Visit a café that's just round the corner

The Senior Common Room is always packed at lunchtime and you don't really feel like dealing with the press of colleagues today, so you decide to try a nearby café, where you've sometimes eaten in the past, on days when you haven't brought anything with you from home. Sauntering down the street, you make a mental note to check whether your grad-students ever prepare your lunches as well as breakfasts and dinners, before arriving at your destination just a couple of minutes later.

The café is a sweet little place catering mainly to tourists, pastel shades and framed newspaper clippings embellished with strings of bunting and shelves bearing brightly coloured pots and jars. Most customers just buy a drink and a few snacks or cakes, eating at one of the small round white tables in the main room or the shiny silver ones outside in the garden, but hot meals are also available to order, including a range of sumptuous rarebits, their extra ingredients often having little connection with the adjectives used to describe them, at least as far as you can tell. Why an Italian rarebit should be tomato-flavoured or an Australian rarebit come on a muffin instead of toast, you're not sure, although you suppose a French rarebit being made with red wine instead of beer makes a bit more sense.

Despite being quite busy, the efficient staff at the tills rattle through the customers quickly enough that you hardly have to wait and by the time you've made up your mind what to have, the young man on the left is ready to take your order, for which you pay in advance. He hands you a wooden spoon with a number on it and you go to the smaller second room where the tables are square and varnished instead of round and painted and the chairs are cushioned instead of bare wood. Tourists who don't know any better end up with the less comfortable seats, encouraging a quicker turnover and greater profit for the owners, but regulars like you know better.

Today, however, a couple of sightseers have found their way back here, possibly because they're both more than a bit overweight and would have found it difficult to fit in the smaller seats out front. In fact, you've become so used to all the women around you being in great shape that you have to stop yourself staring at the wife, who's glaring angrily at her husband and fortunately doesn't notice. Taking a seat, you can't help overhear their conversation, the accents confirming your suspicions that they're from overseas, explaining why the woman didn't have the importance of good diet and exercise spanked into her when she was younger.

"Honey," the bloke is saying in between mouthfuls, "it's the way things are done here. Men like me have an obligation to spank girls like her when they misbehave and they just wanna show their gratitude. It's not like I made the rules."

"I'm not saying you shouldn't'a spanked the little floozy, flouncin' about in that tiny skirt with nothin' under it, but the man chooses how to be tipped and if you'd taken the money we could'a been havin' lunch in that diner at the top of the tower, instead'a this place…"

She continues to drone on and you tune it out, as the other four diners seem to be doing. At the far table, you recognize Dr. Maynard, who often takes her doctoral candidates out for lunch to discuss their theses in a more relaxed atmosphere than her room in college. Today, she's with a blonde stunner, who's clothed a bit more conservatively than most of the students you've seen, her cream dress easily covering her crotch and white hooded top doing the same for her décolletage. You wonder whether she always dresses like that or her attire was chosen especially for leaving campus.

At the other occupied table, a courting couple in their thirties waits for their meal, she wearing a black business suit and he grey trousers and a green sweater with a logo from a local firm of electricians. The woman doesn't have a spanking implement of her own visible, but she's holding the wooden spoon with her order number on it and miming using it to spank someone. When the middle-aged waitress brings your chosen dish, the man waylays her and asks how much longer theirs will be. Her reply that it's on its way does little to appease him and you hear his girlfriend speculate that if the attendant were of spankable age, they wouldn't have been kept waiting as long.

He responds that it probably would have been just as long, but it wouldn't have seemed it, because they would have had the spanking to occupy them in the meantime.

You allow yourself a little smile at the truth of that and settle down to savour your repast. Unfortunately, it is at that exact moment that the foreign couple decide to leave and stagger out, bumping the tables as they go, the wife almost upsetting your lunch with her girth. You catch the plate in time, but wonder whether you may have been wrong to limit the spanking age to thirty.