What I find particularly lovely, and particularly Indian, about this work of art, one of hundreds on the walls on the temples at Khajuraho, is the expression of happiness and pleasure on the elephant’s face. He just happened to find these two people, a woman and a priest of Shiva, I think, taking pleasure with each other. Their happiness made him happy too.
Dante talked of the love that moved the stars and the worlds in their orbit. But I always found that thin and inadequate because he meant “divine” love, or humans wasting love on an imaginary and rather nasty entity.
In this Indian world-view, love is between living things, where it belongs, and it unites all species and all people and all the world.
Dawn breaks over the Ganges.
(I got up at 5.30AM to get this photo, which is not my favourite time of day, but I’m so very, very glad I did it. It was magical.)
It got even more magical a few seconds later, when the dawn was greeted with bells and chanting from this side of the river. It was other-worldly, an utterly different world.
I can’t pretend I didn’t notice that Indian women are beautiful. I didn’t take many pictures because of consent issues, but I asked these girls if I could, since they were sharing my Ganges boat with me.
They’re just women, I know. Not supermodels. But they affected me enough that when I took this photo I paid them a gauche compliment (“this is the most beautiful photo I’ve taken in India”) and then felt stupid immediately after. So they were good-looking enough enough to make me feel like an idiot of about 18, all over again.
India! Yes, I’m going back.
I’m in India. Up there is a tiny fragment of the erotic art at Khajuraho.
I was up at 5 this morning to watch the sunrise on the Ganges. I have a six in the morning start tomorrow, too.
I have a good many things to say, and many good things to say. But I also got exhaustion, flu and an angry case of diarrhoea. This is not going to be the time I say those good things.
Despite the exhaustion and the rest of it, I’m having a wonderful time, and I love India. But I’m looking forward to slowing down.
You’ll hear from me properly soon.
Here’s the pic I took, of which the top image is just one one fragment.
I live on land stolen from the Darug and Gundungurra Nations.
I hope Australia confronts its past soon and comes to a treaty with the Aboriginal nations.
That treaty, I know, won’t involve full restitution, the “give it back” option. But it will involve political recognition of Aboriginal voices.
Not “the Aboriginal voice”, since the Aboriginal nations, and the Aboriginal people who are not associated with a nation, are as far as you can get from being a monoculture.
It’ll involve recognition of certain traditional hunting and gathering rights. And so on. And serious, non-bullshit government-driven moves to reduce the differences in education, health, imprisonment rates and life expectancy.
Do you know that the average lifespan of an Aboriginal Australian is 15 years less than for a non-Aboriginal Australian?
That’s why an Aboriginal Australian can claim the Age Pension from 50, while for non-Aboriginal Australians the age is 66. Ask the average Australian why that is, in a pub, and they’ll probably say it’s because those fucking Abos get all the perks, and so on.
Anyway, Australia hasn’t even started its first step. In a way, Australia has been very lucky in its image, with its beaches and maybe the GLBTQ Mardi Gras makes the place look more inclusive than it really is.
I remember the horror with which the rest of the world viewed Apartheid-era South Africa. If people looked Australia with a cold eye, they’d think, Fuck, that’s horrifying: some of the conditions here are worse than the apartheid era. I’ve been through places in Australia that looked a lot worse than photos I’ve seen of apartheid-era Soweto.
I’m not an expert. I just know that a nearby country, New Zealand, sorted this out in 1840, with Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi. Which was imperfect in many ways, but it was a crucial start. As a living document it’s being developed all the time to fit with the modern world, and post-colonial ideas of justice.
When the day comes, and there’s some sort of treaty with Aboriginal support, I’ll be proud to become an Australian citizen.
Until then I can’t join “Team Australia”. It’s just a conscience thing.
I’d like to think that improvement will come when the current racist, incompetent, corrupt shambles currently in government in Australia gets the arse. Which will happen as soon as they have an election, and they can’t put that off much longer.
But the hopes I have for Labor are very, very low and muted.
Anyway, nobody in their right mind cares whether I join Team Australia or not, I know. It’s just me.
Still… shout out to anyone else in the same position. And muted hopes for a less racist Australia after the election.
Chetana lay facedown on her bed while Philip washed her. He’d sponged all of her body but now he seemed to be concentrating soapily on her ass and upper thighs. Chetana expected he wasn’t going to shift his attention, or his hands. The cabin rocked gently under them. She knew the ship had left the Laccadive Sea, and was sailing into the Arabian Sea.
His fingers, surprisingly strong, pushed into the muscles of her ass. She felt him find and work on the remaining knots of tension, a process that both hurt her and satisfied. She was aware of another feeling, something luxurious that she hadn’t felt in about two years.
It was that she was relaxed, and her mind was in the sensual world, free of things to do or think about.
At last he smacked the inside of her left thigh, then her right, and repeated until she understood and moved her feet apart, open for him. But he continued to knead the muscles of her ass, and only slowly worked his way down to the backs of her thighs.
At last she sighed, and said, “ah fuck, that’s good. Where’d you learn all that?”
But Philip only smacked her bottom, her skin and muscles gloriously relaxed, when a couple of hours ago she had been so tense it hurt. His smack didn’t hurt. She hoped he’d do it again. Most of her male lovers were too deferential for that sort of thing. He said, “You don’t have to talk, my love.”
His finger slid down the sensitive skin of her perineum, from just below her anus to stop, frustratingly, just above her cunt. He was teasing her. Then he smacked her bottom again and she said, involuntarily, “ooh!” That felt so welcome, so right.
“But you do have to get your ass up.” The hand pressed onto her bottom lifted, and she expected it to land again. But it didn’t arrive. She wriggled a little, and parted her thighs further, then lifted her bottom, in the most abjectly invitational pose she could manage. He said, “Perfect.”
She could hear in his voice that he was smiling at her. Then his hand did land, a slightly harder smack. It seemed to awaken her skin. She felt goosebumps forming, suddenly.
Then the fingers between her buttocks dropped a little and touched her cunt for the first time. Chetana opened her mouth, half from the joy of it and half to suck in a lungful of air. He stroked her lips, still only touching the outer sides. He said “Good girl.”
It was the first time he’d ever said it to her, though she’d known it had been on the tip of his tongue for the last two days. She’d heard him stopping himself. Now he was more relaxed, too.
He stroked her, still slowly and lightly, and at last – at last! – touched her inner wetness with his forefinger. Then he pushed further into her. Chetana said – her voice sounded so high! – “You better fuck me soon. I think I’m going to come any moment.”
She wasn’t surprised when he smacked her again. And then again.
After the third smack, he said, “I don’t care when you come. Or how often. Up to you.”
He put a second finger into her, and reached deep. Chetana groaned.
Last year I wrote a very good book, The Tale of the Tawse. It’s funny, sexy as hell, romantic and exciting.
In it, a man with a name like a Wodehouse character (Freddie Underhill) meets two women, Daphne and Shar, and helps each of them deal with a life crisis, with occasional applications of his hand or a long leather strap, the tawse of the title, to their firm proud et cetera.
At the end of the book, he’s back on his own in New York, and he gets an invitation from each of the women to come to a global warming conference in Wellington, New Zealand. Daphne is having an art exhibition there, and Shar is the translator for the diplomatic team of a small mid-eastern country. Freddie ends the book wondering how he’s going to manage his way through that.
The Tale of the Tawse is currently with a publisher, under consideration, but it’ll be out soon. I have every confidence in that. And one thing the world will be demanding is the continuation of the story. What happens in New Zealand?
I think – just working this out as I go along – that he lets each woman know that the other woman will be there. They both already know of the other’s existence. On the day he arrives in Wellington he invites both women to dinner.
They get on very well. However, Daphne’s up for a threesome, or even a twosome with just her and Shar. But Shar’s not having that. She’s a straight girl.
In the meantime they decide that they’ll get a hotel suite together, the three of them, and they’ll each take turns to sleep with Freddie, while the other sleeps in the next room.
Then Shar hears that her younger cousin, Mahtab, who she hasn’t seen since she was three years old, is also in Wellington, to be married off to a Saudi aristocrat of striking physical and moral unattractiveness. She and Daphne go to meet the girl, and Shar gives Mahtab a card with their hotel room and phone number. Daphne tells the girl about Freddie, and says they’ll get Freddie to help her. She writes down Freddie’s number and gives it to her.
The next day, on the way to the global warming conference, Freddie is attacked and stabbed. He manages to break away and staggers into a butcher’s shop, bleeding a lot. The attackers follow him, but are attacked by the huge butcher, and they run. The butcher calls an ambulance for Freddie, and the hospital stitches and bandages Freddie and says he’s fine to go home.
Back at the hotel, Daphne and Shar are waiting. When they see him injured they realise it must be their fault for giving Mahtab written information, that has obviously fallen into the wrong hands. Shar begs him to punish both of them.
He does. Shar, now sore and weeping, begs him to help her cousin escape. Of course he agrees.
I’m thinking the escape takes place on the ferry running between the North and South Islands. But I’m a bit vague about the details.
That’s as far as I’ve got, so far. I’m making this plot up as I write this post, and I’m out of ideas now. Thank you for listening.
The birth of Venus. Fresco at Pompeii.
In the last few days I’ve clambered and walked all round Pompeii and Herculaneum, and climbed from the road on Vesuvius to look down into the crater, a distance of, I’d say, about one and a half kilometres.
All the time limping like a three-legged dog. That’s because I climbed my way into the grounds of the Villa Diodati, Byron’s old palace in Geneva.
It’s in private hands now, and closed to the public, which is a disgrace. There’s a sign nearby about how “Frankenstein” happened there. The Shelley’s house, where Bysshe and Mary were living, and actually wrote the novel, has been demolished.
By the way, the novel was conceived and mostly written by May Shelley. Percy Bysshe wrote about 7,000 words of it and had a couple of the less important plot ideas, which gets him to the status of minor collaborator. He never claimed any share of the credit.
Anyway, my leg had largely recovered, but before I went into Vesuvius’s terrain (terrain of terror, I guess I shouldn’t say) I undid all the repair work while walking through the Carraculla baths in Rome. A road made of cobble Has the power to make me hobble. It seems.
After the ruined cities, plus the volcano that did the ruining, my feet weren’t just sore; they’d swollen up until they looked to me like someone else’s. And that someone else was possibly an elephant.
Since then I’ve kept my feet elevated, and me relaxed, as much as possible, and as a result they’re nearly back to normal size. Phew!
Anyway, I’ve been having a wonderful time, but I’m physically exhausted. That, it seems to mean, prevents me from writing. Writing takes energy, and the body has to supply it. It hasn’t been. What energy I have, I’ve devoted to making myself walk, and go and look round different places.
I have a terrific episode of Maddie’s story (the Wicked Wednesday saga) formed in my head, but it’ll have to wait till next week, when I’ll be resting on the beach in Phuket.
It’s interesting that domming and writing both require unusual amounts of mental energy. You need desire, focus, attention to detail while shaping the direction you want to go.
Right now, if some girl were to drape herself over my knee (or chair), I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to oblige her. Similarly, I have the plot of next week’s Maddie saga worked out, but I couldn’t write it right now to save my life. (That, I guess, is not actually true. At gunpoint, I’d write it.)
Anyway, I’ll be able to write more next week, by bribing some kid to watch my laptop when I go for swims. My journey ends on 16 May.
My great-grandfather was at Gallipoli. Gallipoli was an attempt to get a land pathway into Europe which British troops could follow, and attack the Germans closer to Germany than the stagnant lands created by trench warfare.
The road through Turkey would be opened by non-British troops, mainly New Zealanders and Australians, whose deaths in a futile and poorly planned operation wouldn’t be making headlines in England. There was a beach selected for this task, and naturally the British navy sailed straight past it and dumped the “colonial” troops into a beach where conditions would be intolerable if you lived, and where the Turks could sit up in the hills safely pouring lead onto the poor bastards on the beachhead.
Anyway, my great-grandfather was stuck on the killing beach. He did what you do under the circumstances. You try to go forward, you try to kill people wearing the other clothing style, you try to keep your head down and stay alive, and sometimes you do crazy brave things because the men you’re with are doing them too.
He came back from the meat-grinder alive but fucked. He couldn’t re-settle, he couldn’t be with his family, and he spent the rest of his life, except his last two years, trying to drink himself to death. Unluckily for him, the Mortimers have weird genes, and though he spent nearly eighty years consuming pretty much nothing but gin when he could afford it and sherry when times were worse, smoking when he could and sleeping rough, he lived until his late nineties.
In the last eighteen month of his life, when he was ninety-six, he became the live-in handyman at a block of apartments in Nelson, chopping wood (I told you we’re genetically weird), fixing fuses and hinges and water piping for the young couples living around him. He was proud of himself for the first time since 1915.
He died in the 1990s. Someone managed to locate his family and contacted my father, who wasn’t actually a relation except by marriage, and he went down and cleared up .
Anyway, my great-grandfather wouldn’t talk about Gallipoli, or Chunuk Bair. There wasn’t much to say. Except one thing. He said he was on the slopes with a donkey carrying water. The donkey got hit smack in the stomach by a cannon shell. It whipped its head around in time to see the middle of its body gone and its hind legs falling. Then the front of the donkey fell too, head facing my great-grandfather.
My great-grandfather used to say that the expression on the donkey’s face, when it realised it was fucked (grotesquely destroyed, if you prefer), was something he’d never forget as long as he lived.
I never met my great-grandfather. The only time I ever saw him was when I was nine. I was at a family wedding that he, pointedly, hadn’t been invited to. He turned up drunk, with a drunk friend, and got turned away. I missed that, but saw him later at a kid’s play area with a helter skelter. He and his friend decided to walk up the spiral of the slide, and come down the ladder.
It took them a long time but they made it, with assorted family members standing a distance away making disgusted comments. I knew nothing, understood nothing, but I did feel a kind of sympathy with him. Not “that poor man”. More like, “that’s odd but kind of cool”.
It was my mother who told me the only thing he’d ever said about his experience at Gallipoli. So I don’t know how he told that story: was it a parable about the way the New Zealand and Australian men were treated when the British decided to throw their lives onto a choppingboard? I don’t know: but my guess is that, yeah, it was that, but above all, he thought it was funny.
The people in my country have the blackest sense of humour I’ve encountered anywhere in the world. Throw in having lived through Gallipoli, and I’d say my great-grandfather would have had get a sense of humour so dark it had infinite gravity.
Anyway, I’ve never given a fuck about ANZAC Day. Nor, I understand, did he.
When I see it being used by politicians to defend more stupid military deployments, for the sake of someone else’s empire, I get really, deeply disgusted and angry. And it’s nearly impossible to make me angry.
So, I think the poor sods in the army, navy or air force who get sent where their country tells them to go deserve sympathy, and most importantly they deserve real help while they’re alive.
But fuck ANZAC Day. It was bullshit in the first place, and it’s now been securely seized by right-wing, race-baiting arseholes. Fuck them, fuck the politicians, fuck the snivelling scumlicking bullies in the Murdoch press, fuck all that bullshit. Fuck, as I said, ANZAC Day.
I remember the mess it made of my great-grandfather, sometimes, in bugle-free private, and I remember that poor bloody donkey.
The most miserable experience of my life was because of bdsm. I was twenty-two, and I was very deeply in love with a woman I admired, respected, who was beautiful, who shared my political passions, whose virginity I’d taken. She’d been eighteen, and she hadn’t told me. I’d been nineteen, and I didn’t know enough to realise.
Later, when she told me, I was flattered that I’d been her choice, and sorry I hadn’t made more fuss. She should have had more cunnilingus, and afterwards a cake with a candle. Anyway, it was done.
I don’t really have any photos that illustrate this post. But here’s a pic I took yesterday, of a Prague manhole cover, depicting some sort of strife.
But there was a problem. My deepest and most satisfying sexual thoughts, and all of my fantasies, involved bdsm, and me being a dom. I don’t think the word existed at the time.
But in my sexual dreams I commanded, fastened, spanked and flogged. I guided, I rewarded and punished, and I took.
That was what I wanted, from a willing partner having fun.
It always had been what I wanted. I’d known it since I was four, long before I was sexually focussed, let alone sexually active.
But she thought that that sort of sex wasn’t just not for her; it was evil.
She’d read Andrea Dworkin and Robin Morgan on bdsm, and so she “knew” that. There could be no such thing as ethical, or even consensual, bdsm.
I’d mentioned it once, and on seeing her reaction, I gave up. I thought it was a pity. I loved her so much I wanted to be with her forever. and that meant I’d have to bury my bdsm. Lose it. Forget about it. Cut it off me.
Of course, sexual desires and needs don’t go away. Sometimes it’d be too much, and when she was absent I’d have my fantasies and masturbate. The miserable thing happened because we were staying with her parents, and moments alone just didn’t happen.
Eventually, the desires got too much, and I took a book I liked (“The Coming of Age of Françoise Cocteau”, which I’d expected to be more stylish, though the flagellation scenes were hot) to a local park, overlooking the sea.
It was twilight cold, and no one seemed to be there, and no one was likely to come to the park at that hour. I found a place among the trees, partly sheltered by a rock, and masturbated. But I felt desolate. I was in love with a girl who loved me, and I was still utterly isolated. Part of me was disgusting to her. All of me, just then, would be disgusting to anyone who saw me.
So I was in tears, streaming down my face, before I came, and after. Body fluids everywhere.
That’s it. That’s the experience. I cleaned myself up, binned the tissues, waited a while for the onshore breeze to remove the smell from my body, and trudged home. Despising myself.
But here’s the thing. She left me the next year, because in the feminist circles she was moving in it was wrong to have a boyfriend at all: sleeping with the enemy, and withholding wimminlovingenergy from other women, that’s what loving me was. Eventually it got too much and she moved in with women from the sisterhood. I was collateral damage.
It was not the happiest time of my life.
Sitting at a cafe in Prague today, keeping an eye on the square. Because life is ok.
But humans, thank fuck, are fickle, and after a mourning period I noticed that a man who’d been with one woman for four years, despite a roving eye, was a subject of sexual interest from other women. I had opportunities, and I started taking them. The second significant girlfriend I had wanted me to spank her. We explored further, and I found that I loved spanking her, and I loved what happened when we went further, too.
I moved to another city when I finished my degree, and found that my very next girlfriend wanted to be spanked and commanded too. So I’d met and bedded two women in a row who were submissive, when I hadn’t even included that in my selection criteria. I realised that my life wasn’t going to be as miserable as I’d expected. Instead life set about being fun and bringing me joy. I learned that a male dom is not short of women who want male doms, so long as those doms behave themselves like gentle men.
Because life is random, and for other reasons too obvious to explain, here’s a picture of a dog-washing shop, two days ago, in Geneva.
Anyway, that’s my message to baby-doms. The term “baby-doms” isn’t meant to be dismissive. It’s derived from “baby-dykes”, who are among the most charming people on the planet, even if they don’t want to have sex with me.
Babyhood is a time of infinite potential. Baby-doms are people whose experience of bdsm is in its infancy, who are just starting out, and who have, perhaps, only recently become aware of their desires. Don’t despair. Life can go hard on “perverts”, and so can your own mind.
Keep your code of ethics, try to do the right thing, and persevere.
There’s nothing wrong with being a dom, so long as you obey the same rules about consent and avoiding force or manipulation that people expect in other kinds of sex. A lot of people are submissive, and they are looking for you, or someone like you.
Life gave me some miserable times because I’m a dom, but it also gave me the most wonderful experiences and times I’ve ever had. Those outweigh the bad times by a factor of, I’m not sure, but at least a hundred to one. I’d never give up being a dom, now, even if the thing were possible.
So, be hopeful and of good cheer. Life offers paths to doms, to fit their sexual “kink” into a good, ethical life, with lots and lots of incredibly hot sex and love.
I’ve relaxed, in the middle of Ireland.
I’m in a town called Roscrea. I chose it because it’s as close as I could find any accommodation to tiny Dunkerrin, where my ancestors, Jeremiah and Mary Mortimer, died and are buried.
I know: Jeremiah Mortimer sounds like an old codger in The Simpsons. I can’t help that.
His son, who came to the South Pacific and sired a hell of a lot of people, was called Darby. By the way, the name “Darby” is a fairly common Irish first name. Sean Connery plays a Darby in his first film, Darby and the Little People. You should see it because there’s a bit where Connery has to sing: comedy gold! Anyway, the name Darby is a sort of slang version of Jeremiah, like Jack is a slang version of John.
House of Mortimer (somewhere here, about six feet under this ground)
Anyway, Jeremiah and Mary couldn’t have afforded a headstone, so they’d have had a wooden cross at best. That’s long gone. I’d hoped to buy a mess of poitin, and pour some on the grave, one way or the other. But that was not to be.
But here’s a picture of the last resting place of the Mortimers who didn’t go to the South Pacific and become my ancestors.
There’s not much in Dunkerrin, though the churchyard is pretty. But I’ve been looking about the town of Roscrea, which unexpectedly turns out to have structures that were built in the tenth century, to keep Vikings away, and in the twelfth century when the Normans, having conquered England, decided to invade and occupy Ireland too. So: history! It’s all over the place here.
For example, this is literally the view from the window of my hotel room. It’s a Norman castle, twelfth century, That house in the middle, clashing with everything around it, was built in the eighteenth century by a family who got rich occupying Ireland when Oliver Cromwell went over and did his bit.
Cromwell’s bit for Ireland consisted of burning, murdering, raping, smashing and looting. Ah well, it’s a lovely house, truth to tell, but on style grounds, if nothing else, it really, really doesn’t belong in the middle of the ruins of a Norman castle.
Anyway, I’ve got peace of mind at the moment, and there’s a historical novel I finished a few years ago. Then I realised it has too many characters, and its climactic scene is in the middle, and it should be at the end. It needs serious repair. But I got taken up by other, more immediate, projects, including two other novels and a non-fiction book, and I shelved the flawed historical novel. Now I’m taking it off the shelf, with a fresh mind.
It’ll be about 350 pages, and it doesn’t contain a single spanking or other bdsm scene whatsoever. I think there’ll only be two significant sex scenes of any kind, so I’m afraid my readers will have to settle for a good story, some historical scandal (accidentally discovered by me, when researching something completely different!) that will still create some uproar, some scenes of horror of the human, not supernatural, kind, and some laughs.
So if anyone needs me, I’ll be tapping my keyboard in the bar of The White House, Roscrea. I’ll be drinkin’ Guinness, and if you pop by I’ll be buyin’.
