Diary – 11 December 2004

I was in Woolworths last Friday when a woman hit her little child across the head. Quite a few of us saw what she did, but none of us did anything. To be fair, it wasn’t a hard blow and the victim didn’t burst into tears, but it was shocking. When young, I was often belted round the ear, once for saying ‘bugger’, but then, in those days, the word was unspeakable and the punishment unremarkable. Returning home I did a little research on the history of spanking, and am amazed — as both Richard II and Frankie Howerd were apt to exclaim — at my findings. For instance, did you know that as late as 1968 a gentleman in Bognor Regis was doing such a brisk trade in selling canes by post that he was running out of trees and contemplating moving to a leafier part of the country? I already knew that Gladstone was into flagellation after going out to talk to ladies of the night — as he was a Liverpudlian it didn’t surprise me — but we were never taught that Swinburne wrote a poem called ‘Arthur’s Flogging’, the last three lines of which read:

With piteous eyes uplifted, the poor boy
Just faltered, ‘Please sir’, and could get no farther.
Again, that voice, ‘Take down your trousers, Arthur.’

Last week I went to the Athenaeum club in Pall Mall for the launch of the 2004 Oxford Companion to the Mind, edited by Richard Gregory. It contains a feast of entries on such mind-boggling subjects as evolutionary psychology, tickling, extra-terrestrial intelligence, free will and phantom limbs. It was Professor Gregory who, years back, explained to me how memory works. Apparently the brain lays down chemical tracks — tyre marks in the mud, so to speak — and information is then stored in the circuit system.