Hi folks! It's a wonderfully sunny day here in London and despite feeling a little worse for wear, having spent the majority of yesterday afternoon and evening in the pub, nevertheless I am in high spirits. At the weekend I attended an antiques fair in Bushy, a little town in Hertfordshire just to the north-west of London where of all things I purchased an old Ponting's holiday camp brochure dating from 1975, partly for its nostalgia value but also with one eye to the provision of blog content. I had intended to put aside a little time today to get on with some scanning in any case and the fruit of my labours as regards the aforementioned purchase can be viewed in a PicassaWeb album that I have created specifically for it under the general banner of Women's Nylon Overalls and Uniforms Catalogue Scans and imaginatively entitled 'Pontins Girls'. To be truthful some of the pictures were rather small and could do with enhancing but are interesting nevertheless, if nothing else than for the observation of how surprisingly like nurses uniforms some of the restaurant-staff serving uniforms are. There are couple of actual nurses pictured as well, one of which - a woman dressed in what appears to be a navy-blue hospital sister's uniform - quite readily evokes the image I have in my mind of the woman under whose cane the delectably chubby bottoms of young Lavinia and Susan dance in my first two volumes. While it was at it, I also added 14 more pictures to the 'Art by Lynn Paula Russell' (Paula Meadows, as was) album, listed under 'Spanking Artwork Albums'. I can't guarantee that there are no duplicates but I have done my best to check. Both of these albums may be found under the relevant headings in the right-hand sidebar.
The other reason I'm in such a good mood today is that the writing of the new volume has been coming along swimmingly now that I am finally free of niggling computer problems (touch wood!). Of course new ideas and plot directions necessarily leads to further research, which in itself often turns up little gems of inspiration that in turn can redirects and further inform the story arc.One of the pieces I been working on recently revolves around a girl undergoing a series of interviews involving batteries of psychological tests and assessments and in-depth questioning that more rightly might be described as interrogation. No longer a guest of the institution of her own volition, she finds the goalposts have now moved somewhat. She can no longer harbour any hope of being able to just walk away from the place, nor can she necessarily rely on those on the outside that know of her whereabouts intervening, few that they might be - indeed it seems that one or more parties have a vested interest in her remaining just where she is. And despite having now become officially, on paper at least, an actual in-patient rather than a volunteer behavioural research candidate, she is still very much embedded in the experiment, living eating and sleeping in the narrow confines of a self-contained sealed off section of the behavioural research unit initially set up on grounds approximating to a rather strict old-fashioned girl’s boarding school but having now morphed into something closer to a Victorian reformatory.
Obviously the girl realises that the only person that is going to get her out is herself and that the only way she can achieve that is ironically by going along docilely with the regime. She knows that her ‘case’ will be reviewed and that at that time she will have the opportunity to convince a panel of independent doctors of her suitability for release back into society. The trouble is, she knows too that her ‘case’ is not scheduled for review for nearly two years and that even then, should the reports received by the panel in the meantime not warrant it, she might not be invited to physically attend her own hearing. If she should give the staff sufficient cause to write ill of her, she could easily find her review date put off for another year or even longer - and even then she might not get the chance to speak for herself, not unless medical reports regarding her psychological state warranted it.
She also knows she has only herself to blame: Presented with what apparently was the perfect opportunity to blow the whistle, be free of the place and, she thought, potentially claim substantial damages in recompense for her ill treatment she had been naïve enough to blurt out the whole story. Only later did it occur to her how absurd her allegations would appear, out of context and in the absence of concrete evidence - especially when contradicted by a renown and well respected authority. It was hardly surprising that a swift provisional diagnosis of delusion was agreed upon. After all, who would take seriously a tale of a behavioural research unit buried deep within the bowels of a world renown private sanatorium’s secure psychiatric wing wherein young women were routinely incarcerated in prison-like cells and made to work in a sweatshop or - even more absurdly, surely – kept in an environment approximating to the strictest of convent boarding schools, subject corporal punishment and dressed in the most restrictive, juvenile, anachronistic and humiliating school uniform one could imagine?
Now she has to be careful; she is well aware that her every move is being scrutinised in the tiniest detail and report cards duly made out. If she rebels, then that could be held up as evidence of ‘behavioural disturbance’ – not to mention earning her a good few strokes of the matron’s supple cane across her bared bottom. If she submits, on the other hand, she risks becoming as subjugated and institutionalised as the other girls around her, the other ‘long-term subjects’ that she has in the past secretly despised for their ‘weakness’. Therein lays her quandary. But there is worse, in that the section psychiatrist seems to have taken it on her self to thoroughly investigate the girl’s case to her own satisfaction. The woman seems anything but impartial, digging deep into the girl’s background, and apparently determined to extract any and every morsel that might conceivably be evident of the diagnosis. Our tender heroine is summoned to the doctor’s office each and every day; the tedium of the schoolroom swapped for anything from one to four hours for the equally tedious process of incessant and repetitive questioning and probing, much of it on a highly personal level. Given the potential consequences the girl is of course guarded, but halve-truths and fabrications are daily being teased from the rest and absolute refusal to cooperate is not an option - the woman keeps a supple length of rattan by her desk and has no qualms about employing it.
So now we get to the point that has had me hunting about the ‘web’. It seems to me that the good doctor might consider the girl being removed from and returned to the schoolroom each day as being too disruptive. There is a small windowless anteroom, little more than a large walk-in cupboard, leading directly off from her office and equipped with a hospital bed and the idea occurs that she might remove the girl from the usual day-to-day hub-bub of the unit for the foreseeable future, at least until she is satisfied with the outcome. That room and the doctor’s office is going to be the limit of the girl’s universe from now on and given that she is not going to be mixing with the other ‘schoolroom section’ inmates I thought it likely that the school uniform would for the time being no longer be a part of her wardrobe. But how should she be attired? The thought struck me that pyjamas could be the solution, backed up on occasion by the addition of a straight jacket. What could be more apt or make the girl feel more like a mental patient than baggy, ill-fitting institutional flanelete pyjamas in a wide green and white striped pattern. In this scenario I imagine her as becoming the doctor’s own private prisoner, a sort of pet project that the woman can work on at her own convenience. I can envisage the girl being led in front of the psychiatrist’s desk, obliged to hold up her pyjama bottoms with her hands to prevent their slipping down, her wrists linked by cuffs and her ankles hobbled in restraints – how demoralising!
With all that in mind I have been looking around for a little ‘girl-spanked-in-pyjamas’ type inspiration. And as always, Google came up trumps a s witnessed by this little collection and a few links that I will share with you shortly.Before I go I have to say how surprised – and delighted - I have been by the amount of response generated by my last posting. While quite obviously (well at least I think it obvious) this blog has little to do with cross-dressing and TG nevertheless I am sure that the link to Fictionmania kindly provided by ‘Anonymous’ (he gets every where, this ‘Anonymous’ chap) will be of interest to many, thus I have added it to the ‘Useful Resources’ listing in the right-hand sidebar. Another (I assume) Mr ‘Anonymous’ seemed able to read my mind when, referring to the gym suit idea, he suggested a lining of satin and mentioned PVC – I had just written a bare-bones description involving satin-lined serge with an integral rubber layer. I am going to be taking his advice, though, and investigate the possibilities inherent in 1960s and 70s designs before committing myself to one design or another.
Luckily I have recently been scouring the web for just that of late. I have been looking for inspiration to inform certain ideas I have developed that revolve around the possibilities inherent in the concept of an exploitative private or charity-run workhouse, but always with an eye to how such a scenario might be integrated into the concept of a behavioral research unit and perhaps overlap with the latter's asylum-like structure. 
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