You leave the relaxing, everything works, everyone smiles, world of Canada to face the no-can-do, bugger-off world of Blighty that starts as soon as the plane pulls up to the gate and the ground staff push past you to start rifling for left-over goodies. Every time I return, I feel like a fish out of water for a bit. Take your hairbrush to the stand and defend our ancient liberties!. Flying back to England is always a slightly disheartening process. Correspondents resent the ridicule and censure that their passion arouses "when all we want is to have a consenting sexual experience with another adult". One suggests a "Spankers Pride Day" to be staged in Trafalgar Square, while another urges that they find a spokesman to legitimise the movement.
Who better than the man who once defended Oz magazine from charges of obscenity? Stop hiding like a giant dormouse, Sir John. Having said which, I know state-school-educated males who say their interest in CP springs from an acute disappointment at never having been smacked as boys.The lively and downright fascinating forum on Britishspanking dismisses all attempts at cod psychology, however. In the older generation, there's certainly a stern nanny factor: parental remoteness often meant that the most influential woman in a boy's life was his nurse or school matron, and his first inklings of sexual arousal were linked to that woman smacking him. Her sketches of a woman who closely resembled herself in various degrees of chastisement enlisted an army of fans, so I've never been in doubt about how many CP (corporal punishment, mes enfants) enthusiasts there are out there.I am a little less clear about the genesis for such enthusiasm. The magazines' house artist, Paula Meadows, also provided artwork for Erotic Review ads. She was a petite, soft-voiced woman who dressed demurely and had once starred in erotic movies, hence her nickname, "the Mary Poppins of porn". One splendid old boy in his eighties who used to take me to his club in St James would lament the fact that he could no longer find an amenable female "friend" to slap his bony rump.
The last volunteer had been a soft-hearted Macmillan nurse: "I used to buy her prime steak and give her money for her taxis, but it wasn't prostitution, you understand?" I did, but such angels are in rare supply.However, I was able to point him towards two specialist publications, Janus and Februs, which provided heavily illustrated solidarity for the spanking community. This was particularly the case in the early years of the Review, when most of my readers were Home Counties gents aged 50 to 80. I thought, God, what a strange one we've got here." The problem for some isn't even that it's kinky - more that it's the Benny Hill of perversions when, if you're going down that path, you might as well have Jack Dee with a cat-o'-nine-tails. Even the notoriously bohemian Molly Parkin, who applied herself with vigour to the task of beating the barrister's botty, admitted last week: "After two hours or so, I used to say, 'I'm bored now, sweetheart, can I stop?'" Two hours? Sweet Jesus, someone should give the woman an OBE. I have huge sympathy for Field and Parkin because when I edited The Erotic Review I was overwhelmed with requests to administer a sound thrashing, exhortations to "bend over and think of Britain", and pleas "to see more pictures of lovely, red rumps being spanked by a paddle in your august publication". The actress Shirley Anne Field, who had a youthful liaison with Mortimer, said, "He had this thing about spanking and hairbrushes.
