Fun things to try when you are new

If you have read much of the rest of this site you could be forgiven for concluding that it is all injury risk, legal caveats and people speaking in low, careful voices. Most evenings are nothing like that. Here are twelve things you could do this week that need no preparation and no ceremony.

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.

Adults only, obviously, and I put that in the first sentence on purpose: everything on this page is between consenting adults over 18.

Right. If you have been reading this site for an hour you may have arrived at the conclusion that none of this is any fun. Bruising. The law. Coercive control. Drop, arriving two days later on a Wednesday afternoon at your desk. All of that is true and I stand behind every page of it, and together it gives a badly misleading impression of what a normal evening looks like.

A normal evening is small. Ten minutes, usually. Somebody laughs at the wrong moment. There is a hairbrush involved and then there is a cup of tea. There is even a word for a punishment scene where nobody has done anything wrong, funishment, which is an ugly word for a very cheerful idea.

My own first time as the one in charge was a catastrophe of gravity. I had made notes. I had thought about the lighting. I asked her whether she was ready to begin, out loud, in a voice I can only describe as pastoral, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down. That laugh saved the evening. We got through a quarter of what I had planned, and everything good since has looked more like that than like the notes.

The properly run version, with the coffee beforehand and the negotiation and the check-in afterwards, is at your first time, start to finish. This is the other end of the scale. Nothing below requires an agreement, a scene name, or you calling anybody sir.

Twelve things that cost nothing

A dozen by hand, fully dressed

Over the knee, clothes on, twelve by hand, five minutes, then get up and put the television back on. No counting, no scolding, no vocabulary whatsoever. This is the one I would suggest to almost anybody, because there is nothing in it to get wrong and nothing to feel foolish about at breakfast. Over the knee has the practical detail, though on a sofa you will work it out in seconds.

The warm-up, and then stop

A warm-up is ten or fifteen minutes of light, fast, thoroughly unremarkable hand work, and it makes a complete evening on its own. Do that, and then stop, on purpose, because the two of you decided beforehand that stopping was the plan. A surprising number of people discover the warm-up was the part they actually wanted.

One swat in the kitchen

One, over jeans, while somebody is reaching into a cupboard. This is how an enormous number of couples begin, and the only negotiation it needs is one conversation in which you both agree that it is allowed to happen. After that there is no announcement and no build-up, and it is very easy to give back. If even that conversation feels impossible, there is a whole page on asking your partner.

Let the dice decide

Roll a die and that is the number, no discussion. Or cut a deck, low card takes six. Keep it to one throw, because the charm of it is that neither of you had to decide anything, and the charm evaporates the moment somebody is doing arithmetic. The full version, with caps and what happens when a bet runs away from people, is at games, bets and forfeits.

A bet on whatever you were watching anyway

You had the football on, or the semi-final of something on BBC One. Put six on it. It takes ten seconds to set up, it gives the evening a low hum underneath it, and the result arrives without either of you having to raise the subject again.

The birthday one

A birthday spanking comes with its own excuse, which makes it the easiest ask on this page. You can float it three weeks early as a joke and see what comes back at you. One for each year gets less charming every year, so agree a fixed number of strokes. The ritual version is at rituals and occasions.

A forfeit on something domestic

Attach a small price to something dull that already happens. The bins going out on Thursday morning instead of Wednesday night. The washing left in the machine until it smells. Nothing invented and nothing solemn, and the price stays small enough to be funny. Half the pleasure is that it gives a tedious Tuesday a bit of charge.

A number in the morning

Say a number before you both leave the house and then say nothing else about it all day. Twelve, tonight. That is the entire mechanism, it costs nothing at all, and it will sit at the back of somebody's head through two meetings and a supermarket queue. The cheapest anticipation available to anyone.

Two implements, and you pick

Put a hairbrush and a wooden spoon on the table and let the person receiving choose between them. A small taste of the dynamic with no weight on it, and quietly revealing, because people take much longer over that decision than the stakes justify. What each one actually does is on implements, although for a first go the choosing matters more than the choice.

A rule that expires at eleven

One rule, agreed at seven, gone by eleven. No sitting on the sofa without asking. No using my first name. Pick something faintly ridiculous, because a rule with an expiry time is a joke you are both in on, and if it makes you cringe then it has expired by eleven anyway.

Six each

Both of you take six, one after the other, same implement, same spot. It clears up a great deal of guesswork about what this actually feels like from either end, and it makes the whole business very hard to take too seriously. Some people find out something about themselves doing this, which is what switching is. Others find out only that they have a strong preference, which is also useful.

Positions, with nothing happening

Ten minutes trying positions with your clothes on and no impact of any kind. Over the knee, over the arm of the sofa, across the bed, bent over the kitchen table. You are finding out which ones your back tolerates and where the furniture is the wrong height, and doing it in advance saves an awkward shuffle later on. It sounds absurd. It is probably the most useful ten minutes here.

What not to start with

A short list, given lightly. Canes, which are a different sport altogether and unforgiving of a beginner's aim. Anything hard and wooden, for much the same reason.

Big numbers, which sound impressive in advance and mostly produce a sore, bored person at stroke forty. Heavy roleplay, since remembering a character while self-conscious is genuinely difficult. And whichever thing one of you has been building up in your head for eight months, which deserves better than a first attempt on a weeknight with the dishwasher going.

The short safety bit

The fleshy lower half of the backside and nowhere else, which is the one thing on this page I would not bend on and which is set out properly at where it is safe to strike. Agree a word that stops everything at once, even for something this small, because it takes four seconds and it means nobody has to be brave about saying stop: see safe words. And none of it after drink, in either direction, on any evening.

It is fine if it stays like this

Something happens to people who read a lot about this subject. They start treating the light version as a stage on the way to the real material, and they get slightly apologetic about only wanting twelve with a hairbrush.

There is no ladder. Nobody graduates. I know a couple who have done the same dozen by hand on a Sunday evening since some point in the nineties, have never owned a cane, and are not behind anybody. If a hairbrush and ten minutes on a sofa is the whole of what you want, then you have already found the thing.