He can turn his creative mind to anything constructive.
My chat with a London dominatrix in yesterday’s blog reminded him of one of his more eccentric commissions…
Here, he shares his memories of Brenda the Dominatrix…
Some years ago I made some stocks – the three-hole jobby type for head and hands – for a dear lady – Brenda – who specialised in the modes of “indoor sports and correction”.
It was arranged I should pop round for a cup of tea and discuss the stocks and “any other devices that may be of interest” in her line of work.
The tea was quite normal – “I don’t do chocolate digestive biscuits as they give me wind, you know,” Brenda told me – with an assortment of other biscuits on offer, all on a silver tray – “The real stuff. None of yer plated rubbish here!” she said – as we sat there discussing assorted manacles, stocks and “what else you feel would be nice”.
Brenda was in her late forties at the time. Her hubbie Cliff worked as a manager of a furniture store, in the fitted carpets and rugs department.
Once tea and biccies were consumed, she gave me a ‘tour’ of the house and all manner of ‘normal’ household gadgets seemed to have another purpose for her.
The canvas-type icing bag and assorted nozzles as used by bakers, once filled with a mix of gritty birdseed and lemon curd, could be slowly injected in a part of the body normally associated with exit work – “You have to get the mix just right and you have to get the speed right,” she told me. “It comes from experience.”
One item that had me wondering was the small, industrial-type floor-standing food mixer – I had seen one in our local baker’s years before as a schoolboy.
It was used by Brenda to mix custard powder with builder’s-type sand – “If Cliff’s not about when it’s delivered, it does my back in getting the bags in as it comes in half hundredweight bags, so I have to split the bag and carry it through in bucketfuls one at a time.”
Once her client was strapped down, naked with a gag in his mouth on a plastic-covered couch, she applied the said mix with a sort of paint roller – once again, speed was of the essence – until he was totally covered from neck to toes. The whole process took about two hours or so from start to finish, then scraping it off on old bits of newspaper before taking a shower.
I asked: “How on earth would people first find out they get their kicks from this process?”
Brenda leaned over and whispered: “I have three who did.”
In her dungeon – the cellar – she had manacles bolted on the walls – “My Cliff put them up for me with Rawlbolts. He had never drilled a wall before” – and a full-size rack, something I had only ever seen before in films – “The best part of five grand that cost me, luv,” she said, “but it’s got the best non-rot rope fitted to it.”
I made her a set of stocks as requested, then sets of leg-irons, chains and handcuffs to make it all up into what she called “something meaningful” .
I also did repairs and improvements as some of her whips were “not lasting as they should”. This was basically down to the attachment of the whip to its handle or grip and was, according to Brenda, all down to “cheap imported crap” as she could not get decent English-made stuff.
I put her in touch with a saddler I knew who supplied her with handmade whips although I then realised I had shot myself in the foot as my whip repair work dried up.
Sadly it all came to an end when Brenda had a heart attack during a ‘training session’. She was fifty-seven. Cliff told me: “It’s the way she would have wanted to go.”
At the time of her death, Cliff was away on a company training thing.
The poor client was chained up for about a couple of days before his (weak) cries for help were heard.
It was the postman who heard him.
A friendly matey policeman told me this and the same Plod mentioned that the chains and ‘restraints’ were so well-made “that Houdini could not have got out of ’em, mate.”
I kept silent on the matter.
The client requested no publicity.
I got on well with Cliff as he was always keen to learn what power tools did and I loved his description of Brenda: “She’s a little, fun-loving tinker is my Brenda – nothing phases her you know.”
A while after, he sold their home and moved to Portugal to retire early. He said the house brought back too many memories to stay.
I still miss Brenda and Cliff.
She once told me: “Do you know it cost a bloody fortune to soundproof that room…”
M.PSYCHE: Because I think it’s a good place to store the information and I want to develop an online presence.
JOHN: What’s your dominatrix name?
M.PSYCHE: BDSM Butterfly: Mistress Psyche.
JOHN: Why Psyche?
M.PSYCHE: It means butterfly in Greek. And I have an interest in the mental side – ‘mental’ as in the mind side, not the crazy side – of BDSM. The stuff that’s most interesting to me is the mental control of people rather than any actual physical domination.
JOHN: You have an urge to mentally control people?
M.PSYCHE:(LAUGHS) It gives people space to relax in a safe way.
JOHN: So being whipped is relaxing?
M.PSYCHE: It is for some people. I hadguy who wanted me to nail his testicles to a board.
JOHN: Not his actual testicles?
M.PSYCHE: No. The scrotum sac.
JOHN: And he found this relaxing?
M.PSYCHE: He fell asleep while I was doing it.
JOHN: You’re joking.
M.PSYCHE: No.
JOHN: How long did it take?
M.PSYCHE: How many carpet tacks can you fit round a testicle?
JOHN: It’s not an area I have any expertise in.
M.PSYCHE: He found it relaxing. It gave him space where he didn’t have to think…
JOHN: Surely the thought that one of his testicles might be accidentally nailed to a board might keep him awake?
M.PSYCHE: He trusted me.
JOHN: The impression I get is that a lot of the clients for this sort of thing are men in positions of power – bankers, top executives, the masters of industry and let’s not even mention Cabinet Ministers and judges…
M.PSYCHE: Yes.
JOHN: …and I can’t understand why people who have spent their entire working lives wanting to dominate and actually dominating other people should want to be dominated.
M.PSYCHE: Well, for powerful men who have to be in charge all the time in their jobs, it’s quite mentally intensive so, to go to someone… with the pain, the bondage, the scrotum-nailing… it’s not the actual experience itself, it’s the space it creates in their mind to be able to relax inside yourself and have some time off.
JOHN: You surely can’t relax if you’re expecting the next stroke of the whip on your back or a cane on your buttocks or carpet tacks in your scrotum. You’re anticipating not relaxing.
M.PSYCHE: Not necessarily… SOME people ARE just into pain. They are going to be excitedly expectant and awake and aware that the next stroke of the whip is coming.
JOHN: Are you telling me they are not the predominant type?
M.PSYCHE: Most of the sessions I do involve relaxing people and putting them into a submissive space where they can relax.
M.PSYCHE: (LAUGHS) Yes… in stiletto heels and a leather skirt.
JOHN: Getting back to powerful men like politicians and the captains of industry… Is it not that, even though they are tied-up, they are still in control because you are doing to them what they tell you to do? So the person being dominated is actually dominating the dominatrix?
M.PSYCHE: People say that. I don’t think it’s true. I am definitely in charge of all my sessions. Beforehand, they tell me what they want me to do and then I will facilitate it, but I am definitely in charge when it happens.
JOHN: Surely, if I come along to you and say: “Hello, missus, I want you to nail my balls to a plank,” surely I am in charge – You are doing my bidding.
M.PSYCHE: No because, once you enter the ‘play space’, you hand over the power. I have to decide in advance if it’s safe and sane and consensual and then, as soon as the session starts, I’m in charge.
JOHN: Presumably you have ‘safe’ words.
M.PSYCHE: No. You can tell the difference between someone enjoying something – even pain – and not enjoying it… I mean, I’m not a sadist. I’m not interested in moving beyond the point of them enjoying it.
JOHN: The first stories you have posted on your blogsite are… erm… quirky.
M.PSYCHE: I’m picking out the more eccentric fetishes and… Well, to be honest, most of them ARE quite eccentric. There’s the Welsh guy who gets turned-on by inflatable PVC bananas and the optician who wanted to see things. He wanted me to give him some quasi-religious experience in the basement of a famous high street chemist’s shop.
JOHN: I’ve had a bad back for the last three weeks and had to see three osteopaths. One of them has several clients who are dominatrices because they have to do a lot of odd movements – I guess like whipping and caning – so they get what I suppose are repetitive strain injuries.
M.PSYCHE: Well, I don’t do those sort of sessions. I don’t do much whipping and beating and things…
JOHN: There’s scrota-nailing…
M.PSYCHE: …I mostly do transformative stuff. People know what I’m offering and, if they want a hard-core pain session, I’m not really the person to do it. They will go somewhere else.
JOHN: I’ve not seen your online pitch for clients…
M.PSYCHE: It just lists my interests. And there are reviews on the site where I advertise where people leave reviews of the sort of sessions they’ve had from me. I don’t deal with hardcore masochists. The review I have right at the top at the moment says: “She’s a sensitive and very lovely spiritual girl”… which (LAUGHS) isn’t particularly useful. I had to add underneath it: “I do like to give the client the session they request.”
That particular guy wanted me to gag him. I went along to meet him at a hotel in Park Lane and he took me for dinner and told me all about the fact a court had placed a ‘gagging order’ on him. He talked about it and that seemed to be all he needed to do. So I got dinner and a bottle of perfume. He just wanted someone to talk to.
JOHN: You must have turned some people down…?
M.PSYCHE: I only turn people down who want sex.
JOHN: Nothing so bizarre you don’t want to do it?
M.PSYCHE: No. I like interesting, bizarre stuff. Though there was one guy who wanted to be ‘un-gayed’. He wanted me to rape him with a dildo, which he hoped would un-gay him. I told him: “I’m not going to do that, because you’re gay and what you want is dangerous. It could cause internal physical damage.” He wasn’t looking to enjoy being ‘raped’; he was looking to be physically damaged to be put-off being ‘bummed’.
JOHN: So he was encouraging physical damage.
M.PSYCHE: Yes. So I said No.
JOHN: So you are more interested in… what?
M.PSYCHE: What I do is a sort-of renegade form of therapy. I’ve tried to help people but obviously, if you try to help people too much, it stops being sexually exciting. Which is not what they want.
One of Mistress Psyche’s Dominatrix Diary blogs
JOHN: So why am I not interested in BDSM? I’m just a tad too dull? I’ve had enough emotional pain; I don’t need physical pain, thankyou very much.
M.PSYCHE: You might have a different form of masochism. I mean, I’m an emotional masochist. I like being slapped-about emotionally.
JOHN: Being unhappy?
M.PSYCHE: Yes. That’s my type of masochism.
JOHN: So you have analysed yourself.
M.PSYCHE: Yeah. I know absolutely all of my mental illnesses and conditions. I know what they are; I know how they get triggered; I know how to manage them.
JOHN: So you never get over-emotional?
M.PSYCHE: Well, I’ve figured out how to manage that. But is over-emotionality a sign of mental illness? What is considered ‘sane’ and ‘insane” changes over time. Being gay used to be presented as being… It’s all very dubious. I mean, they were still lobotomising people until the 1960s. That’s the nature of mental health: very fluid and also very culturally determined and that’s why it’s all quite dubious. I’m very glad I figured out all my stuff before I went to… I mean, I have never been to an actual doctor.
JOHN: You mean to a psychiatric doctor…
M.PSYCHE: Yes. Or to an actual doctor. Because I would have been prescribed things and I would have been given ‘diagnoses’ that are actually very unhelpful and limiting.
I had a random consultation when I was doing another job and this woman told me that, probably because I was abused, I have borderline personality disorder. Which has become much more mild. But they give you drugs for that. And actually NOT having the drugs has meant that I have been able to manage it myself and get it under control rather than using medication which just suppresses it.
I have a friend who was also abused who went to a psychiatrist after a breakdown and they basically just papered-over it. She’s still really mental. They just gave her drugs and coping strategies whereas, because mine is DIY, I seem to have done it at a deeper level and actually got to the roots of stuff and sorted out the real underlying issues causing problems. It’s about creating balance in yourself. It’s basically the Jungian idea that you’ve got light and dark.
M.PSYCHE: Jungian AND yin/yang and Zen and all these things that exist on a spectrum inside you and you need to find ways of balancing them and, if you can’t do it in one way, you have to do it in another.
JOHN: I’m not up on Jungian stuff.
M.PSYCHE: Basically, you have a shadow self. You can use these things as an access point to understand your shadow and integrate it because, in the West, we have a very disintegrated sense of identity and this is why you end up with these bizarre fetishes.
JOHN: Why?
M.PSYCHE: Because we are disintegrated as individuals. We have stuff which is acceptable; we have stuff which is unacceptable – all the taboo stuff which you actually need to accept as being an essential part of your human psyche. This is why people don’t function properly: that they can’t just accept these things are actually an aspect of them.
JOHN: Being healthy is balancing the yin and yang…
M.PSYCHE: Yes, exactly. It’s a counterbalance. That’s what I’m interested in. That’s why I’m called Mistress Psyche.
SARA: Because the CEO of the venue I was booked in suddenly flatly refused to have me perform.
JOHN: Because?
SARA: He or she didn’t say. But he or she did say he or she would not be persuaded and he or she was obviously horrified by the subject matter.
JOHN: So he or she accepted your show and then changed his or her mind?
SARA: Well, the wonderful Big Difference Company had programmed it in the venue as a Valentine’s Day show – which I thought was a brilliant idea – and the CEO then looked at the line-up after the brochure had been printed – and absolutely, categorically would not allow me to perform.
JOHN: You had already paid to go in the brochure…
SARA: Yes. The CEO totally, categorically agreed to pay me a figure I won’t divulge NOT to perform the show at the venue.
JOHN: Can you perform it somewhere else in Leicester?
Sara, surprised by the sudden cancellation
SARA: At this point, most venues are full – the brochure has been printed. I started discussing a venue for this show back in August – before my run at the Edinburgh Fringe had finished – and the brochure deadline was mid-October.
JOHN: What’s the title of the show?
SARA:A Beginner’s Guide to Bondage.
JOHN: One might think the CEO could have got a hint of the subject from the title.
SARA: Possibly. But I suppose it could have been about a housewife ‘chained’ to the kitchen sink.
JOHN: Or someone who just liked James Bond films.
SARA: Indeed… I am sure we would have sold out on Valentine’s Day night. People are interested in the subject. That’s the thing about this show. Audiences are interested. But the critics don’t want to know. The press don’t want to know. The publicists at the Edinburgh Fringe didn’t want to represent me. I tried to get a publicist. Couldn’t get one. Yet, at the end of the day, I was sold out every single performance.
JOHN: I’m never totally convinced about the value of publicists at the Fringe.
SARA: I felt I would never get reviewed at the Fringe if I didn’t have a publicist. And I wasn’t. And that was – is – the reality. To book a tour for this show is possibly impossible.
JOHN: Though your show got audiences in in Edinburgh – which is no mean feat.
SARA: My show is a feminist and funny look at all the weird and wonderful kinks that people can have. It’s not judgmental and it’s not for the raincoat brigade. One chap from the raincoat brigade came to see it in Edinburgh. He came in his raincoat with a plastic bag and sat by himself in the crowded back row. He walked out after about ten minutes and complained to the manager that he thought the show was very sexist and anti-male – particularly, I assume, anti white, middle class men. I felt I should put that quote on my programme! He was the only person who has ever been offended, apart from a Tory lady who was offended by what I said about Boris Johnson.
JOHN: Which was?
SARA: I said that I would like to use my massive strap-on on him. Usually, that gets rounds of applause and shrieks of laughter, particularly in Scotland, where they are not very fond of Boris or Brexit. But there happened to be a party of Tory voters in who – although they liked the show… Well, one lady felt morally upset that I was bringing politics into my show.
But a dominatrix is a human being with a political opinion and it’s my show and I can say what I like. Without a doubt, all of the dominatrices I have ever met were Left Wing and all of their security guards were Right Wing.
JOHN: Security guards?
Sara’s show CAN be seen in London on 14th and 16th December in a Kentish Town venue
SARA: They all have security. Someone to answer the door and security at night. Sometimes they are ex-Army and usually they are Right Wing. I think dominatrices tend to be Left Wing.
JOHN: Why?
SARA: (LAUGHS) Maybe because they like beating rich toffs for money.
JOHN: So the Tory lady who went to your show did not object to the title or subject of the show.
SARA: No. Just me dissing Boris Johnson.
JOHN: Did you have the ‘dead dad’ bit that all successful Edinburgh shows are supposed to have?
SARA: I included a sad story, yes. But the Tory lady who didn’t like my Boris Johnson references said she didn’t understand why there was a deeply-upsetting, sad moment. My reaction was: Well, you don’t understand how you write a play or a comedy show. There is always a climax and then a resolution.
JOHN: Indeed.
SARA: If you are writing a play, you call it the climax. In comedy, it’s the ‘dead dad’ moment and then you get them back laughing again.
JOHN: The show was a success in Edinburgh…
SARA: It sold out. There were queues down the street. Hardly any of my friends could get in to see it – Only if they told me when they were coming and I physically reserved them a seat.
JOHN: Who were the audience in Edinburgh?
SARA: In the main, young – under 26 – and more women than men. On the few nights when there was a bit of a geezerish crowd – a chav crowd – the sort of guys who sat in the front row hopin’ I’d get me tits out – they didn’t laugh half as much and I didn’t enjoy performing to that crowd at all.
Sara in costume at the Edinburgh Fringe
I had one night when it was a predominately male audience with a few of these geezers sitting in the front – they were quite big and made me feel quite threatened. After that, in every performance, I would pick either couples or a group of girls who didn’t look too frightening and ask them to sit in the front row. So I couldn’t be heckled by people who had come to the show for the wrong reasons.
The thing is it’s a Fem-Dom show. Which part of Fem-Dom didn’t audience members understand? Did they not know I would be taking the piss out of certain men? Not in a horrible way, because my show does not judge even the slightly yuck fetishes. We live in a free society.
Nowadays, we have transgender, transvestite, gay shows. We have all types of things. But it seems like ‘kink’ and bondage is still an unpronounceable thing. Why should that be so? Let people do what they like in the bedroom. We can laugh and giggle. I show my delight at people’s eccentricity. Everyone has a right to express themselves.
JOHN: Did you aim your show at a particular type of person?
SARA: I have a friend who is a theatre director and he told me: In your show, reach out to the ‘vanilla’ couples in the audience and let them know it’s OK to experiment. It’s not abnormal. So I end my show with a little speech to the vanillas, offering them a little role-play exercise they can do with each other to discover if they are sub or dom or neither or vanilla or double vanilla.
JOHN: Or strawberry whip.
SARA: Exactly. I give them that speech and they seem to enjoy that.
Three years in the making, the design for the publicity flyer went through some changes when it was a Work in Progress
JOHN: How do you know so much about the subject of bondage?
SARA: I take the Fifth Amendment, but I spent three years writing this show. Everything in it is true. Even ‘the nose man’.
JOHN: The nose man?
SARA: The nose man needs his nose to be stimulated in order to achieve any sort of gratification. Now – look – that is quite amusing, you have to admit.
JOHN: Does he think it’s amusing?
SARA: No. But it is a known fetish. It’s called nasophilia.
JOHN: Well, people sometimes like their ears fiddled with – that’s aural sex.
SARA: There is a fetish for everything.
JOHN: You mentioned rubbish.
SARA: ‘Rubbish Boy’ likes you to put him in a wheelie bin and cover him with rubbish.
JOHN: Smelly rubbish?
SARA: Any kind of rubbish. So my character in the show – Mistress Venetia, the ‘dotty dominatrix’ – one time she put him in the bath tub and covered him with all the rubbish from the flat and he wanked himself to completion. Of course, I made him clean it up afterwards – half a bottle of bleach – he loves that.
Another time, Mistress Venetia put him in a pair of ballet tights and taught him some ballet moves. Bend-down-stretch… bend-down-stretch. She taught him a pas de chat and he was leaping all over the dungeon. That is a true story. He said it was the best day of his life. The real man is quite chubby and had never been asked to do ballet before.
JOHN: So the good people of Leicester are not going to hear any of this.
Here I sat after midnight, struggling with the transcription of two blogs – well, struggling with the first, which is delaying the second – when I got a series of emails from Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional correspondent. She lives in Vancouver.
They started and continued thus:
Anna, Ruggero and Daniel at St Paul’s A&E in Vancouver
I am in the waiting room of A&E at St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver again.
I have been sitting beside two nice young men for two hours. They are both film students – one Italian, one Mexican. One of them had to get scans as he had an appendectomy two weeks ago and his innards were still settling so he is waiting for the scan results and getting blood tests.
It has been a very entertaining last several hours.
A and E is very busy. Though a window, I saw a catatonic Sikh man sitting on a chair, without a turban and his hair was a mess. Nearby, a hefty, good-looking drunk woman with bare legs sat howling angrily that she had been in every suburb of Vancouver in the last two days.
“You DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT HAS HAPPENED to me!” she told people. “My boyfriend has LEFT me!”
The emergency waiting room is like a circus. The two students and I seem like we are the only ones not stoned or drunk.
One old man was amiably drinking beer after beer from cans. He announced he had some pot but not rolling papers. An old lady (who works as a safety officer on a building site) said she had papers, so they went out to smoke a joint and got stoned in the ambulance bay.
Meanwhile, a wiry little man with a grey Afro hairstyle went into the bathroom and, when he emerged, his pants were falling down. He ripped his shirt off and started roaring around the room stripping so they made him lie on a stretcher.
“Fuck Me!” he said in exasperation.
“Don’t talk to me like that!” a nurse told him.
“I wasn’t talking YOU,” he said angrily. “I was talking to MYSELF!”
I went for an MRI scan.The technician asked me to remove my bra and necklace. The necklace had a fiddly clasp and, because I was feeling shaky, I asked the young lady to undo it for me.
She asked: “Do you want me to help take your bra off too?”
“God, no!” I said, “I’m a stripper. I can take my own bra off.”
Anna Smith – Nurse Annie – c1979
“When did you do the stripping?” she asked.
“I still do it,” I told her.
“Did you ever do anything else?” she asked.
I should have pretended to be surprised and asked: “What else is there?” but I didn’t.
Anyhow, when I got back to the waiting room, the students were still there, I told them about the bra question and they cracked up.
I told them my funniest stories. They told me their funniest stories too. One involved a friend in Mexico, who had mistaken a midget for a leprechaun.
We also spoke about film, art and the drug problem downtown.
The Italian – Ruggero Romano – is directing a feature documentary film about homeless people on the downtown east side – it depicts the controversial dynamics of the financially poorest and emotionally richest postal code in North America – V6A – There is a teaser trailer online.
The Mexican – Daniel Federico del Castillo Hernández – was a painter before turning to film.
Daniel del Castillo’s lively painting of his family in acrylic
He showed me a lively painting he had made of his family, with each of his relatives portrayed as a different animal – a dog, a cat, a horse, a deer, etc. We were having so much fun watching the goings on. Ruggero was busy taking notes. He has joined a writers group. He said: “We should come here more often….”
A cute, paranoid lady with a skateboard and a British accent sat nearby, chatting on her phone.
The beer drinking man started demanding that the television channel be changed. When no-one responded, he stood on a chair and groped around the TV unsuccessfully. A security guard then realised the TV-groper had been drinking and told him to put away his beer. He refused, so he was told: “You aren’t allowed to drink in the hospital!” and he was escorted out.
Eventually (after 6 hours) a doctor came to explain that Daniel’s scans were OK so he could leave.
Alien Bra heads at the Isle of Wight (Photo by Gordon Breslin)
While waiting, I have found out that, in the UK, Ian Breslin and Mark Levermore of The Outbursts band were at the Isle of Wight Festival. Apparently they are still celebrating the release of Alien Bra, their latest album, which features a song about being abducted by aliens and forced to wear a bra.
Elsewhere, the World Health Organisation has declared that BDSM and Transvestism have been struck from the list of diseases. They did not mention anything about men who go out in the sun wearing alien heads (or alien bras), so I suppose that is still an illness.
I am still here, in acute care now, waiting for my CAT scan result.
I was in a train yesterday. A couple of women were talking. They were talking very loudly, oblivious to people around them. I was sitting two seats behind them and could hear the conversation clearly. I had no alternative. They obviously knew each other but had not met for a while and were catching up with each other’s lives.
Well, I was not really listening, but it was when I heard the exchange…
WOMAN ONE
So what have you been doing?
WOMAN TWO I went to a BDSM workshop and I quite liked it.
WOMAN ONE Oh
…that I started paying attention… and I switched on the microphone of my iPhone a few sentences later.
Yes, that is very reprehensible of me. What can I say?
What follows is a verbatim transcript. All I have done is remove a few details which might identify the two women – names and places.
NB… The end is 100% exactly as it happened.
WOMAN ONE
I would like to marry him if I was to have a husband but I don’t think he wants to marry me. I got to the point where I realised OK, I’ve had my joy with this and it’s really not working for him but I do want to be with him so I got a lot of what I needed and now I’m back to monogamy. I don’t know if that’s what I want full stop. It’s just that’s what works for us at the moment. And he is dating someone, which is great.
It gets him out of the house – otherwise he’s always round the house in an armchair playing a Star Trek computer game. So it’s quite nice when he goes out.
Like he went out with this woman. He likes her and she likes him, you know. He went out with her the other weekend. I had the whole house to myself all day.
WOMAN TWO
Oh nice.
WOMAN ONE
I watched ukulele players. There’s a really great ukulele player. She sings songs. There’s a song she sings called I Want To Get Laid. She’s a comedian. I think she’s really funny. She’s really great and she interviews really well. And I watched other stuff on YouTube.
The thing is, when he is in, he doesn’t even think what channel I wanna watch. He will just sit there and be in his own little world with his gadgets.
WOMAN TWO
Oh, right.
WOMAN ONE
So it’s really nice when he’s out of the house, so I’m all for it and whoever he wants to go out of the house with is fine.
WOMAN TWO
That gives you some freedom and space.
WOMAN ONE
Yeah and then, when he got back, I was like: “I’ve got a question in mind. Do you mind if I ask you?” – “Yeah, what is it?” – “What happened? Did you get laid?”
He said: “Where’d that come from?”
I said: “Well, it’s kinda come from a song I watched on the ukulele.”
He said he hadn’t got laid. He’d gone to the cinema and I said – she lives in a house share – “You do know you could have taken her to a hotel?”
I just want him to have a good time, really. Despite the fact he and I drive each other up the wall, there is so much strength to it and it has survived so long… I just want him to have a good time.
(WE THEN PASSED ANOTHER TRAIN AND THE NOISE MAKES THE RECORDING INAUDIBLE. IT PICKS UP AGAIN WITH…)
WOMAN ONE
So when did this happen? There’s some really beautiful… I’ve never been into latex…
I am thinking about getting some kind of gloves so I can wash my hands without water touching my hands. Just for the winter; my hands are cracking everywhere. So you went to a workshop?
WOMAN TWO
Yeah. I absolutely loved it. It’s so beautiful. Explaining how you’re giving away the power.
WOMAN ONE
Where did he do the workshop?
WOMAN TWO
At his home just outside London, so it was very intimate. About twelve of us.
WOMAN ONE
A small group.
WOMAN TWO
Yeah. It was nice. I quite liked that.
(THE TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT THEN SAID WE WERE APPROACHING THE NEXT STATION)
WOMAN ONE
Let’s have a drink. Why don’t we have a drink? Are you part-time?
WOMAN TWO
Cool.
WOMAN ONE
OK. Good.
WOMAN TWO
It’s a new way to carry my bicycle.
TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT
If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to staff or text British Transport Police on 61016. We’ll sort it… See it. Say it. Sort it.
I PRESUME THIS IS THE YOUTUBE SONG WHICH THE FIRST WOMAN CALLED “I WANT TO GET LAID”…
Journalist Kate Copstick is currently in Kenya working with her Mama Biashara charity, which gives small sums of money and advice to poor people so they can set up their own small, self-sustaining businesses which will allow them to help themselves out of poverty.
Mama Biashara’s slogan is:
A HAND UP, NOT A HAND OUT.
Copstick and Mama Biashara make no money from this and 100% of all money donated to the charity is used for the charity’s work. Copstick works for free, receives no money herself and covers 100% of her own costs.
She keeps a diary which she posts in full, when possible, on her Facebook page. These three (edited) extracts from last weekend give, I think, a fair idea of the background within which Copstick and Mama Biashara have to work.
Friday 17th November
Doris calls with news from Kisii. Yes, we are STILL trying to find a way to help the women hiding out in Kisii County (as mentioned in previous blogs/diary extracts).
Good News: between Vicky and themselves, they have found some farmers and villagers who are not tribalist to the point of violent criminal insanity and who will give them jobs. That is about thirty of them with at least a life-raft to cling to.
Bad News: there is a something between a gang and a sect with absolutely the worst aspects of each which operates in Kisii. They are called the Chinkororo. They rule the place. They arrived in one of the decent, helpful villages a couple of days ago, called everyone together, pointed at a random woman in the crowd, declared her to be a witch, doused her in petrol and set her on fire. While everyone watched. Pour décourager les autres, one assumes. If, say, a screaming, terrified child tried to run away or even look away, one of the gang would hold its head and force it to watch. Until the woman died screaming and squirming.
Vicky was sent this on a smartphone video.
Doris saw it and is still traumatised. Doris is not traumatised easily.
There are a lot of silences in our phone call.
Then I get a call from Joan, wondering where I am.
“Still sick?” She worries. “It can be malaria.”
She has some good news, though. Earlier in the week she had called me about a girl – just newly eleven years old, raped when she was 10 and now pregnant. She wanted to know if we could find a doctor to give the girl what is generally referred to here as a ‘wash and blow-dry’. The wonderful… er… hairdresser… who had helped some very young girls for us before has moved to Turkana but it seems Joan found one herself. The girl is now great, and currently home with her mother.
We are getting increasingly worried about Oliver, the marvellous Mobile Phone Whisperer who was going to spearhead our training of young women in mobile phone repair. I had asked that he come to Nairobi to meet with me so we could discuss things properly. Despite all warnings from Vixen and Doris, he went to stay with some friends in Huruma – a scary place at the best of times but, with all the political nastiness still happening, now properly dangerous.
We heard, via Vixen, that, in a night of the kind of ethnic cleansing that happens in places like that at times like this, Oliver had been beaten up while trying to leave the slum. Oliver is Luo. That is all that it takes to get you beaten up. Or worse. He went into hiding and has not been heard from since. It is a nightmare. Huruma is not the kind of place you go wandering around looking for a lost mate.
Doris wants to come over and pick up some headed letter stuff that I set up so we could give people letters of recommendation. Vixen has found jobs for about twenty women in a resort in Malindi and it looks like this could be the start of an ongoing relationship with the owner, who knows the backgrounds of our ladies and is happy to give them a chance, a good training (hotel and kitchen staff) and a really good salary. But he wants a letter of recommendation. Kenyans LOVE letters, certificates… anything on paper.
Plus Doris wants to talk.
Saturday 18th November
There is still no sign of Oliver, but what is emerging is a huge community of mums and wives who are searching for young men who have simply disappeared across areas like Huruma and Mathare. Every other day a body will turn up in some place far away, the other side of Nairobi and a flurry of hope/dread will stir. So far, no Oliver.
Luos are being kicked out of Kenol (on the outskirts of Nairobi), says Doris. They just get a visitor in the night who tells them to go or suffer the consequences.
Kabiria (where Joan lives) is on a knife edge.
Kawangware has sporadic outbursts of what can only be called ‘ethnic cleansing’. Things are not happy.
But there is an odd failure to report any of this in the papers.
I think if people were really looking, they would find that just as many people are being killed now as were killed in the 2008 riots. It is just being managed more carefully this time. Kept sporadic, geographically spaced out. Just young men disappearing from slum areas… who just happen to be Luo. The sixty odd in Kisii who disappeared while Vicky has been up there have not reappeared. People are now looking for a mass grave.
Sunday 19th November
Talking to Doris again I remember that I never DID tell you what she wanted to talk about on Friday.
We have been approached about all manner of domestic and sexual abuse. But nothing like this case. And it is all the fault of UK Kink.
Precis: middle class Kenyan (male), presumably a massive bully, physically and emotionally. Goes to Oxford. Discovers BDSM. Totally perverts it to cover and give a modicum of imagination and sophistication to his own bullying tendencies. Marries a sweet Kenyan virgin. And lives a 24/7 full-on BDSM existence. She is abused physically and mentally.
We are talking to the extent that, before he leaves in the morning, he ‘marks’ her by pissing on her and she is not allowed to wash it off. Oh yes. Because she was so innocent when he married her and is so controlled by him, she thinks this happens in all marriages.
Only now, because he left his browser open and she saw some of the pages he likes, she has she begun to realise what is happening is not normal.
On behalf of BDSM fans everywhere, I am outraged at what this man is doing. I give Doris a gallop through the basics of BDSM, garnished with personal anecdotes and heavy on consent. It takes a lot to gobsmack Doris but gobsmacked she is. Utterly.
We are going to meet up with this woman and see how she wants to proceed. I am thinking a day in a dungeon with the CopMistress and no safe word.
Great news from Brian. Mama Biashara’s Special Condiment has been VERY popular with the ladies of Homa Bay. A refuge for abused girls was suffering regular break ins by state police who would stop off on their way from the pub for a quick rape of some already abused and vulnerable girls. A full face of Mama Biashara’s Condiment is a surefire way to distract a man from any planned action in the jap’s eye area to the searing agony in his other eyes. Production is underway, so that all the women can be safe. Well, safer.
People who have foolishly never attended ask what the increasingly prestigious live Grouchy Club shows which I host with comedy critic Kate Copstick are actually like.
Well, for one thing, they are not really shows. They are chats. Free to enter. Free to leave. No bucket collection at the end.
They aim to be what The Scotsman described them as last year: “a talking shop for comics riding the emotional rollercoaster of the Edinburgh Fringe” – except that the target audience is wider… performers, media and industry.
The audience are the show. Co-host Kate Copstick and I talk with whoever turns up about whatever crops up. Inevitably, today, one of the subjects was (again) comedian Lewis Schaffer and his show Unopened Letters From My Mother – Each day, he opens one of 23 letters his mother sent from New York (some from a mental hospital) to him in London between 2000 and her death alone in New York in 2011. And he never opened them.
Lewis Schaffer reading aloud one of his mother’s letters
In yesterday’s blog, I wrote: “I have a terrible feeling that he is doing these shows as a way of daring the audiences – and daring himself – to dislike him.”
This afternoon, at the Grouchy Club, I said: “In his show last night, it was seriously voyeuristic. We were watching a real person on the stage… not quite having a breakdown, but showing real emotions. You don’t normally see real, genuine emotions on the stage.”
“I think,” said Copstick, “that he is genuinely a kind of misery junkie. Some people go into physical SM because, when someone takes a whip across your back, you get a rush of endorphins. That’s just scientific fact. Whatever you think of the psychology, getting beaten-up creatively releases endorphins into the brain and they are the most powerful feelgood chemicals on the planet. It stimulates all kinds of things. The messages that the nerve endings send release into your brain adrenaline and all the -enalines and they are ‘fight or flight’ and they give you a kind of a rush, a head rush.
“And, of course, you are not using that to trigger flight – frequently because you’re bound up – or because you are paying to be beaten-up, so why would you run away? The bondage thing – the psychological thing – helps but, physiologically, you get an endorphin rush.
“Things like morphine are less powerful versions of the drugs that your brain makes anyway. It’s an amazing feeling. I don’t really do it now, I think, because I am on severe anti-depressants. But, before I was on anti-depressants, I was a real SM junkie. There were a couple of guys – I was their favourite sub because they couldn’t hit me too much for my taste. There were a couple of guys, I was their ‘show sub’ if they were doing a demonstration and I would come out feeling great, feeling relaxed, feeling happy.
“Some people self-harm and they cut themselves. I had a kebab skewer – I’ve still got it for old times’ sake – which I used to stick in my arm and swizzle around. It didn’t make a big mark. I would just go, stick it in, swizzle it around and you get this burst of pain and then (BIG SIGH OF RELIEF).
“I think Lewis Schaffer has that same kind of need, but it’s an emotional not a physiological thing. He needs to traumatise himself emotionally every so often. He has his divorce, this, that, everything but, now he has a relationship, people love him in Edinburgh, nobody really ‘has a go’ at him any more.
“So I think in the same way that I needed physical pain, he needs emotional pain. Maybe it reinforces his ideas about himself or whatever and he gets from a very specific pointed burst of emotional pain like that the same thrill and the same release that someone who is into physical SM gets from a whip across their back.
“What you need is something very specific… For example, it’s no fun for somebody who is really into SM to break a leg and be in pain all the time. It IS pain, but what you need is a burst of pain and it needs to be deliberate. I have lupus. I’m in pain all the time, so I should be happy like a pig in shit. But there is no intent.
“For Lewis, just having a shit day or a shit week or Oh! My life’s going all wrong! – That’s not the kind of misery he is addicted to. If he opens a letter from his mum and she is saying: You are a shit! You are dead to me! – that is a specific burst of pain and there is the added misery that he can’t do anything about it now because she is dead… That’s a real bombshell of misery and… I am not saying he wallows in it, but I think it’s a need he has to reinforce a… well, self-loathing is a cliché now but… I think it’s like a lash on his back.”
I bumped into Tony Hickson at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden and he asked me if I wanted to hear about Dogboy – his ‘dogumentary’ film – not a documentary, a DOGumentary – about human pups. So, a few days later, we met at the Soho Theatre Bar. The up-market glamour of my life never ends.
“Human pups?” I asked.
“You must know what they are, John.”
“There is,” I said, falteringly, “some sub-culture where people dress up in furry animal costumes and have sex.”
“No,” said Tony. “Those are Furries. The human puppy thing is mostly latex and a bit of bondage stuff and dog leads and that sort of thing. One of the people in the dogumentary used to be a Furry.”
Tony Hickson directed the new DOGumentary
“Why did he change?” I asked.
“He was drawn to the dog thing, dressing up with the mask and all that.”
“Do they dress up as specific dogs?” I asked. “Are there human chihuahuas and human King Charles spaniels?”
“Now you are just,” said Tony, “being silly.”
“No,” I said. “When you say ‘dress up as a dog’ do you actually mean fur and ears and …”
“More a PVC suit with a dog’s head,” said Tony. “PVC or leather. Not fur.”
“Rather un-dog-like, then,” I suggested. “More BDSM.”
“I did ask them,” said Tony, “whether it was sexual or not. They said it wasn’t. They said it was about being in the headspace of master and servant and roleplaying.”
“How did you stumble on this sub-culture?” I asked.
“I was driving along the seafront at Whitley Bay in Tyne and Wear and one of them was walking along and he was on a lead. So I stopped and asked: Can I make a documentary about you?”
“Was he on all fours?” I asked.
“No, just walking normally.”
“That’s not being a dog at all!” I complained.
“But,” explained Tony, “if you were on your knees, it would take you ages to walk along the seafront.”
Dogboy with his ‘handler’ shopping in Newcastle city centre
“How long is the Dogboy dogumantary?” I asked.
“22 minutes. I made it for Made Television in Newcastle and their slots are 22 minutes.”
“They screened it?”
“No. They didn’t like the subject matter though there’s no sex in it and it’s not dirty in any way.”
“Have they transmitted other stuff of yours?”
“Yes. A documentary about gurning. I won the South East England Gurning Championships.”
“In the DOGumentary,” I asked, “were the people OK with being identified?”
“One of them never takes his mask off, but his handler doesn’t wear a mask.”
“That’s the official name, is it?” I asked. “Handler?”
“Yeah.”
“What do they do? Just walk along seafronts?”
“They go to meet-ups with other pups.”
“Do they smell each other’s bottoms?”
“I never asked that.”
“Do they urinate on lamp posts?”
“I never asked that. You are going a bit Channel Five here, John.”
Dogboy plays with his bone and ball in Tony Hickson’s film
“I still can’t get my head round what they do. Do they just walk along seafronts and go to meet-ups where they bark at each other?”
“No,” Tony replied. “They play with their rubber bones and their balls.”
“Have you tried any of this yourself?” I asked.
“No. Personally, I can’t really see the point.”
“Do women get involved?”
Yes, but it’s mostly just men.”
“So not much bitching?”
“No.”
“Do they go dogging?”
“I never asked that.”
“So you have made documentaries on gurning and this human puppy thing. What else?”
“I normally make short cartoons. I did make a horror film called Nasty Splurty Brains in 1992 but didn’t start submitting it to festivals until about 2002. It was banned in Scarborough.”
“Banned in Scarborough?” I asked. “Surely not. Why?”
“In 2004 or 2005, there was going to be a film festival in Scarborough called Whitby Shorts and the Council were humming and hahing: Oh! You’ll need a licence and the films will need to be licensed! which was bullshit. So I thought: How can I turn this to my advantage? The BBFC have got a list of video nasties and there’s a copy on Wikipedia, so I added Nasty Splurty Brains at the bottom of the list. Then I wrote to the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association saying: It’s on the list of video nasties! and they got onto Scarborough Borough Council and it was banned because it was on the BBFC list.”
“That’s an interesting piece of alternative marketing,” I said.
Where’s Mary? – legally, Tony’s short film obviously can’t say.
“I also made a 10-minute puppet film called Where’s Mary?” said Tony.
“It did not get banned,” Tony continued, “but I got a lot of heat. A few death threats.”
“What was the basis of the film?” I asked.
“A child killing other children. A puppet film. Originally, it was going to be more esoteric and experimental, but then I shifted it to puppets. I sold it to the Horror Channel. They went bankrupt.”
“Your other films?” I asked.
I Suck Your Guts – full of movie moments we will never share
“I started making a feature film called I Suck Your Guts around 2012. It was about time-travelling Nazi zombies. But it never got finished, because I fell out with the writer.
“I studied TV and video production at college in Newcastle and worked in corporate video in the late 1980s.
“I stopped making films when I came to London in 1991 because I just ended up working in shoe shops and record shops. I got back into film-making in about 2005 because I started to enjoy it again. Shall I tell you about Dead Elvis?”
“Oh, go on, then.”
“I first started performing as Dead Elvis when I left the circus.”
Circus boy Tony on trapeze at the Theatre Royal, Newcastle
“The circus?” I asked.
“Before I was an actor, I was in the circus. I trained as a trapeze artist and ended up doing knife-throwing and fire-eating for Zippo’s Circus and at a circus called The Foolhardy Folk up in Norfolk.
“I did about five years in the circus but then I got bored. The novelty wears off. Then I came up with a cabaret idea called Dead Elvis around 1998, based on a 1980s drag performer called Dead Marilyn. He did Marilyn Monroe… after she was dead.”
“Did you have much success as Dead Elvis?” I asked.
“I was in a programme on Channel Five.
Dead Elvis supported the 1998 Scottish football team
“Why did they have Elvis in the Scottish World Cup video?”
“Because it was filmed at Prestwick Airport, which is the only place in the UK that Elvis ever visited.”
“And Dead Elvis?” I prompted.
“When I did live events, people hated it. I used to sing Suspicious Minds and there’s a part where the lyrics say Dry the tears from your eyes and I had this plastic Madonna on stage which squirted water out of its eyes. And I would sit on a toilet and pull the chain and there was a pyrotechnic which exploded and blew glitter everywhere. But the audience just didn’t get it and I would get booed off stage and I thought: I’m wasting me time here.”
“Would you revive the Dead Elvis to perform it again today?”
“No. There’s lots of people doing it now. Even when I was doing it, there was the Lesbian Elvis, there was the little one – Elfis – and there was Elephant Man Elvis. Then there was El-vez (the Mexican Elvis) and there was Harry Singh – he was the Sikh Elvis, back in the 1980s with Don’t Step on My Popadoms.”
Tony as Dead Elvis in Jesmond Graveyard on New Year’s Day 1997, shortly before getting thrown out for climbing on graves
“You seem to have had a few careers,” I observed.
“Round about 2008 or 2009 I was a paparazzo photographer in London. I did get Kate Moss once, when she came out of a taxi. I had thought it was going to be Jarvis Cocker but it was Kate Moss and Pete Doherty was with her and she had his guitar in her hand so it looked quite cool.
“As she walked by, I was pressing the button on my camera and the flash didn’t go off and she said: Yer flash is really shit and, for some reason I apologised to her – Oh, sorry.
“On my way home, I threw my flash over Waterloo Bridge into the water. Pete Doherty was always pissed, he always looked like a bag of shit so pictures of him were guaranteed to sell.”
“But I get the impression,” I said, “that you really want to make movies now.”
“In 2015,” Tony told me, “I did a Masters degree in screenwriting at the London College of Communication.”
“And you have made films since then?” I asked.
Ratty etc – such stuff as dreams are made on
“There was Captain Ratty: Intergalactic Space Crusader. I made it in 2015. It was screened at about five film festivals including one in China and at the Anča International Animation Festival in Slovakia.
“It uses rats. Proper rats. The rats are dead. One of my hobbies is taxidermy, so I just bought a rat, two mice and a gerbil from the local pet shop and stuffed them. They were dead before I stuffed them.”
“Do pet shops,” I asked, “sell dead rodents?”
“Yeah. For snake food. Captain Ratty: Intergalactic Space Crusader is good. It’s quality. People hated it though… Obviously.”
“Did the stuffed rat move?” I asked.
“Yes. I moved it with me hand. Like a puppet. There was a film festival in Brighton where they brought in kids from the local autistic school.”
“Please tell me you didn’t stuff them,” I said.
“No. But one of the kids saw Captain Ratty on the screen and he freaked out. He had to be taken from the hall. He didn’t like it. But it is a good film. Highly recommended.”
Comedian Will Franken cross-dressed as a woman for six months last year. I only did it for seven hours on Saturday night.
On Sunday morning, I got a text from Sandra Smith, this blog’s South Coast correspondent, saying: “It’s the first time that I’ve ever walked into a pub with my tights around my ankles.”
A couple of months ago, performer Frank Sanazi (he sings like Frank Sinatra; looks like Adolf Hitler) asked me to come and see his new singing act ‘Elvis Corpsely’ – Elvis Presley back from the dead. He told me he was performing it for the first time at Torture Garden, the monthly BDSM fetish club.
And so he did this weekend, on Valentine’s Night (well, 9.00pm Saturday to 6.00am Sunday).
Tony knew Sophie Seashell, who had booked bizarre acts for that night. The Tiger Lillies performed. As did the extraordinary Andrew Bailey. In the cabaret section, it felt like they were trying to re-create a feel of the decadent Weimar Republic nightclubs in Germany between the Wars.
This year, I thought of going dressed formally
Twenty years ago, as now, Torture Garden had a dress code. Tony Green, wearing a white straw hat, a rather louche suit and looking a bit like Sylvester McCoy’s incarnation of Doctor Who. was told by the Torture Garden doorperson: “You’re OK. You look perverted.” Alas, my loud, hippie Indian-style shirt was not deemed a suitable costume. The people on the door conferred and suggested I take my shirt off so I was naked from the waist up, then take off my black leather belt and tie it diagonally across my chest with the buckle at the front.
With that, I was allowed in.
Since then, though, the dress code has been tightened, if that is the word to use.
Now the rules read:
You can’t wear a fetish top with normal black trousers or vice versa, we do not allow jeans, even black ones, no suits, no camo, no cotton underpants, no regular party dresses that you could wear to any club, no normal black trousers that you could wear anywhere and although full theatrical costumes are fine, cheesy fancy dress is not. Dresscode is enforced throughout the night. TG is a home for people that want to express the most extreme version of their fetish fantasy alter ego, so take this opportunity to push your boundaries.
BDSM and fetish are not my thing. I am quite happy with a picture of Baby Spice and a peach. So my wardrobe does not include anything remotely suitable.
So, on Saturday afternoon, I found myself in the car park at Beckenham railway station as Frank Sanazi handed over to me a long leather Gestapo coat – genuine, from the 1940s – and a small hand whip. He had temporarily lost his Nazi armband down the back of a bookcase in his living room.
With these legs, could I have a second career?
This was my fallback costume. But I also know comedian Sara Mason, whose Edinburgh Fringe show this year will be called A Beginner’s Guide To Bondage.
Which is how I found myself in her bedroom in Fulham at teatime. She was – for reasons I did not ask – particularly keen that I should go in drag.
So I tried on various shoes, stockings, panties, black tops and wigs. Sara seemed unsettlingly keen on dressing me in a variety of things, though I did stop at the offer of a butt plug.
I was going to Torture Garden with this blog’s South Coast correspondent Sandra Smith, also not a BDSM fan, who, while I was trying on my flattering fishnet tights in Fulham, was glueing studs onto her black jacket in Brighton.
Later that night I met Pete Cunningham – aka Frank Sanazi – at a pub in Elephant and Castle and he told me: “I’m playing Tel Aviv on the 7th of April.”
“As Frank Sanazi?” I asked.
“Yes,”
“That should be interesting,” I said.
“I’m doing two gigs out there” he explained. “I’m opening for The Producers in Tel Aviv. It’s the first time they’ve shown the film out there. I’m doing my songs as a warm-up for the film. And I’m also doing a burlesque night – they have a dark burlesque night. I was a bit apprehensive at first, because imagine checking in at the airport.”
“It could be a tough gig,” I suggested.
“Well,” he said, “if I can play Berlin, as I did a couple of weeks ago, and last year I did Vienna – why not Israel this year and New York next year?”
Prestigious blog’s South Coast correspondent (has initials SS)
At this point, Sandra Smith arrived at the pub. As she walked in, her tights fell down.
And then we went to Torture Garden.
Just as I found St Peter’s in the Vatican to be a decidedly non-spiritual and non-religious place, Torture Garden was decidedly non-erotic and the punters seemed to have changed in the last twenty years.
In the blog I posted about that visit, | wrote:
There was a look in the more outrageously dressed (or un-dressed) people’s eyes at Torture Garden which made me think a strong British sense of irony and an active sense of the ridiculous don’t gel (if that’s the word) with wearing outlandish sado-masochistic costumes for sexual thrills.
My memory of twenty years ago was that there were a few decidedly odd people wandering around. Sexual thrills were in the air. Some had come over from Amsterdam for the night.
Pete Cunningham – now a real dead ringer for Elvis Corpsely
This time, people seemed more relaxed wandering around semi-naked or in bizarre get-ups and there were more of them – 2,000 people in The Coronet, a fairly small former cinema.
But, just as people say that modern Glastonbury Festival-goers are not like they used to be in the 1970s – today they are sometimes like tourists visiting a theme park far-removed from their comfortable suburban lives – so Torture Garden seemed a bit like a theme park where participants dressed-up for the occasion. There was no sexual tension in the air.
Until towards the end of the evening.
Sandra Smith and I were trapped in the venue until 5.00am by a lack of trains home.
Dug up: Elvis Corpsely in performance
So we were sitting at one of a group of cafe tables by the bar behind the large dance floor, shouting at each other. You had to shout because of the loud, thumping, repetitive music.
Sitting at one of the adjoining round cafe tables was a couple – a young man and his topless girlfriend. And, at another table, a similar duo. All the other tables had similar couples and groups in various states of undress.
Sandra and I, by this point, were rather disappointed by the normality of it all.
Alright, there was a lot of naked flesh, leather thongs, PVC, latex and occasional studded choker collars with dog leads on display. But everyone was terribly polite, well-behaved and very very British and I observed to Sandra that any other bar in Elephant & Castle – or anywhere else in London, really – filled with people in their 20s knocking back large amounts of drink for hours on end, would have been less politely civilised. Our little cafe area was a bit like sitting in a Costa Cafe emporium with actors resting and chatting between takes in a Mad Max movie.
The girl in one of the couples at one of the tables next to us decided to make a thing of showing off her very nice breasts and adjusting her leather or plastic costume. This resulted in an invitation for her and her man to join the couple at the other adjoining table. and, over the course of the next five minutes or so, five or seven other young topless girls meandered over. I think the attraction was her breasts. There was much silent female amiability with the girls canoodling, snogging, kissing/feeling each others breasts and suchlike. All in a strangely innocent, only semi-passionate way.
Somewhere along the way a taller, thin girl was involved and another man sat down at the next table and, as she bent over, aiming her naked buttocks in our general direction, he started to insert his finger into her in what I suppose one might call an active penile impression.
This then continued when she stretched over to put her hands on the seat of a nearby plastic chair and he replaced his finger with a more appropriate length of his body and started making what Shakespeare called ‘the beast with two backs’.
The strange thing was that this uniformly rhythmic movement was an emotionless, almost mechanical, happening. No passion, not real excitement, no eroticism – just a meeting of meat in what William Burroughs called the soft machine.
It was one person who had an emotionless face doing something to (not really with) another person who had an emotionless face. Watching it was like having an out-of-body experience although, obviously, it would be incorrect to use that description for the two participants.
This ended without really ending. It just stopped. It had got nowhere and never was going to get anywhere. Then there was some other unemotional happenings with soft machines, some erect penises being played with by the two men (separately) and, at some point, a wet wipe was taken out and used for no apparent reason. It seemed more for show that for any practical necessity.
I have a feeling the object was to shock two old and presumed dull people sitting at the other table (us). But really, at this sort of event, this was a forlorn hope,
I suppose this was the climax of the night but – ironically – it involved no climax by anyone.
Sandra Smith’s opinion today was: “It seemed a lot tamer than I expected. One thing that did amuse me in that little scenario at the end was the girl in the midst of it all. While one man was fucking her at one end, she was giving the man at the other end a blow job but covered her head with a coat. With everything else going on, she covered her head with a coat! That amused me.”
Personally, I too am mystified why a coat was necessary for this but not the other parts of what I can only call the act.
Which it did seem to be.
For Sandra Smith’s blog about the evening, click HERE.
About a week after posting this blog and after it was mentioned on the Chortle comedy website, Chortle editor Steve Bennett got this comment from Israel:
I wanted to clarify a mistake in a report about Nazi in Tel-Aviv. It was said that The Producers will be shown in Israel for the first time. Well… The Producers is a huge cult movie over here and always have been. You’d be surprised how much the Holocaust in Israel is a common topic for comedy. Since it’s the land of the Jews no one can accuse us at being anti-semitic so we can take it one or few steps ahead.
Steve Bennett commented:
If you can’t trust the word of a man pretending to be Hitler, who can you trust?
There is a video of Torture Garden’s 2015 Valentine’s Night Ball on Vimeo.
There are always stories and incidents which do not fit comfortably in my normal daily blogs and get lost like tears in rain, as Rutger Hauer might say.
This week, amongst other things:
Mat Ricardo – the man with a potential TV show
ONE
I went to the last ever Mat Ricardo’s London Varieties show at the Leicester Square Theatre which started with the unbilled Heather Holliday walking on stage with a stick and a plate. She used the stick to spin the plate.
Fair enough.
Then an assistant came on stage with a sword and a hula hoop.
Heather replaced the stick with the sword, spinning the plate on the sword’s hilt, then dropped the sword’s blade down her upturned throat – while still spinning the plate – and started hula hooping.
And THAT was just the start of an extraordinary show.
It should be a TV series.
John Robertson & wife Jo wake in a dark garage
TWO
On the same night at Leicester Square Theatre, I saw John Robertson’s The Dark Room again – a preview for his upcoming Edinburgh Fringe run. An amazing show based on his 2012 YouTube hit.
John recently got married in a chicken shed in Australia – I blogged about it – and he and his lovely wife Jo have now re-located from Perth in Australia to Brighton in England. Until they go up to the Fringe, they are living in Jo’s sister’s garage in Brighton.
When they return from Edinburgh, more conventional accommodation has been arranged.
Escaped kangaroo’s Bohemian rhapsody
THREE
Meanwhile, in surprise news from the Czech Republic, Scots ex-pat Alexander Frackleton, who currently lives there, sent me an e-mail:
“A kangaroo is on the loose in northern Bohemia,” he told me. “It escaped from the backyard of its owner on Tuesday night near the north Bohemian town of Lovosice. The owner found a hole in the fence and realised his pet kangaroo was missing on Wednesday morning after being alerted by the police that a kangaroo had been spotted in nearby villages. Although a number of people are reported to have seen the kangaroo (named Joey), no-one has yet re-captured him and the owner has recruited a friend with a private helicopter to help him look for the marsupial.”
“Keep me up-to-date on this,” I begged him.
“The kangaroo is still on the loose,” he told me the next day, “But two weeks ago, there was a wild boar running around the 10th, 11th & 12th districts of Prague… It took police three hours to catch him and eight policemen to pin him down. There is never a dull moment in the Czech Republic.”
Alex tells me he is looking forward to meeting comedian and So it Goes blog regular Matt Roper in mid August, when he passes through Prague.
“I’m going to take him on an alternative sight-seeing trip,” Alex tells me, “by visiting places and things connected to the old regime – including The Tunnel of Intelligence, which was constructed by political prisoners of the communists during the 1950s. Stuff like that. There is also a museum of Totalitarianism which will probably be the first port of call.”
The same day, back in London:
This man knows too much about Hellfire Club
FOUR
I had tea with former Fringe Report editor John Park. We had an interesting discussion about the Bible, theology and Roman Catholicism and he told me about a gay whipping club just off Trafalgar Square, merely a short blood-stained crawl from Whitehall.
John has no interest in such things himself but he did know an unhealthy amount about Sir Francis Dashwood’s 18th century Hellfire Club which was held in the caves near High Wycombe.
I was able to tell him about the defence bunker at High Wycombe and the fact that the adorably wonderful but sadly being fast forgotten entertainer Marti Caine used to live there.
In High Wycombe, not in the bunker.
She once told me – truthfully – that she was perfectly happy just being a housewife and Hoovering the living room, but people kept phoning her up offering ludicrous amounts of money to do showbiz things. She was one of the sanest entertainers I ever met. And was dying from cancer. She died in 1995. So it goes.
A couple of days ago, I blogged about Malcolm and fellow comedian Ricky Grover breaking into a zoo and encountering a silverback gorilla. Comedian John Moloney has now told me a story from many years ago when he was up at the Edinburgh Fringe with Malcolm.
“I was lying in my bed one afternoon with a lovely lady,” John told me, “when Malcolm knocks on the bedroom door and comes in – naked of course, apart from his socks.
“He’s got a tenner in his hand and says to my lady friend, as he waves the tenner in the air: Oy Oy – Show us your tits.
“She says (as she flashes her tits): You can have this one for free.
“Malcolm turns on his heels and says: Oy Oy I’m off for a wank. Sublime.”
“It’s the wearing of the socks that makes that story,” I told John.
“There were wooden floors,” he explained, “so Malcolm didn’t want to get cold – He was always very practical about his masturbation.”
Cereal offender Candy Gigi – last night’s Pull The Other One
SIX
At last night’s Pull The Other One comedy club show in South East London, Martin Soan said to me: “I must tell you the story about Malcolm and the kangaroo.”
“Not another one,” I said.
“You haven’t heard this one,” said Martin.
“I meant Not another kangaroo,” I said.
Martin looked at me, ignored the comment, then told me The Greatest Show On Legs will be performing in Switzerland in December.
“Have you been there before?” I asked, as I know Martin hates flying.
“Yes,” he told me. “I drove there and, at the border, we were stopped and questioned by a very serious-looking Swiss Border Guard. I thought Oh Jesus, we’re in for trouble here! But what he told us was: You will have to wash the car before you can come into the country. They are very clean, the Swiss.
SEVEN
Clean but with an occasional taste for filthy things, Kate Copstick, legendary comedy reviewer for The Scotsman newspaper and a Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards judge since they started, this week got an e-mail from comedy group Late Night Gimp Fight, drawing her attention to their scantily-clad video attempt on YouTube to curry favour with her. See it HERE
I can only dream of such honey traps and not involving other men.
Jon on final Friday at the Emporium, Greenwich
EIGHT
Yesterday was a sad day in South East London. The Emporium vintage clothes shop in Greenwich – which supplied Malcolm Hardee with many of his clothes – is closing tomorrow, though it will continue online.
Co-owner Jonathan Hale was arranging everything – the shop has been there for 27 years.
But Greenwich’s loss may be Hollywood’s gain, as Jon and partner Jacki Cook can now turn their attention more to their successful movie costume business.
Ricky Grover was originally to be on BBC TV’s Secret Killers
NINE
Good news, though, came in the form of a section of that chat I had with Ricky Grover a couple of days ago. It was in a section which I did not include in my previous blog.
I had read that he had been diagnosed with diabetes.
“There’s a two-hour BBC TV show coming on called Long Live Britain,” he told me. “It was originally called Secret Killers but they changed the title.
“They had three of us so-called celebrities.
“We done a couple of tests and it showed up that I had Type 2 diabetes and I had a bit of scarring (fibrosis) on me liver. But they’re reversible things. I’m not on any medication.”
“You don’t need injections for the diabetes?” I asked.
“No, that’s more Type One,” Ricky told me. “If you get anyone who’s middle-aged and overweight like me and you do tests… I’m only a little borderline over.”
“I had a BUPA test two years ago,” I told Ricky, “and they found I had the lungs of a 38-year-old. I had another BUPA test a couple of months ago and they said I had the lungs of a 39-year-old. The bad news is he wants them back. But enough about me.”
So I know this dominatrix. 
Journalist 
SO IT GOES - John Fleming's blog 