Eggs and Bacon, Trials and Tribulations on the Line

Hi Orage and others who may have been wondering about my protracted absence from the bloggersphere! No, I’m not being lazy, far from it! I'd got the date of my return from the Greek island of Kos (yes, I'd got the spelling wrong) wrong - it was 14 nights, not 10 nights. This meant I was scheduled to join my kids at their grandmother's place (just outside Clacton, by the sea on the east coast) more or less immediately on my return, having spent an additional night in a hotel in Gatwick due to a delay occurring to my return flight which meant I got back to the UK too late to travel on. Since then I have been pouring all my creative energies into fulfilling the commission I have spoken about previously having fallen behind schedule due to various other commitments. This latter endeavour has been complicated a little by the fact that my kids were scheduled to return to school later than I had been led to believe they were supposed to - and so for a few days the privacy I need to work in has been somewhat limited (they went back for the first time since the summer school holidays yesterday. The other problem I encountered upon my return home was a severely limited broadband internet connection, with the connection intermittent at best and failing completely to connect at worst!

Now it wasn’t my intention to update the blog again until I had completed the commissioned piece but I am visiting a friend’s place today who has a good fast broadband connection as I needed to quickly look up something for that piece. As I blundered into a blog I had not come across before I thought I’d take the opportunity to add it to the blog list (see right hand sidebar) and briefly update you all as to my progress. Called ‘Domestic Discipline Digest’ you can visit by clicking on the above picture taken from the blog, clicking on the blog title here or checking out the sidebar blog list. By the way; I have also added a reply from yours truly to a comment made on the previous entry which some of you may be interested in. Click here to read.

The problem with my home internet access is ongoing and is clearly due to electrical noise on the phone line. The phone sounds like eggs and bacon frying in a pan whenever it rains - and it is not exactly a desert here in the UK! As I said to someone else in an email recently by way of explanation: You are probably thinking 'just report it to the phone company'. In theory this sounds simplicity itself; in practice it is somewhat a pain in the arse! You see we don't get our phone line from the phone company (British Telecom),,, Oh no! We get our phone service by way of the post office (mail company) and oddly they are based in Ireland and don't seem to know what they are doing (although they get out a British Telecom engineer to fix the fault if they find it). Weird isn't it. I wonder if it is like that where you are in the world?

Here we get our electricity from the gas company (or is it the other way around?) and bank accounts and mobile phone contracts (and insurance and banking) through the local supermarket.

The utility companies are a real mess though. It was supposed to lower prices through increased competition - and perhaps it can lead to lower bills sometimes, when it all works - when anything goes wrong though, all hell breaks loose. And there are cases I have read in the UK press of people receiving multiple bills from different utility companies for the same service!

In our case; our telephones, internet router and internal wiring are all ours and our responsibility. We get the bill for our phone calls from the post office but rent the phone line from British Telecom, the phone company. The broadband service provider is someone else entirely, although their equipment rack is housed in the local British Telecom telephone exchange (to whom they pay rent to house it and provide access to the phone lines).

So guess what happens when there is noise on the line and the fault is intermittent and difficult to localize? Yeah! You got it! Everyone points the finger at everyone else and it goes around and around and around.... You get the picture. For now I’m off to get some more writing done and the blog will return to full service just as soon as I get the commissioned piece satisfactorily completed. At that point I intend to start to add some original creative content by yours truly on a weekly basis. Bye for now!

'Wringing' Out the Inspiration

Hi folks. I was going to put up a few views of post-'riot' Wood Green North London but I have just had a change of heart. I have now worked out how to download the photo's off of my phone (took all of two minutes) but while reorganising the various folders on the desktop computer I came across an archive of 'Wringer's' photoshots that I had gathered together for my own enjoyment from various sources.

No matter what has been stamped across one of them, these are - to my knowlege at least - all the work of 'Wringer'. My first inclination was to load these on to a memory stick and upload them from my holiday hotel (WiFI extra but 'reasonable' I have been assured). On second thoughts there is always the chance of said memory stick falling into 'judgemental' hands while passing through customs or what ever, by being stolen or indeed lost and so I decided to quickly upload now and to take the riot pics (not very exciting, frankly) and a couple of pics from my last holiday (Pompeii, Herculaneum, Mount Vesuvius - that sort of thing) and upload them later in the week from the island of Koss. Some of these Wringer pics you will have seen before, perhaps here, and other's you will have not.

They are also widely variable in terms of resolution etc - but this reflects their various sources; all now lost in the mist of time but including several Yahoo Groups I seem to remember. The thing is how one almost automatically tends to weave a multitude of tales around them, individually or as a set - I think it has a lot to do with the ambiguity of the background (especially in those atmospheric black and white shots) along with the institutional appearance of the bed, leaving one's imagination to fill in the gaps as to whether one is being made privy to a domestic or an institutional scenario. Wonderful stuff!
I have to be off now. Gym first (if it ain't been burnt!) then off to Gatwick, leaving North London around 4 o'clock this afternoon. The flight is not until tomorrow, but it is at 4 o'clock in the morning!!! and so, I am staying in Gatwick for the night. I guess in theory I need not leave London until late this evening, but I want to miss the rush hour (about four hours these days) and also preempt some genius coming up with the idea of burning the stations... Just a matter of time!!!

Hi to 'Orage' there! Good to hear from you too! Hi, too, to anyone who has emailed and still waiting for a reply or who has not heard from me for some time (especialy 'Snooze' and 'Miha')- I hope to catch up on my emails while away, along with completing my commissioned piece (which I must say has down much to reawaken me!), and so you should hear from me in the next week.

Oh! And I forgot to say: INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 is now available in the Ebook format through Andrews UK LTD at Amazon Kindle (click to visit). I be setting up a direct link in the right hand sidebar sometime in the near future.

Riotous in Tottenham

Hi folks! It has been a hell of a long time I know but here I am again. After the completion of the mamoth (for me) work that became in effect INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3 almost by default and the marathon writing task it turned out to be - taking well over 18 months from concept to completion – I was left feeling drained. I have had liitle enthusiasm since and a similar dearth of inspiration. What little inspiration I have had has come by way of the private commision I received and that I have mentioned before and what creative energies have been unleashed through that route I have ruthlesly harnessed to that cause. Even then progress has been slower than expected, though mostly that has been due to my having to take time off to do other things in the background to earn a crust and though I could of course put aside an hour or two every day to work on the project the ideas just do not come to me as if on schedule in that manner, on demand whenever I have a couple of free hours. I prefer to work in an uninterupted burst of at least a day at a time, though entire weeks are so much better. Still, quite a lot has been achived although I have held back on comleting the project until next week. I am going to the greek island of Koss (hope I spelled that right) for 10 days and it is poised to be one of those quite holidays with very little to do during which I'll easily have time to fit in at least 5 full days writing or more – and so that will be that. I recently went away for 7 nights to Sorrento in Italy but that was another story entirely having an itinary so packed with museum and archiological site visits that I didn't even bother to pack the netbook computer I ordinarily carry around with me.

The photo incidently represents one of the few moments of inspiration on my various travels, being the window I alluded to in an earlier entry that I photographed in Marbella, Southern Spain. The reason I have posted it up is that I intend to use the shot as the basis for a little experimental photo manipulation project I have in mind and the results of which you'll be able to judge for yourselves right here as I go along. Talking of photographs, I have been contacted by 'Wringer' the creative force behind what must be one of my favorite photo sets of all time saying that he is happy to have his pics featured here as long as they are correctly attributed to him – which is fine by me. Many you will have seen before – but possibly not all – and all have fired my imagination, spawning miriad scenarios and diverse creative pathways: Watch this space, as they say!

Now: why the odd title? You may well ask! Well we have just had a riot here in sunny Tottenham. I'll hopefuly have a few pics next time (before Wednesday when I fly out) as soon as I can work out how to coax them off my (not so smart) 'smartphone' 'camera phone' thingy. Not that exciting I know but I'll be more on the ball when I get back from my hols and it's all gonna get a lot more busy on the blog then. Just like the good ol' days when it got started! Bye 'till then!

Riding Along with that Jodhpur Fetish Thing

Well, what a long time it has been! And a busy time too, although I wont bore you with too many of the details. Suffice it to say that I have had to earn a crust; or rather I have been obliged to aid my ‘other half’ in earning a crust since it is she who is currently the breadwinner in our relationship. The trouble is that she is occasionally a little over zealous in fulfilling that role and a little over ambitious in the quantity of work she takes on. She teaches full-time nowadays in a London based university but still likes to hold on to some of her old freelance contacts and so is loathe to give up on taking on freelance work altogether.

Thus it was that I found myself doing a little research work which amounted to trying to uncover how many outlets certain retailers have around the world by going on their websites, utilizing their ‘store-finder’ – which generally lists stores and stockists by country and then by city – and manually counting up the total (over 400 in one instance!). No you can’t just simply ring them up (or email) them and ask, apparently – I’m not sure why but apparently that’s just not done! Besides; some of these companies don’t seem to actually know how many outlets they have themselves – in interview their representatives say one thing but their website ‘store-finder’ says something different entirely. Go figure! There we go – I said I wouldn’t bore you with the details and now I just have!

Right then: The (world’s most tedious) research is not the only kind I have been engaged in – thank fcuk (little fashion-world / dyslexia joke there). Although I had to place on the back burner for a while that commissioned piece I am writing and that I mentioned before I did find time to do a little research around certain aspects that need to be incorporated as I went along. So what did I uncover? Well did you know that there is an entire horse riding attire and jodhpur fetish literature out there? I didn’t. Obviously I knew that riding attire, riding crops and jodhpurs etc sometimes feature in D/S and S & M literature and interests but not jodhpurs as a ‘standalone’ fetish. Indeed it turns out there are several sites catering to this interest and although not directly related to my commissioned piece I have done a little exploration and have added a selection to my ‘Useful Resources’ list in the right hand sidebar. Although not by any means exhaustive, these include: ‘ridingfetish.com’, ‘equestrianbabes.t83.net’, ‘sexyjodhpurs.com’ and ‘jodhpur-fetish.com’. The latter hosts an interesting forum and both it and ‘sexyjodhpurs’ are listed alphabetically together under ‘J’ - for jodhpurs - for the sake of simplicity.

As always one link followed the next and so I added the Yahoo Group ‘Female_Farm_Animals’ (see pic above right - I don't know who created this so can't credit him / her, but it's great) to my sidebar’s ‘Useful Yahoo Groups’ listing and ‘Thomas’s Picks’, ‘The Memories of a Strict Uncle’ and ‘Brambleberry Blush’ to my blog list (the standard one) – also to be found in the right hand sidebar. Finally: A while back ‘Scarletfanny’ added a link to her site ‘Strangelove’ as a comment to one of my postings (a bit naughty that!) which you may have missed. Anyway; I have finally got around to adding it to my blog list and you can get there by clicking on the good lady’s pic (in her school uniform, below left).

Oh! And the box of knobs and wires pictured last time is my Doepfer modular electronic music synthesiser fronted (though lost in the shadows) by my Yamaha DX7 MK II FM synthesiser that I use to control it via a MIDI to voltage / trigger converter module (for those in the know or who actually care!).

Amother Excuse and a Weird Piece of Kit

I was going to to tell you all about the exciting new links I have added today. Except I'm not, because I forgot to email myself the document I'd prepared and now I'm out down the pub. The aforementioned document also contained the links I have just mentioned so that is the end of that for the time being – perhaps tomorrow? But what it was to have been about was something that came to light while doing a little research for that commission piece I mentioned last time.

Did you know that there was a specific jodhpurs fetish? Not just for horse riding gear generally or that fairly well known 'pony-girl' thing but jodhpurs in particular – not even 'riding britches' (no I don't know the difference either!). Not that the subject is necessarily connected to my client's interests - discretion is everything - but it just happened to crop up in a search I did (if you pardon the pun... crop, get it? riding crop? Oh, please yourselves!)

Well, there is quite an extensive literature it turns out and next time I shall be posting up a plethora of links to prove it (well, perhaps not a plethora). I'll also be adding a few new blogs to the blog listing, including a young lady who has added her blog link already as a comment someplace – I'm too pissed to remember where – naughty, that, but she has a nice school uniform she wears so I'll have to put that up as a focal point for a link just for the irony of it (and the fact that it looks great! Though it is typically American and she hails from South Shields – somewhere in the north of the UK apparently; but I'm a Londoner, what do I know?)

Meanwhile, here are a few shots of another of my little distractions – hands up who knows what it is,,, Yes, you at the back, there?

Looks technical though, doesn't it?

Time to Sound the ‘All-clear’ and Punishment Clothing Sans Armholes

Yes at long last it is time to sound the ‘all-clear’! With the indispensable help of several volunteers I think we have finally dispensed with the last of those tenacious little typos that had somehow clung on to a few of the pages of INSTITUTIONALISED volume 3.

Partly I have been hard at that task (making the corrections that is – I am dyslexic, so there is little point of my checking through myself) and partly I have been doing some prelim research for a private commission I have received to write a bespoke piece. The latter is especially exciting as I was becoming more than a little jaded, not to mention disillusioned. Now, having been presented with someone else’s vision for a story framework, I find my self all ‘fired up’ again. Obviously I can’t say much as regards the brief, but surface it to say that even a preliminary scratching around has spawned all sorts of new ideas.

Going back to the proofreading for a moment; a very special ‘thank you’, I feel, must go out to ‘Orage’ who has proved especially diligent in this task. That is not to belittle all those others that have contributed of course, to whom my heartfelt gratitude goes out. Now, despite having now passed through several different individuals’ hands at various stages in the process, it is such an elephantine work – weighing in at well over a quarter of a million words – that some errors and stumbles may yet have fallen through the net, so if you have downloaded a copy since yesterday (Thursday 2nd June) - which was when I created the latest revision – please let me know if you spot anything glaring.

Now, in my defence as to my apparent neglect of this blog of late, I have not been quite the laggard I may appear. I have made several additions to the ‘Useful Resources’ section of the side bar and added a couple of blogs to the blog list. The trouble is that I have failed to make a note of each addition as I have been in a perpetual rush most of the time – it has been the half term school holidays and I have had to do my share of that ‘parenting’ thing – and so you will have to check through to see what has changed. I have also sourced a couple of affiliates that seem suitably appropriate for the direction this blog usually explores. Lupus Films, in particular, always seem imaginative in terms of the plotlines they develop and authentic in terms of their costumes and sets – where else can you see young girls put in button through overalls / work dresses as part of a disciplinary régime? The nurse delivering a spanking pic from SIT-Spanking could almost come out of a certain scene in the new book – at least as depicted in this shot. You can find the links in the right hand sidebar someplace. 'Spanking Shame' is another affiliate I will be adding soon (Bared buttocks at school desk, above)

As for the other half of this entry’s title; I have been playing around with the idea of dresses and blouses etc designed excluding the provision of armholes as an adjunct to certain bondage / discipline themes. I am not talking here of just sewing up the arm holes of pre-existing and commercially available garments but rather of tailor-made bespoke garments, carefully fitted and designed with the aim of making the wearer appear as if a double amputee. The question I find interesting is exactly how such designs would appear to the eye and how one might put that impression over in writing. Your thoughts, please.