I’m going to interrupt the tawse story for a moment or two.

In my edition of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”, there’s a playful bondage and discipline scene early in “The Adventure of King Omar al-Nenan and his son Sharkhan”.

The young Prince Sharkhan is beside a pool when he sees a group of beautiful girls approaching. So, as you would, he climbs a tree so he can hide and watch them. This is most rewarding, because it is the beautiful Princess Abriza, with a retinue of serving girls almost as beautiful. And they undress and slip into the water, which runs sleekly over their peach-firm, lion-brown breasts, bellies and buttocks, their soft thighs and their sacral dimples.

Sharkhan is a happy man, though not a gentleman.

Then the beautiful and naked Princess, tiring of her beautiful and naked maidens’ silly chatter, threatens to tie them up and spank their bottoms with her belt, one by one. By one, by one. Having delivered the threat, she makes good on it. Let’s say there were a dozen serving girls. It must have taken ages.

"Like this, Princess?" Both paintings by the wonderful Etienne Dinet.

So the scene is one of spanked, mildly flushed servant girls in one heap, and an orderly queue of unspanked girls waiting for the Princess to get to them. The sound is all girlish squealing, the slap of leather on sun-warmed serving-girl buttocks, and an oddly human sighing sound coming from the tree above them. As for the scent … It must have been a nice place to be, though I doubt Prince Sharkhan was feeling comfortable.

That sounds like an Arabian night, doesn’t it?

(Answer tomorrow.)

Robert Burns got his name attached to most of the poems in “The Merry Muses of Caledonia”, a collection of poems in Scots dialect, mostly about fucking. The rest concern … farting.

The idea of “The Merry Muses” is a bit better than the reality, though, because the poems could only seem funny if you were heroically drunk, and they aren’t all that sexy, either. Here’s a slice of one of the best ones.

From: Haed I the Wyte She Bade Me

I pat six inches in her wame,

A quarter wadna fly’d her;

For ay the mair I ca’d it hame,

Her ports they grew the wider.

My tartan plaid, when it was dark,

Could I refuse to share it;

She lifted up her holland-sark,

An bad me fin’ the gair o’t:

Or how could I amang the garse,

But gie her hilt an hair o’t;

She clasped her hochs aboot my erse,

An ay she glowred for mair o’t.

(Robert Burns)

So Burns’s idea of a sex poem is a man complaining that some woman didn’t find his cock big enough and wasn’t ready to stop when he was. If it was just one poem, you could say it was characterisation, where you’re not meant to take the singer’s point of view, like in a Randy Newman song. Trouble is, they’re all like that. Except the ones about farting.

It makes you wonder how Scots blokes got their romantic reputation. I know a woman who swears she will fuck any man who asks her nicely in a Scots accent.

Actually, that’s probably true of every woman I know, ach the noo. Sean Connery’s doing a lot of the carrying, I guess.

On the other hand, the Scots gave us the little kilt, essential wear for women pretending to be schoolgirls, and the tawse. And if you like welts and weeping (that’d be wauts and greetin’, if Burns wrote poems about that sort of thing), then the tawse is your implement.

I bought my tawse in Lochgelly. I’m a traditionalist, when I remember.