that I was trying to incorporate and the subject seemed to arise quite naturally given the context of an experimental psychology clinic sited within a psychiatric hospital. I have to say that the use of suppositories to inhibit bowel movement had not occurred to me - a great idea, that - but the use of a steadily increasing size over time has. This is something explored within the new volume and strangely enough very much in the manner described. The insertion of a suppository (or suppositories) is somehow more personal and more of a violation of the person than the administration of an enema and is best given, as I see it, with the girl bent double across the starched-aproned lap of a nurse with an appropriate dialog as above. It is also a treatment I see as more likely to occur in the domestic setting that we explore before we see young Lavinia persuaded to sign up as an inmate of the clinic. Ironically though, despite the kind comments above - comparing my writing favourably with that of Victor Bruno - this particular direction of plot development is as much due to my trying to get away from that style of writing (despite having been so influenced by it) and go beyond the work of the great master as anything else. I should also point out to the uninitiated that despite any impression given by this discussion, the medical fetish aspect per se - i.e, as conventionally perceived - plays only a relatively small part in the story arc of the INSTITUTIONALISED series; it is definitely not obsessed with scatological concerns. Nor are there the long, drawn-out and inhumanly-severe canings that might be encountered elsewhere - the work was never conceived as a series of hard-core S and M novels. But then again, from a psychological standpoint, if one reads between the lines then in its own way the story-line could be perceived to be just as cruel, perhaps more so.

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Taking all that into account we finally come to the point regarding the prophylactic devices. I originally intended to weave more detail as regards the operation and fitting of these devilish devices into INSTITUTIONALISED volume two. Indeed a heck of a lot was completed at the time, but insufficiently so to really do the idea justice. Rather than use the material half-baked, as it were, I decided upon including greater detail and incorporating it into the plot line of volume three. I have since come to the conclusion that the best place to elucidate these ideas is within the pages of the upcoming 'in-betweeny' volume - think how a Victorian physician might have tackled 'obsessive self abuse', think of masturbation denied...but think also of temptation constantly and unrelentingly aroused. A similar fate befell certain ideas I harboured regarding the fitting of particularly ugly teeth braces to an otherwise pretty and vivacious girl and a description of what I like to call; 'Matron's, enforced self -critical body-image mirror therapy. The former I expect you will encounter in INSTITUTIONALISED volume three, the latter you will come across in the aforementioned, up-coming 'in-betweeny' book - I really must come up with a better working title!

A Kind Comment Received and a Bit about the Next Book

As a comment to my last posting ‘Orage’ wrote: “Garth,
I've finished reading ‘Institutionalised part 2’ and words fail me to express admiration! The book is absolutely riveting. Your minute description of the girl's garments when she's in the car was enough to make me sweaty all over.
You're so knowledgeable you could write an outstanding study for a university doctorate. But God forbid! Much better to leave us on tenterhooks waiting for part 3.”

I was about to reply with a comment of my own when I realised what a chance it presents to outline something of the book I'm presently working on - the in-betweeny volume, as I call it as a working title. So I thought I would paste up my reply as if a full-blown blog entry, pretty much in the style that I had begun writing it - so here goes:

Ah! Well, you see I already have a university doctorate, albeit something to do with cows losing their marbles. Thanks for the kind comments, it all helps keep me going. Anyone having gotten to the end of volume 2 would have got some flavour of the direction volume 3 will be headed when I get round to writing it (some small part of it is already completed to some degree - and perhaps as much as three-quarters of it exists already in my mind’s eye). First of all though I want to finish the book I'm working on as it is perhaps as much as two thirds completed on paper. It sort of fits in between volumes 2 and 3 - as I've said before – and covers the period in Lavinia's life when, while in conflict with her Guardian, she is taken under the wing of the woman she comes to call Aunt.

We follow step-by-step Lavinia's path as she is introduced, first to that woman's psychotherapist friend and then gradually to a life of increasingly restrictive discipline and the acceptance of corporal punishment by way of the strap and the cane. We see her persuaded to sign up, as a volunteer clinical research subject, to a project being run under the auspices of a private psychiatric hospital in that institution’s very secluded and very secure experimental psychology unit - itself embedded deep within the hospital's secure wing – where she is to join a small group of girls living in an environment that has been set up approximating to a private boarding school from a bygone age. It all sounds very cosy - all ‘jolly hockey sticks’ and midnight feasts, straight out of The Girl's Own Annual circa 1955 - and so she is completely unprepared for the strict discipline, mind-numbing tedium, demeaning treatment, corporal and psychological punishment and near constant humiliation that she encounters there. Little wonder then that she should seek to leave as soon as possible; but as we have seen in volume to leaving that particular research project is not such an easy option.

We also get a further glimpse into the previous life of one Meredith Hewson and gain insight into the works of a church-run charitable institution only vaguely alluded to in volume 2. Set up in the nineteenth century to care for ‘young women likely to drift into moral peril’ - its remit: to house, employ, keep secure and keep safe such ‘waifs’ from their own harm - vouchsafed beyond the scope of prying eyes and with a nefarious, if nebulous, connection to the aforementioned psychiatric hospital, its work continues today in much the same vein as it did then. Behind its austere portals, the runaways, the lost hopefuls, toil in penance to the Lord and are educated in equal measure - albeit within the limited scope deemed suitable for such girls by 19th-century values; parochial and scholastic discipline intermingle with hypocrisy and ambiguous motive.

Later some of the loose ends are tied up and gaps filled in when we learn something of what happened after young Lavinia made her bid for freedom after her psychological assessment as seen in volume 2. Finally we are given some insight into the mindset of a certain Ms Julia Soames as she prepares to receive back Susan Stringer from the research clinic for the summer months, before deciding - upon consultation with her psychotherapist acquaintance - that it might be advantageous for all concerned if young Susan was to pass the summer living under the care of a professional governess and her nursery-nurse assistant in the secluded country home of a certain titled woman in North Norfolk. And at this point we will of turned full circle and be set up for volume 3 with the necessity for flashbacks etc now negated.

Throughout, though, I'm cognisant of the need to try to avoid repetition as much as possible, in the manner that the work of another author was criticised in a comment appended to an earlier posting on this site. And therein lies the trial of course.

Emails, Latex, Starched Collars, Restriction and Enforced Tattooing

My apologies to all those who have emailed me over the last week or so and have yet to receive a reply. I have been out of action for one reason or another and on and off for quite a while now and in the meantime the incoming e-mail tends to build up. The new arrivals eventually push earlier messages further and further down the pile until they disappear off the bottom of the page and go out of focus - then they are all too easily overlooked. I am now working my way through my outstanding email stack and in so doing I thought I might use one or two to illustrate points regarding the INSTITUTIONALISED story arc and the influences that have impacted upon it thus far. As always I'll keep everything anonymous unless the writer concerned requests acknowledgement.

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Here is one that unfortunately it has taken me seven days to reply to - seven days languishing in my mailbox is unforgivable, sorry old chap - and my reply. The pictures are from a set that somebody recently sent me anonymously, for which my heart-felt thanks, and which deliciously illustrate - in an in-between-the-lines sort of way - the spirit of part of the upcoming new volume. There is piquant ambiguity there; of which, for our purposes, one might wish to choose the darker interpretation - is the girl truly as content as she seems... or has she just come to think of herself as content?..or been expertly led into a mindset of dominated acceptance? hmmm! I know not the origin of these pics so I can only hope I am not treading on any one's toes, copyright speaking, here - if so I will of course remove them at once.

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“I am really enjoying the descriptions of the uniforms, especially Lady Madison’s “maid” and the girl in the wheelchair, 24C, I’m not that keen on latex but the idea of all white, including the Nurses’ uniforms is great, adding the Nun style wimple adds to the effect. The idea of tattooing the individual “patients” number on their buttocks is inspirational, just a couple of questions though, why get the girls to write their names when consenting, wouldn’t it have been better to have them sign in a previous chapter that they would in the future as eg 23C and then any consent form would only use their number, or was the intention to introduce a little confusion when they used their previous name. Also what would happen if the patient changes from the school to the cells, eg 30S / 30C and then back again, would she have been tattooed?”

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I have to say that latex is only on the peripheral my interests, my interests really lie more with the use of corporal punishment and imposition of strict discipline and school uniforms and the like on young ladies in their late teens or early twenties. As I have said before; my formative reading matter tended to be the likes of Richard Manton and Victor Bruno, and if you know the works of these authors you'll get a feeling for where I'm coming from. As I read around more over the years and discovered other people's interests, the discomfiture inherent in the idea of the heroine having to contend with snug-fitting school knickers, say, fitted with a latex lining seemed to lend itself to developing that all-important sense of restriction. I saw the use of latex under such circumstances much in the same vein as crisply starched school blouses having high, tight starched collars, a girl's hair being tightly plaited and pinned coiled to either side of her head or cut to a short boyish, collar length, style, restrictive corsetry incorporating a stiffened backboard so as to ensure good deportment at the school desk, heavy gabardine rain-capes worn on the warmest of days or toe-crushing shoes cunningly designed to hobble the wearer and so ensure a suitably submissive dainty, girlish gait. You have to realise that when I set out to write these books I also set out to incorporate as many disparate fetishes that seemed to fit with the storyline - not necessarily my own interests in all cases.

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The level of discipline and restriction that many letter writer's seemed to advocate in the correspondence pages of Janus, Blushes, Whispers and some other magazines published in the 1980s, the period when I was mostly reading them and tend to hark back to, never really rung true with me in the context within which the correspondents would develop their ideas - such regimes as were often advocated seemed unlikely, if not downright distasteful to the point of being a turnoff, in the context of the parental home or in any sort of conventional and publicly scrutinised school system. Where on occasion some sort of promise of plausibility did seem to arise it was to be found more often than not broached in connection with the subject of ' admission procedures’ wherein the existence of various small, secure and privately funded institutions were sometimes posited - apparently run as much for the amusement of the rich patrons that fund it as to benefit the reformation or education of the inmates.

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One writer talked about an establishment wherein a young lady might be confined and where she might be visited from time to time by the man or woman responsible for her incarceration. Some spoke of reformatory schools and short-sharp-shock regimes, lasting two to three months perhaps. Others, excitingly in my opinion, spoke of minimum periods above a year while still others used that wonderful term 'indefinite'. Then one would sometimes come across the idea of a young lady cloistered behind the high walls of her ancestral home, kept from her inheritance by a cruel guardian or stepparent and under a regime of some sort of scholastic discipline whether mediated by a stern governess, dour children's nanny or strict nursery nurse. Influenced by all of the above and having read about the church run, so-called, Madeleine laundries and the ease with which a young woman could find herself committed to such a place - or indeed, in the Victorian period, to the local mental asylum - merely for having refused the advances of the local squire, as well as the unethical psychological experiments carried out in the 1930s through to the 1960s, I chose to invoke a combination of these ideas, centring around a privately funded research unit embedded within a secure psychiatric hospital. As you know it is basically the story of a girl who, having been manipulated into becoming a voluntary research subject for a short period, finds herself increasingly less able to extract herself from the situation to find herself in.

The idea of having the girls sign an earlier legal document stating that from that point forth, while within the institution, their assigned patient number would stand for their given name in all further waivers is a nice one. The reason I opted to have the girls sign the documentation, giving the hospital the right to tattoo them, using their full names, was to impress upon them the legality of their situation and to further impress upon them the futility of attempting to stand against the reform--school / boarding-school regime they are being kept under. It is for similar reasons that the documentation itself is dictated to the girls and has to be rendered in their own handwriting while sitting at their school desks. Obviously, pre-printed sheaves of papers, merely requiring the subject place her signature at the relevant points, could have been handed out, but that would have been missing out on a wonderful opportunity to further apply psychological pressure on them - remember that during the dictation process, any one girl making a mistake or failing to achieve sufficient copperplate-neatness caused the group as a whole to have to start again from scratch. Recall also that the documentation was worded so as to be not so much a permission given to the hospital as it was a request from the girl concerned that the hospital authorities should permanently tattooed each with her assigned patient number. You have hit the nail on the head when you posit the intention of introducing a little confusion when the girls are forced to use their previous names - a girl finding herself automatically going to use her patient number despite herself, perhaps finding her given name appearing almost strange to her, will surely be mindful of the effect that her time in the unit as already had upon her.

As to what would happen as regards the tattoo if the patient was to be changed from the 'schoolroom' regime to the ' prison' or ' workhouse' regimes - there is a good reason why this would not be of too much concern but to elucidate further would be to give too much away.

Curbing Masturbation and Domestic Discipline – A Scanned Letter from Blushes C.P Special Edition

The title says most of it - and I am too pushed for time to say very much more. A very inspiring and stimulating little treatise I think you will agree - it certainly was responsible for inspiring the development of some of my ideas, anyway. It is amazing how often the most interesting of these letters seem to either start or end close into the spine of the magazine - even the short ones. In this case, being a 'C.P Special' - and thus a compilation - the book is rather thick and because of that it proved difficult to get clear reproduction of the scanned print close in to the spine. I have done the best I can and hope you can make it all out in a satisfactory manner. If not, let me know and perhaps some time after Christmas, when I have a little more time, I will transcribe the letter as text. The main body is on the left and the continuation from the next page is on the right (amazing!). Just click on each to enlarge enough (I hope) to make readable.

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The picture, above left, is just a little something that I scanned from a fairly recent newspaper cutting and just seemed apt, especially as the mini-kilt seemed so popular in the reader's letters pages of such mags as Blushes, Janus et al in those far-off days. The shot actually originates from a scene in The Benny Hill Show (UK TV); popular here in the 1970s.

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I am hoping to get at least a tiny bit done to add to the new book before having to rush out to pick up the kids from school and then head off - via no less than three buses - to Brent Cross, North West London (the closest half-way decent Mall) for a spot of hurried Christmas shopping...Oh, what joy!

A (very) Quick Update

Sorry you have not heard from me for a week now. There have been personal / relationship problems here, not unrelated from my having been on a near week-long bender that I am experiencing some difficulty in drying-out from. This time of the year is always difficult in terms of staying out of the pubs, what with all the marketing ploys exhorting one to party, party, party! At least there has been plenty of exchanges going on by way of comments appended to earlier post - my gratitude goes out to all those who have contributed to keeping this blog alive over the last week. I have a carol concert to attend at St Martins In The Fields, London tonight, for which I have to arrive sober and I managed to get through yesterday unscathed by the ravages of drink. I am still rather shaky and suffering anxiety attacks / nightmares but I hope to resume scanning my collection tomorrow - and will hopefully post something from it - and maybe, if I can fight back the depression sufficiently, I can resume a little work on the latest book. Bye for now ...Watch this space!

More on Admission Procedures and Institutionalised Punishment

Once again I find myself a little strapped for time. I have to rush out to get on with one or two shores related to preparations for Christmas but I shall be taking my net book computer with me so hopefully I will be doing a little writing later on somewhere, perhaps in a pub with any luck! There has been some interesting correspondence going on via the comments sections attached to my last few posts over the last couple of days, including the contribution of some very interesting and useful links, all of which I shall report on next time. An anonymous contributor has apparently been greatly taken with the subject of admission procedures, as portrayed in the reader's letter that I scanned in from an old copy of Janus I found my collection. As I said before, this was a subject broached any times over the years in the Janus reader’s letters pages, played a pivotal role in developing and forming my interests as they are today and in retrospective view provided a rich vein which I have unashamedly mined quite extensively in developing some of the ideas I have incorporated (and continue to develop) in my INSTITUTIONALISED story arc. Anyway, over the weekend, while rummaging through my old suitcase-cum-treasure chest in a spare moment, I came across a fascinating firsthand account of life in a 1930s institution that I remember reading way back in the 1980s and that my mind has often flashback to in developing my storylines. I have truncated it somewhat, as it is rather long and also moves away from my particular areas of interest, to include those sections that were personally most influential at the time and that endured in the back of my mind to be refined, redeveloped and incorporated into the little (and not so little) tableaux I would conjure in fantasy. See you soon - meanwhile why not have a trawl through the comments sections and join in; all ideas and contributions are most gratefully welcomed.

And the birched Schoolgirl? Nothing to do with the letter's contents whatsoever, it's just that the birch seems to me an appropriate form of institutional corporal punishment for that era. I can't envisage it in the home environment, even in the hands of a stern governess, but within the confines of a suitably secure punitive institution...that's another matter entirely. It is not a form of correction I would imagine would be found wielded by the medical staff, the nurses and matron, populating the secure experimental psychology unit that we visit in INSTITUTIONALISED volumes 1 and 2, but behind the walls of a charitable church-run shelter for girls deemed in moral danger... Well, who knows?

Another Janus Reader's Letters Scan

I hadn't really planned to post an update today, but having harbored a suspicion that the opportunity might arise I took the precaution of emailing myself one of my more recent scans from my desk computer before leaving home yesterday. Right now I am in a coffee bar in Muswell Hill, North London and quite close to Alexandra Palace which I will be visiting tomorrow at some point in order to look around the antiques fair being held there (I collect American Depression Glass, you see - quite apt you might think, considering that I suffer from depression). I have a couple of hours free which I intend to dedicate - once I have completed this - to working on the new volume. I am presently working on a piece provisionally entitled 'The Spiral Stair' which revolves around (revolves around - spiral staircase - get it? Ha, Ha,Ha!) a woman 's visit to a the not-so-humble abode of a certain clergyman in order to get some idea of the workings of his charity offering shelter to young women thought in danger of falling into moral peril. Later i have to go off and earn a crust doing a little paid work - oh well!

Meanwhile, I thought many of you might appreciate this scan taken from the reader's letters pages of a 1980s Janus magazine. It is another example of how that mag so often helped formulate and develop my interests and the direction of my writing. Bear in mind as you read through it, though, that I was never very happy with the idea of the involvement of parents (at least genuine biological parents - by proxy seems fine) or other blood relatives then or now. In my mind's eye I would change the circumstances to involve step-relatives of various flavors - or later and better still, as my ideas developed and I became more widely read - a court appointed legal guardian or strict governess in the employ of a grasping stepmother.