Boxing Day, diving the well

This year Monday 28 December is Boxing Day

The Photo: A caution to frenzied UK after Christmas sales shoppers

Blackthorn Barony and Boxing Day: The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest attestations of the term as being from England in the 1830s, defining it as 'the first week-day after Christmas-day, observed as a holiday on which post-men, errand-boys, and servants of various kinds expect to receive a Christmas-box'. However there are indications that gift giving to tradesmen and servants on the day after Christmas began long before that name was attached to the custom.

Presently in UK Boxing Day is the day after Christmas. However, because Christmas is on Friday this year Boxing Day is celebrated on the following Monday, December 28^th. These days in the UK, Boxing Day is a bank holiday when the after Christmas sales begin. Traditionally ‘Christmas boxes’ contained money or presents and the Barony’s ‘boxes’ for employees who have performed satisfactorily throughout the year contain a sum of money equal to at least 10% of the servants annual wage. The Barony’s boxes are distributed to employees by the Baroness on the afternoon before Boxing Day and to tradesmen and others on Boxing Day itself.

 For her female employees my predecessor Edith, as 22^nd Baroness Blackthorn, began a tradition in the late 90s of allowing most of the Barony’s women servants to travel to London aboard The Dragon the night before to attend the sales on Boxing Day. The minimum staff that stayed behind on Boxing Day to provide hospitality services to the castle are taken to London for the sales aboard The Dragon the following Monday. Anyone who has been in domestic service in a major household knows how tightly they are run so having time off with meals, transportation and lodging (sleeping aboard the Dragon in very comfy reclining seats) on their employer’s dime is very rare. Although the excursion is not entirely w/o oversight since very junior staff are in the care of senior staff members on the trip to ensure no harm comes to them. Male staff gets an equal amount of time off to hunt or fish on Barony land. So that has proved an extremely popular tradition.

Multi-bed hyperbaric chamber: The four bed industrial multiplace hyperbaric chamber (MHC) was the last piece of major equipment installed in my dive facility. It was installed in a space reserved for it after I decided that I could rent out the facility as a diver school when I wasn’t using it and needed an MHC to ensure I had the equipment needed to get the necessary approvals and licence. It’s an upgrade from the one that is about six years old that Adolph, my friend in Vegas, has installed for his dive facility that was used also by women in residence at his Spa, The Lorelei, near by.  

Diving the Well: I try not to vary my exercise routine very much regardless of what is going on around me because at my age I can’t afford not to keep my body in top dancing condition. That’s especially true over the holidays when fattening foods and sweets are so plentiful so that it is harder to keep the pounds off. So after my daily ballet barre and pointe classes I’ve been diving the shallower, 64 ft., well for dive-sex with one of the ballet-boys who are here to provide erotic companionship over the holidays. Carla fitted him with one of the Guardian FFMs reserved for guests. I chose him because he is very well endowed, is an avid SCUBA diver and has a reputation as a considerate partner and an awesome underwater fuck.

I find it amazingly exciting to hang restrained by an ankle leash weightless tethered to the floor 64 feet below the surface sucking gas while having my brains fucked out by a marvelous hunky and very experienced lover.  At that depth using regular gas rather than a Nitrox mix I sometimes get just a touch of nitrogen narcosis which heightens my danger if I’m not careful. To avoid that we breathe Enriched Air Nitrox with 32% oxygen (EAN32) to minimize the chance of nitrogen narcosis and extend dive time w/o decompression. Even so I have deco lines and spare air hung in both wells for periodic decompression stops the last being at 15 feet if needed. After sex I love having an afterglow nap while still tethered to the bottom. I have my computer set to alarm when I’ve reached table limits and I need to deco during ascent. Dive-sex uses a lot of air as air consumption techniques are pretty much ignored as you are racing toward and at orgasm so we use 130 cu ft HP steel tanks. That way we can usually have at least three encounters and a nap before we ascend.   

Since it’s after Christmas I’m luteal, I ovulated on Christmas day, so right now I don’t need a cervical barrier for contraception. I just need reproductive tract protection for ‘flood insurance’ to prevent having water forced into my uterus from the hydraulics of a lover’s thrusts if or when my vagina floods which is a common occurrence for women during dive-sex.  Ideal for dive-sex flood insurance is a latex Reflexions flat spring diaphragm because silicone lube so necessary for extended intercourse underwater can be safely used with a latex diaphragm and unlike arcing and coil spring rim diaphragms the flat spring rim is nearly impossible to under-thrust even when the man is intentionally trying.

After inserting my Reflexions I always squat push, down to force my cervix closer to the entrance to my vagina and use my fingers to express the air out of the dome forcing the stretchy rubber deep into my anterior fornix to be held there by the suction which appreciably increases the strength of the suction in the dome and therefore the strength of the seal and the safety of the device.

Female staff off: Three thirteen passenger vans took the ladies of the castle staff down to Caersws to board The Dragon for the overnight trip to London for the sales. They will sleep and eat aboard the train and the Dragon will be parked at an unused platform at St Pancras so they can breakfast and leave for the sales when the stores open. They were so excited! I’m glad to be able to do something to please them as they work very hard to please me during the year.

Super Bowl weekend in London

Eaton Square Belgravia, Westminster, London

The photo: Eaton Square, London SW1W Terrace to the north side of Eaton Terrace looking west. Part of the Grosvenor Estate in Belgravia. The photo is by Paul Leonard 2006. Eaton Square is one of the three garden squares built by the Grosvenor family when they developed the main part of Belgravia in the 19th century, and is named after Eaton Hall, the Grosvenor country house in Cheshire. Blackthorn House is one of the few freeholds privately owned by others in the square.

An Invitation: Morning Wood, who is living at Blackthorn House while he practices psychiatry at Blackthorn Clinic during the week received an invitation on my behalf to a Super Bowl XLIX party at a neighbor’s home a few doors down from Blackthorn House.  I was surprised and pleased. Not because I care about the game, I don’t, but because a London neighbor invited us. It is a marvelous neighborhood, but a lot of homes are owned by foreign absentee owners and it is very quiet so I was looking forward to meeting some of the owners who actually live on the square.

Our hosts who I’ll call ‘Alexei’ and ‘Veronika’ were a widowed Russian expat businessman, and his 18 y/o daughter who dances with a prominent local ballet company.  Alexei is very handsome (think George Clooney) and local gossip has it he is an attentive lover and expert swordsman. Assuming that to be true I wore a latex Reflexions flat spring diaphragm even though I was CD23 and Luteal so if we had a sexual encounter and neither of us were protected I should have been safe from pregnancy. A bigger concern on my part was that I had no full panel STI test for him so I wouldn’t have taken the chance on him penetrating me w/o using a condom. I needn’t have worried; he didn’t make a serious attempt to seduce me.

Dress was casual so I wore pink seamed tights over a long sleeve, turtleneck, and thong-back aquamarine leotard with pink suede tipped GM pointes. Over my leo I wore a toasty warm cowl collar canary yellow woolen sweater as a tunic which came a bit above mid thigh. It was an ensemble to display my legs and be noticed in and I was.

The weather was cold and damp with light rain. Fortunately Alexei lives in the same terrace row less than 100 yards away so it was a short dry walk for Marvin and me under the covered terrace walkway to his door where we were greeted by two large security men and after showing our invitation were shown in. We were warmly greeted by Veronika who was acting as hostess.  She knew us by name and said she had been looking forward to meeting me as her father had told her about me. I smiled and said I looked forward to being good friends with her while I wondered what her father, a I man I had never met, had told her about me. Her remark did alert me that the invitation might have been more than to a friendly neighborhood gathering and I wondered what he wanted.

Veronika introduced Marvin and me to other guests, mainly young Russian men and gorgeous Russian women with one or two older business acquaintances of her fathers. No one was wearing wedding rings. There was a table with caviar from the Caspian Sea on toast points and Champagne and single malt scotch which I avoided since I suspected Alexei had some business he was going to ask me about. It turned out many of the young men work for Alexei and the women are ballet dancers either in Russia or other European countries and England who had time off and had been invited for their looks and pelvic skills.

Alexei: As soon as we had something to drink, Marvin had a Macallan 40 y/o single malt scotch, Veronika guided Marvin away to introduce him to her ballet girlfriends and I found Alexei immediately at my elbow. He must be in his mid 50s, but has a lovely hard chiseled body, is 6 feet tall, about 165 lbs. and steel gray eyes. He is in the energy business, natural gas from Russian fields which he has the rights to, among other things, and is a patron of the Mariinsky and Royal ballet companies. He said he learned about me from Maya, the Russian ballerina from the Mariinsky who returning readers will recall had the termination and spent her recovery with me at Blackthorn Castle after her German Medusa IUD failed during her stay with the Duke of M**** at Crag Abbey over the Christmas and New Years  holidays.

Training Veronika: Alexei Said he had heard what an amazing job I have done in training my wards; Bea, Willow, and the Swan twins and asked that I coach Veronika in the ways of men as there is no woman in the family to take her in hand to counsel her and to improve her seductive and pelvic skills. I was pleased that he asked as I had taken an immediate liking to Veronika and I have been missing the interaction between myself and my other wards. I’m not sure how much time Veronika would otherwise have away from the ballet company she dances with, but since Alexei is a patron she can probably get a leave of absence with no harm to her career.

Super Bowl XLIX: In a drawing room there was a huge flat screen TV and soft couches and chairs in a semicircle around it where we all gathered to watch the game. The New England Patriots beat the Seattle Seahawks, the defending champion, 28-24. I watched very little of the game as I’m not a sports fan. I accepted the invitation so I could chat up my neighbor and his friends which I thought worked out quite well.

Though it was hard fought and a tight contest In my opinion the New England team had no business playing in the Super Bowl as they cheated with an under-inflated football to win over the Indianapolis Colts to get there. A ball condition that team members must have known they were playing with, but in hindsight no one seems to have any knowledge of. Imagine that!   If you don’t understand the last sentence Google ‘deflate gate’. I thought the Commercials were less interesting this year and my fave was the one for Budweiser with the lost puppy saved by the Clydesdales.

It was three AM when the game ended and many of the guests paired up and retired to rooms at Alexei’s place. Marvin and I said goodnight to Alexei and Veronika and walked home and to bed briefly before Morning wood took me doggie style before showering, dressing, having breakfast and going to the Clinic for his first patient at ten AM while I slept in.

European ballet venues

Palais Garnier the Foyer de la Danse

The Photo: One of the worlds most beautiful assignation spots, the Foyer de la Danse in the Palais Garnier in Paris. An institution, the Foyer de la Danse in the opera house was the privileged meeting point between subscribers and dancers. It had its golden age in the decades 1820-1880. The Foyer de la Danse was discussed in my post for March 28, 2011 entitled Ballet Sex.

A proposed European trip: During June, July and August Anya and I will be visiting Taryn (outside Cambridge) and Tanaquil (in Bavaria) as well as major ballet performance venues in London, Paris, Vienna, Stuttgart and Milan. Tanaquil has made special arrangements for Anya and me to have intimate encounters in these venues ballet studios, some of which; Paris, Stuttgart and Milan were the scene of early innovations in classical ballet technique and costuming. Gigi will be with Jacques in Hawaii, Cyndi will be with her mom, Fiona, visiting her maternal grandfather’s castle in England and Aimée is returning to her home in France to visit her parents before returning to St Lucy’s for Fall term. All the arrangements aren’t final as yet but it should be an amazing time.

Our itinerary:

London: Royal Opera House: The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in the London district of Covent Garden. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later Handel's first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there. The current building is the third theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1857. The façade, foyer and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,268 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high. The main auditorium is a Grade 1 listed building.

Paris: Palais Garnier: The Palais Garnier, also known as the Opéra de Paris or Opéra Garnier or Grand Opera House, but more commonly as the Paris Opéra, is a 2,200 seat opera house. A grand landmark designed by Charles Garnier in the Neo-Baroque style, it is regarded as one of the architectural masterpieces of its time. Upon its inauguration in 1875, the opera house was officially named the Académie Nationale de Musique - Théâtre de l'Opéra. It retained this title until 1978 when it was re-named the Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Paris. After the opera company chose the Opéra Bastille as their principal theatre upon its completion in 1989, the theatre was re-named as the Palais Garnier, though its more official name, the Académie Nationale de Musique, is still sprawled above the columns of its front façade. In spite of the change of names and the Opera company's relocation to the Opéra Bastille, the Palais Garnier is still known by many people as the Paris Opéra, as have all of the many theatres which have served as the principal venues of the Parisian Opera and Ballet since its founding.

Stuttgart: Staatstheater: The Staatstheater Stuttgart (Stuttgart National Theatre) is an opera house in Stuttgart, Germany. It is also known locally as the Grosses Haus, having been the larger of two theatres of the former Königliche Hoftheater. Designed by the noted Munich architect, Max Littmann, who won a competition to create new royal theatres, it was constructed between 1909 and 1912 as the Königliche Hoftheater, a royal theatre of the Kingdom of Württemberg with a Grosses Haus and a Kleines Haus. In 1919 the theatres were renamed the Landestheater, and later, the Staatstheater. The Small House was destroyed by bombing during the Second World War and, today, the site is occupied by a new Kleines Haus, which opened in 1962. The Grosses Haus is the only major German opera house to survive the bombing of the Second World War. Between 1982 and 1984, extensive renovations restored it to its original condition and it now seats 1,399.

Vienna: State Opera House: The Vienna State Opera Ballet, like the opera company, is based at the Vienna State Opera House in Vienna, Austria. The original building was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945.The ballet company performs to a worldwide audience each New Year's Day by means of the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's Day Concerts, the televised broadcast of which includes several pre-recorded dance sequences.

Milan: La Scala: La Scala (Italian: Teatro alla Scala), is a world renowned opera house in Milan, Italy. The theatre was inaugurated on 3 August 1778 and was originally known as the New Royal-Ducal Theatre at La Scala (Italian: Nuovo Regio Ducale Teatro alla Scala). The premiere performance was Antonio Salieri's Europa riconosciuta. Most of Italy's greatest operatic artists, and many of the finest singers from other nations, too, have appeared at La Scala during the past 200 years. Today, the theatre is still recognised as one of the leading opera and ballet theatres in the world and is home to the La Scala Theatre Chorus, La Scala Theatre Ballet and La Scala Theatre Orchestra. The theatre also has an associate school, known as the La Scala Theatre Academy (Italian: Accademia Teatro alla Scala), which offers professional training in music, dance, stage craft and stage management.