A trip to the University Sports Centre

When you see the word GYM in your calendar, your first thought is that it must be some sort of code or abbreviation. The gymnasium is by no stretch of the imagination your natural habitat and you don't think you've ever even visited the University Sports Centre before. Then your imagination drifts to the image of bevies of young beauties exercising in tight clothes and you begin to see the benefits of taking a greater interest in your fitness level. According to your recent research, all students are required to take part in some form of sport or supervised exercise on a daily basis and to achieve a high level of competence within their chosen arena.

You saunter over to the hangar-like twentieth century brutalist building surrounded by outdoor sports fields and training facilities, exchanging polite greetings with other staff members and students you pass on the way. There are several entrances, but you use the main doors into the large foyer, which contains lifts and doors into the stairwells to access the other floors, a reception desk, a large map of the centre, vending machines and several tables and chairs where visitors are sitting to relax, either before or after their exertions.

Inspecting the map shows rooms given over to pretty much every sport you can think of, but the largest areas are listed as being for yoga, cheerleading, various forms of gymnastics and aerobics. The thing that piques your interest the most, however, is the location labelled Spank Practice. It's on the ground floor, so you decide to see what it entails.

You pass though the double doors to the left and find yourself in a glass-walled corridor with expansive exercise rooms on either side. According to the map, those on the left are supposedly intended for aerobics classes, although at the moment you can see various forms of dance being taught, along with at least one self-defence session in which students are learning to incapacitate a stronger and larger assailant, with the help of several men wearing protective rubber bodysuits to play the attackers. The soundproofing is very good as you can barely hear the music from the dance classes or the grunts from the participants in the defence class.

Glancing to the right stops you in your tracks. It turns out you were wrong about the tight clothes. The yoga class on the other side of the glass partition is happening in the nude! Most of the floor is taken up by a shallow pool with hundreds of round floats tethered in a grid pattern within it. The exclusively female participants perform their asanas on the floats while clothed instructors (of both genders) pass through the pool, correcting their postures and making small marks on their backs just below the neck with a bright yellow grease pencil. You imagine that floating on the water must make it much harder to maintain their balance, particularly when, at an inaudible instruction from the yogi at the front, they all reach into the pool and take out a pair of cylindrical blocks, placing one palm on each and then shifting their entire weight to their arms, resting their knees on the outside of their elbows. This position exposes row upon row of spread vulvas and crinkled arseholes to anyone in the corridor, but before you can fully appreciate the vista, one of the young women loses control, tumbling off her float and knocking into two others, starting a chain reaction that ends with more than a dozen beauties in the water.

Straight away, they all rush to get back into place, but the instructors put yellow marks on every one of them, not just the unfortunate who started the whole thing. After a few more extremely taxing asanas, the class comes to an end and the girls step down into the water, some walking towards the showers and cubbyholes where their possessions are stored, whilst others head over to the dry platform where they take it in turns to lean against the back wall while the yogi and instructors whip them with multi-tailed whips. It is apparent that the yellow marks on the girls' backs indicate the number of lashes they are to receive and not one ends the lesson dry-eyed. You don't see any tipping taking place, even though several of the instructors are male, so the whole process is soon over.

The clumsy young lady who caused several of her classmates to fall is one of the last to receive her punishment, which doesn't seem to be any worse than what they received, but afterwards she's bundled into the showers by the girls who suffered because of her and although you don't see what happens to her, you can hear her screaming even through the sound-resistant glass.

The doors from the foyer burst open behind you to admit a large group of students and not wanting to gain a reputation for hanging around the nude yoga class, you start walking again towards your previous destination. It's quite a long way, but eventually you reach the door bearing a plaque simply labelled Spanking. This room doesn't have glass walls and when you open the door, you see that it's by far the smallest you've encountered so far, barely ten paces from side to side. Currently, there's only one person inside, a young man practising the paddle on a padded bolster.

Evert time he hits the bulky cushion, a display on the wall in front of him reports the accuracy and **** of his blow and when he stops, it gives him a report into his performance. You take off your jacket and hang it on a peg just inside the door, then select a cane from the rack and take your place beside another of the bolsters, giving a few warm-up swings whilst the other man drinks from a bottle of mineral water and watches you out of the corner of his eye.

The touchscreen has icons for several spanking implements and so you tap the cane. The picture changes and offers you a selection of training programmes, from which you select a short, expert level tutorial. The screen immediately asks you for a level four (brown) stroke across the centre of the bolster. You instinctively flick it down with moderate **** and are rewarded with a green one hundred percent sign in the accuracy column and a golden number four for the ****, along with a Perfect! on the bottom of the screen.

There follow another eleven similar instructions, with the **** varying between level two (green) and level ten (red), sending the sound of the impact echoing round the compact chamber. The last three strokes are all at level ten and by the end you have an average of ninety nine percent accuracy and gold (excellent) **** rating.

Your audience of one is by now watching openly and lets out a whistle of awe.

"I wish I could cane like that," he says. "What's your secret?"

"Lots and lots of practice," you reply with a smile.

The two of you try several other programmes and implements, your scores consistently superb and his gradually improving. At about the same time your arm starts to tire, the door opens and someone else enters, a fellow from another department whom you recognize by sight but whose name you don't recall at present. You exchange nods of greeting and decide it's time to call it a day before you exhaust yourself. Besides, you've built up an appetite and it's almost lunchtime.

You leave the young man to continue practising his swing alongside his new companion and walk back along the corridor, noticing that the next naked yoga class is well under way. The sight of nearly three hundred young ladies acting in unison is quite mesmerizing, but this time you manage to continue walking whilst you watch. Nearing the doors back into the foyer, you turn your thought to where you want to eat.