Getting home afterwards

Aftercare here assumes somebody is with you at the end. Plenty of the time nobody is. The commonest real version is a woman on a train at half ten with a sore backside and ninety minutes to think, and almost nothing is written for her.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Aftercare here, and the page on drop, both assume somebody is with you at the end. That is the version everybody writes about.

The one I come across more often goes like this. You played with somebody who is not your partner, at their flat, on a weekday evening. At half nine you are putting your shoes back on. By ten past ten you are under the departure board at Euston with ninety minutes ahead of you. I have made that journey from both ends and I got it badly wrong once, which is at the bottom of the page.

Sort the journey out before the scene

Whatever route you work out at twenty to ten, having just come down off something, will be worse than the one you would have worked out at six. Planning is the first thing to go and you will not notice it missing.

So do it before you leave your own house. Last train, and the one before it. Ticket bought, bus checked, the app already on the front screen of your phone, and the fare home in a form nothing can affect: notes in a pocket, or a contactless card you have used this week.

Driving is the part people get wrong

This is the most important thing on the page. Something happens to concentration afterwards. I have no medical training and cannot tell you the mechanism, but the shape of it is consistent. You feel fine for a few minutes, then somewhere in the next half hour there is a dip, and it tends to arrive at about the moment you join a dual carriageway.

So sit for twenty minutes before you touch the keys, with something to eat and something to drink. Longer if you were hit hard, or if there is a stretch of the evening you cannot account for. Twenty minutes is my own figure, and I have never seen a study on it.

The train, forty minutes after

Nobody can tell. People want reassuring about this and believe it least. Nothing shows through clothes, and the man opposite is thinking about his own evening.

Sitting down is a real problem with a boring solution. Bus seats are harder than train seats. Sit slightly forward, take the weight through one side, and after ten minutes you stop noticing. You will probably go cold, so carry a layer even in June, and eat before you get on rather than after you get off. The shakiness people read as emotion is very often blood sugar.

The message you said you would send

One person should already know where you went, who with, and when you were due back. That protocol is on meeting safely. The part that gets dropped is the message itself. You get in at half eleven, you decide it is too late to wake anybody, and your friend spends the night with her phone face up on the bedside table. Send it. Two words will do, and agree beforehand that no reply is expected.

Drop that arrives at work

Sub drop has its own page. The part that belongs here is what it is like with nobody to say it to. It comes on a delay, usually a day or two, so it misses the night when it would have made sense and turns up on Tuesday morning next to a photocopier, flat and quietly ashamed about nothing you can point at.

What helps at a desk at eleven on a Tuesday is unglamorous. Eat something and drink some water, then get outside for ten minutes even in the rain. Postpone every decision until the weekend. The long message you want to send will still be sendable on Friday, and by Friday you will not want to send it.

What to have at home before you leave

Do this in the afternoon, while you are still a sensible person.

• Food in. Bread, butter, eggs, anything that takes four minutes and no decisions. The shop at the end of my road shuts at ten and I have been caught out by that.
• Phone charged, and the charger somewhere you can find it in the dark.
• Heating on a timer, so the place is warm when the door opens rather than at one in the morning.
• Bed made and washing up done. Four minutes now, unbearable at half eleven.
• Nothing outstanding. No bin to put out, and no email you have promised for eight in the morning.

Aftercare you can do on your own

Kettle on before the coat is off, and a pint of water whether you want it or not, because you are more dehydrated than you feel. Then toast, or eggs, or whatever you bought that afternoon for exactly this. Standing up in the kitchen is fine.

A warm shower beats a bath on the first night after a caning, because sitting in hot water with fresh welts stings much more than people expect. Look at the marks before bed and photograph them if you want a record, because by Thursday you have lost the baseline. Marks and bruising has the rest.

Then put on something you have already seen, because anything new asks you to concentrate and there is nothing left to concentrate with. Message somebody, and it does not have to be about the spanking. I have never regretted going to bed at half ten after a session.

If you were the one holding the hairbrush

Hardly anything addresses the top going home alone, which is why top drop is a page here. You have spent two hours concentrating hard on somebody else's body and making decisions with real consequences, watched throughout. Then the door shuts and you are on a night bus with all of it still running.

Same rules, applied more strictly, because you are the one who will assume you are fine. Eat before you set off. Expect to feel oddly bleak at about eleven for no reason that makes sense, so that you recognise it when it comes.

What a decent person does from a distance

Agree it beforehand, at the same point as the safe word. A message that evening once each of you is in, and another the next day. Settled in advance, so nobody is lying there at half eleven deciding whether a text would look keen. The second one matters more, because the night is usually fine and it lands a day or two later.

Somebody who plays with you and then goes quiet for four days has told you something, and it may only be that he is thoughtless.

The time I got it badly wrong

Six or seven years ago I drove home from a flat in Croydon after a session in which I had been the one doing it. It had overrun. I left at about eleven with the car, because the trains across that bit of London after ten are dreadful.

I have no memory of Vauxhall Bridge. Her front door, then parking outside my own flat, and in between a stretch of twenty minutes that is simply not there. I had not been drinking. I was not tired in any way I could have described if somebody had stopped me and asked.

That frightened me more than anything that has ever happened inside a session, and it is why the driving section sits near the top of this page. These days I sit at the kerb for twenty minutes with a sandwich before I start the engine, feeling faintly ridiculous. Faintly ridiculous is a cheap price.