Mija’s Room

Melodrama by Post: Aunt Gladys, Lady de Vries, and Other Disasters

Posted on By Mija

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How to Read Inez of the Upper Fourth

Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

(Writing this section of the story has me missing the ASS/SSS poster and story writer, the late, great Alex Birch 1Alex’s stories are other places on the ‘net, however I’m absolutely sure The Spanking Story Archive had his enthusiastic permission. So try there first.more than I can rightly say.)

Introduction – A Prefatory Word

At Saint Clare’s, it is a truth universally acknowledged (at least by Ronnie Elwood) that any girl seen in Inez de Vries’s company after lights out is more or less doomed. Thus Clarissa Charrington — (a character created by reader JustABoomer) a perfectly decent Lower IV with a genius for self-pity and a Jelly Baby happiness scale— was slippered for nothing more shocking than talking in slippers. And this was before her role in the “The Secret Letters” or with Lady de Vries and Headmaster Lewis had even been revealed. 

Trusting his indulgent understanding, Clarissa poured out her grievances to “Papa,” only to find he had abruptly transformed into “Father,” replying with all the ponderous dignity of the House of Commons. Clarissa, meanwhile, revealed a transformation of her own: the once devoted daughter emerged as a haughty, stroppy teenager, indignant at every turn and grandly refusing the hundred lines set for her. What might have remained a minor school punishment swelled into a correspondence campaign. Aunt Gladys, recalled from her Highland idyll with all the grace of a cat yanked from a sun-beam, contributed her tilted-halo irreverence by post, while Lady de Vries, with a deft flick of the foil at the Garden Fête, contrived to elevate the whole business into something resembling a diplomatic incident.

Thus, a few minutes’ chatter after lights out blossomed into an exchange of letters in which Papa became Father, daughter became adversary, and a melodrama about six slipper whacks on the knickers went speeding back and forth across the country by post — culminating in a command summons so imperious it required a telegram and sleeper train.

(Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.)

 

 

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington
Saint Clare’s School for Girls

Lower IV Dormitory
22 June 1955

Dearest Papa,
   You must prepare yourself — for I have suffered one of the most frightful injustices in the whole history of school.

   On Tuesday evening I was caught in the Upper IV common room after lights out. Yes, I own up: I was out of bed in slippers and dressing gown, with Inez. But what were we doing? Only talking. No feasts, no sneaking fags behind the lavs, no plotting to burn the place down — just talking!

   The punishment? One Saturday detention and six whacks with the house slipper across our knickers. Papa, it was beastly humiliating. As if I were some dreadful hardened case when my only crime was conversation. I know girls who’ve had nothing more than a ticking-off for worse.

   And everyone can see why. It wasn’t what I did — it was who I was with. Because it was Inez, the staff came swooping like hawks, and I was caught in their net. She can’t so much as sneeze without someone making a whole to-do of it. That I should catch it too seems monstrously unfair.

   I bore it like a soldier, of course — not a single tear, though the corridor was thick with girls craning their necks to see. Matron tutted and gave me a spoonful of cod-liver oil afterwards (as if that helped!). I can’t help thinking it was all absurdly over the top.

   Really, Papa, you must agree it was hardly tyranny beastliness. A detention and a slippering for twelve minutes after lights out? Mamma would have called it petty, I’m sure, and I daresay you might too.
  Please do say I’m right to be indignant. It would comfort me to know at least someone thinks talking after lights out is not the moral equivalent of mutiny.

   Your bruised but not beaten Darling, Daring Daughter,

Clarissa

P.S. On my Jelly Baby scale: 2½. Pride very sore, bottom less so (thank Heavens).

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  • 1
    Alex’s stories are other places on the ‘net, however I’m absolutely sure The Spanking Story Archive had his enthusiastic permission. So try there first. ↩︎
bottoming

Oasis 2025 Day Two: The Envelope Please

Posted on By Mija

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[My first and second Oasis 2025 posts are here and here.]

I’m not going to talk about the dog park today. Suffice to say Sutti and I went out, found a patch of green, she played hard, we came back, she ate, drank, and took a nap while I had a two-hour meeting with my department chair. It went well—we discovered we’re on the same page about where the department goes next, which is always a happy thing.

Afterwards I got coffee and started thinking about detention.

My detention with the Headmaster (Stephen Lewis) wasn’t until the very end of his evening schedule—9:02 p.m.—because I’d told him about my afternoon meetings and he’d kindly shifted me. (Thank you!). The later slot meant I wouldn’t see much of the vendor fair, but that was fine. This house already has more than enough implements, thank you very much. I did, however, pick up a wonderful tin of “Bare Bottom Balm” from the lovely Botany Bitch. She’s based in Southern California, but of course we had to meet in Las Vegas.

I did my first of these Headmaster sessions at last year’s Oasis. Paul walked me over, waited outside (yes, you can hear through the door), and then took me back to our room where school punishments blurred into home ones. This year would be different.

The set-up is remarkable. Each session is only six minutes long. There are chairs outside where the next two or three people wait, nerves jangling, muffled sounds of spanking drifting through the door. Quiet, shared humor in the hallway. The shortness of the appointment is part of the realism—you’re just another unfortunate student slotted into the Head’s busy evening.

Last year with Mr. Lewis, it had been straightforward: missing assignments—both of us playing the roles serious and straight, as though the scene were a page from an actual school register. This year I’d tried for an adventure. With Inez on my mind, I added a twist: tardiness (a perennial), missing work (inevitably linked), and—my favorite—“being cleverer than the teachers.” I hit send.

This was set out in Newcastle the day the uniform arrived. I forgot to take one at the hotel.

Hours before my slot I slowly assembled the uniform: ironed my white shirt, changed into navy knee socks and black Docs, tied my tie, buttoned my kilt. But before any of that I’d already donned the very irregular panties beneath my regulation knickers. At least deciding to wear the Scottish uniform solved my “what to wear” problem. (See photo—not taken in Vegas.)

And in case you’re wondering why I so often overpack for spanking weekends: it’s the possibilities. What if someone wants a safari scene? Or this is finally my chance for T-Rex cosplay discipline? Yes, I’ve packed the dark green blazer—but what if the navy one is the one that matters? It goes on like that, to infinity.

For those of us who do school roleplays that last hours, the idea of a meaningful scene in six minutes seems ridiculous. But Mr. Lewis makes it work.

I was called in, handed over my envelope containing my offenses. He inspected it first for tampering. I hadn’t tampered with it—not even with removable washi tape—but I had unthinkingly jammed it into my backpack, where it migrated to the bottom like a guilty secret. Though I’d ironed it along with my skirt, he declared the envelope and slip only barely passed muster. Already I felt like the careless schoolgirl I’d claimed to be.

You would think an envelope would protect a note a tiny bit better.

He questioned me, sharply but not unkindly. Tardiness. Missing work. Being cleverer than the teachers. My heartrate shot up. I was already regretting the pink-panties gambit. First I was taken OTK, knickers up. For a moment I started to relax—the navy knickers are enormous; surely they could keep the much smaller pink pair safely hidden.

I was then led to a table and told to bend over it for six sharp cane strokes. It was a light-ish cane, delivered over my knickers.

As the cane strokes fell, one by one, each with its signature SWISH, I was reminded of my “cleverer than my teachers” offense by being asked if I thought I was smart. “No, sir,” I answered quickly and meekly.

“You are smart,” he corrected me. “But perhaps not smarter than your teachers.”

I found the cheek to agree: “Not all of them.”

Painful, yes—but perhaps because of the double layers, not unbearable. With each stroke I became more certain I was going to get away with it, that my pink panties would remain a private joke I could tell “Mr. Lewis” about after our scene was over.

Alas, not so. After the final stroke, Mr. Lewis stepped closer, smoothed my knickers, and lifted the leg elastic just a fraction. His voice went severe: “I thought as much.”

I knew better than to rise—no one says that and then sends the culprit on her way. He crossed back to the desk, selected the tawse, and told me to prepare for twelve strokes. It would have been six, he noted, had I not been “too clever.”

The first six bit and were bearable—sharp, stinging, the kind of pain I could take with steady breaths. The second six fell lower, harder. Each one drove me up onto my toes, fingers clamped white-knuckled around the table’s edge as I fought the urge to jump up, to throw my hands back and cover my bottom.

At last he told me that was all, and that better behavior would be expected in the future. I thanked him, as properly as I could manage, and received a brief embrace before being sent on my way.

Then, returning to myself, I asked him how it was going. He said it was fine—lovely, actually—except that he was terribly bored with the sound of his own voice. I left the suite laughing.

When I reclaimed Sutti, her temporary keeper reported that my absence—vanishing into a room she couldn’t see, from which came strange and worrying noises—was, as far as my furry friend was concerned, NOT OKAY.

Sutti’s ruling was clear: no more disappearing into mysterious rooms, thank you very much.

Day three’s post will also involve Stephen Lewis, but in a very different context.

fiction

The Secret Letters – Part 1

Posted on By Mija

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Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Introduction

The Secret Letters exchange began when Clarissa Charrington slipped a note into the post for her aunt Gladys, with Beano clippings and a sly message from Inez de Vries tucked inside. Gladys, amused and willing, forwarded the enclosure under her own respectable cover. In this way, the girls’ words travelled by official post — yet hidden in plain sight, a letter within a letter.

Placed between the correspondence between Lady de Vries and the Headmaster and the memoranda of The Elwood Files, this packet shows another face of Saint Clare’s: the smuggled confidences, the dodges, the clever workarounds that made school life both dangerous and delightful.

It also helps explain one puzzle of the summer term: how Lady de Vries came to know of her daughter’s punishment almost at once, when other attempts at posting letters — Ronnie’s, most notably — were intercepted and handed over to staff. For Gwen, the way was cleared by her niece-by-marriage, and the Headmaster and faculty were left wondering how she learned so quickly.

Those who remember school will recognise it straightaway — the thrill of knowing your secret was out, the conspiratorial tone (“if you’re not too greedy”), the Beano page folded in like a wink, the sense that one joke could topple into disaster if an adult opened the wrong envelope.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the plain text version.

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington

Saint Clare’s School for Girls

13 June 1955

Dearest Glad,

Thanks awfully for your last — and for the gossip about Cousin Margaret’s fête. I can just see her trying to look queenly with jam on her gloves and nose. How long was it before someone told her? Or maybe no one dared!

Everything’s much the same here — prep, bells, and the usual scramble for hot water (honestly you’d think we were fighting for it like rations). I’m sending you two Beano clippings that gave us a proper giggle in the dorm. Minnie the Minx in the second one is the spit of a certain Upper IV girl — you’d know the sort, can make a Latin lesson feel like the build-up to a jailbreak.

IdV has the staff muttering and the rest of us craning our necks to see what happens next. That’s why I tucked in the second clipping — if you like it you might pass it along to someone who’d appreciate the likeness (you know who). Just keep it under your hat — not everyone here has the right sense of humour, and I’d be in the soup if it got round.

Buckets & buckets of love,

Clarissa

(more…)

books

Saint Clare Prehistory, Part One – In which The Luggage steals my sources

Posted on By Mija

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This post will (hopefully) evolve. It’s intended to be a living bibliography of boarding school books, stitched together while my brick-red school trunk goes off into an alternative universe to have adventures without me… because every great school story begins with a missing kit and misplaced books.

There are still several days of Oasis Party posts (first and second) waiting in the wings, and more than a few Inez entries stranded halfway through editing. In theory, finishing those should have my full attention for this Friday morning’s blogging. In practice, however, my AuDHD brain—already juggling post-COVID fog, the occasional energy crash, ridiculous Southern California late-summer humidity and heat, unanswered emails, and an overwhelming number of personal and professional to-do lists—has staged a coup. It looked at the careful queue of half-finished projects, waved politely, and declared: what we really need right now is to get a boarding school bibliography posted.

And so here we are.

I’ve been meaning for ages to pull together a proper list of books and studies—especially those centered on British girls’ schools. Partly as a research tool, part a nostalgia trip, and, of course, partly an excuse for muttering, “Can you believe this was actually published… for children!?” As a research resource, it’s also slowly taking shape in Zotero, where I no longer have to depend on memory (unreliable), BBEdit, my favorite writing space, on random pages of notebooks, or on the chaotic space that I call my desk.

FedEx account of The Luggage’s journey. Clearly there is a portal somewhere in the LA sorting facility.

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Oasis 2025 – Day 1: Local at the Dog Park, Stranger at the Party

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As I mentioned yesterday, this isn’t my inaugural Labor Day-weekend spanking shindig—I’ve been doing the “spank-and-sun” combo for a couple decades. What is new, though, is that it’s the first one in 20+ years without Paul, and the very first with Sutti in tow. Her presence rewrote the itinerary entirely.

Even in a city that markets itself as a playground for strangers, a quick stop at the dog park turns you into an instant “local.” Suddenly I’m swapping leash tips and weather forecasts with people who assume we’ve lived here forever—while I’m still trying to plot the route back to the hotel with the fewest left-turn-arrow intersections.

Sutti isn’t just any service dog; she’s a whoodle (Wheaten Terrier × Poodle)—fluffy, low-shedding, and happily immune to the chaos that follows me. Within minutes she’d made friends with every ball-chasing Labradoodle in sight. It was still under 90 degrees and I felt good about our calm, canine-filled intermission. It’s good to get outside sometimes, you know? Then, one young boxer, a newcomer like us, planted a wet, enthusiastic lick square on my forehead. It felt affectionate at the time.

By the time I was back in my Zoom lecture, fresh iced coffee to hand, that lick had staged a coup. First a tingle, then a welt, then a neat little cluster of blisters. Turns out I’m really, really allergic to boxers. Ooops!


 

My last Zoom ended at 3:00 PM.—that indecisive hour between lunch and dinner. Given that I hadn’t even had breakfast, it hardly mattered. I met a friend at the deli in Circa, across from the Plaza. My forehead welts by then were obvious, and she mentioned them immediately. I’d been hoping only I could see them. Not the case. I told her about the boxer and she wisely suggested Benadryl.

We caught up, moving from my forehead to a surprisingly detailed hair-brush showdown back in my room. Both of us measure brushes in inches but brag about their weight in grams, as if this were a miniature Olympic lifting competition. You can insert your own imagined commentary. Soon enough, our conversation gave way to testing: jeans first, then panties, smacks light enough for a first night. No one wants to start out a party feeling like they’ve been whacked by a novice lumberjack. It was perfect—warm, companionable, a glow we both hinted we’d like to revisit later.

We said goodbyes with vague promises about the suite parties that evening. The plan was solid—until 9 p.m., when I followed her advice and took a Benadryl. By the time I’d showered, it’d kicked in. The next thing I knew, it was 6:30 a.m. and I was already gearing up for another round of dog-park runs and Zoom meetings.

Perhaps by Day 2 I’ll make it up to the suites.

I did manage to get my name badge and (gulp) an envelope containing my detention slip.

Oasis 2025 – Day (-1) – Arrival.

Posted on By Mija

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Some things are over, some things go on.
Part of me you carry, part of me is gone.” — T.P

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Day -1: Arrival

I left the house at 5:00 AM this morning to catch an eight o’clock flight from L.A. to Las Vegas. Landed just after 9:00 AM, hotel by eleven, dog park stop for Sutti tucked in before my 2:00-5:00 meeting, oodles of emails and then quick walkies before straight into teaching a Zoom class from 7:00-10:00 PM that’s only just finished. Tomorrow morning brings more meetings before the official start of Oasis tomorrow night. As ever the weekend feels like a braid of obligations: academic, domestic, and canine, with an added kink.

This is only my second Oasis—my first on my own. Last year Paul and I were in Vegas together, as we had been for decades of parties before. Onks ago, before he moved to Los Angeles, before we married, there were two long-ago Shadow Lane Labor Day parties I’d attended without him, but those were in Palm Springs, and I’d driven. No dog, no flight, no juggling of suitcases and expired licences. Flying makes traveling different, heavier somehow,  though I’d been careful—lesson learned from the UK trip—to pack light: just two bags, each under twenty-five pounds. Neither heavy nor hard to handle on their own,  but even packing light is heavy with the knowledge of how often and how much I’d taken for granted Paul’s quiet labor as bearer. Without him, every minor thing looms far larger.

Today it was the luggage hydra: deplane, doggie relief, train to baggage claim (blue line? red line? I never remember—this airport feels like it was designed as a riddle). Then the slow parade: bus to central car rentals, another bus to the off-site car rentals—only to discover my driver’s licence had expired last month. Back on July 28, my birthday, while I was in the UK, no less. Exactly the sort of stressful AuDHD slip that drove Paul quietly nuts and that he would have noticed, prevented, and made sure I fixed before I even clocked it was a problem.

Sutti and my much-smaller luggage watch me try and solve the Expired Driver’s License Problem.

Left to myself, I still made it through. Solved the license issue in twenty minutes via California’s DMV online renewal –a minor miracle—but not without the sense of carrying two bags that grew heavier with every transfer, multiplying like gremlins despite each being small enough to carry-on.1Though I’d checked them because, well, Sutti. And then, of course, my discomfort at navigating the casino: all flashing lights and noise, a disorienting labyrinth that seems custom-designed to trip every sensory wire I have. Paul’s guided me through such spaces so many times (I realized today I’ve never even been to Vegas without him), steady and unbothered while I flinched at the clamor, blindly following the thread of his presence like it was the only map that mattered. Alone, it was another gauntlet in a day full of them.

Still, I managed, and I am managing. Day-by-day. There’s a quiet pride in that, a sense of #smallvictories—getting the licence renewed, finding the right bus, shepherding the luggage and the dog and myself through the day. But the victories don’t lessen the losses. Friends like Tony, gone. And Paul: his absence both sharp and constant—so much so it blurs into the texture of everything, distorting, making it harder to name, and still harder to breathe. Not impossible—just hard. Everything is harder without being satisfying..

Tonight, beneath it all—the meetings, the luggage, the dog walks—runs the quieter anticipation: what it would mean to play here, or anywhere, without him. For years, Paul has been both my anchor and boundary: the one who made it possible to for me play, however rarely, with others, because I knew he would be there afterwards to carry the physical side of aftercare, to give the touch I otherwise find so impossible to accept. Even before he began attending these parties with me, he called every night whether I was away or home. Bedtime check-ins, his voice steady in my ear, the reassurance at each day’s end that no matter what I did or didn’t do at the party or elsewhere, he would be there to come back to, to gather me in, make sure I made it back to him and to myself. That’s always been my real aftercare—the spine of it.

Once he could come to parties with me, he was never far away. We didn’t play together much, but he watched me play with others, his presence making that play possible, his aftercare grounding me through some deep and dark scenes. He watched and helped me say “no” when I froze, carried me out of scenes that might otherwise have left me stranded. Care that was the invisible net beneath the visible play.

In June I went to TASSP in Dallas, my first time at that gathering, first party without Paul in more than twenty-five years. I stayed only a couple of days, and I made the conscious choice not to play much at all, apart from the group detention scene. It wasn’t abstinence so much as reconnaissance: watching, listening, reminding myself I could be present without having to prove anything by throwing myself into play. Oasis will test that same edge. Do I play? With whom? Why? And if I do, what scaffolding will I need to make it feel safe, meaningful, shared, and mine?

I haven’t really seen anyone yet—just a few quick waves across the lobby this afternoon. The anticipation is still in my head, untempered by coffee or dinners or catching up. Today his absence showed itself in the unglamorous practicalities: luggage straps biting into my hands, the absurd relay of trains and buses, the birthday licence expired in the desert heat. Tomorrow, I know, it will surface in quieter ways—less visible, more tender.

For now, I’ll go down to dinner, alone. Later, at least, I will not be entirely alone in the king-sized bed. Sutti will be there, breathing steady beside me. A small comfort. But a comfort all the same.

  • 1
    Though I’d checked them because, well, Sutti. ↩︎
fiction

The Lady and the Headmaster

Posted on By Mija

3 comment(s) so far. Please add yours!

How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”

Banner of “How to Read Inez of the Upper iV”The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Introduction

In which an Old Girl writes, and luncheon invitations become articles of surrender.

Most Fourth Form girls, after receiving a tawsing, a detention, and a caning, learn to keep their heads down. Inez de Vries, however, reached out to her mother. Her account of the affair travelled through the post as a stowaway, arriving at Hollingwood Hall with the stealth of a midnight feast.

Lady Honor de Vries — Head Girl by record, an Old Girl to her fingertips — writes on monogrammed blue paper, her words as precise as they are perilous. They reach Saint Clare’s Headmaster like a perfectly timed volley on the hockey pitch: elegant in delivery, devastating in effect.

Poor Mr. Lewis, veteran and Headmaster, responds on cream bond, summoning every Edwardian circumlocution to defend his flank. He insists that Saint Clare has “ever been jealous of its reputation” — a dangerous protestation, given that his previous post at a boys’ school ended, rather suddenly, and without fanfare. Here there lingers scarcely more than the whisper of a whisper, yet Lady de Vries has contrived to hear it.

The duel proceeds with the utmost courtesy: “your obedient servant” meets “with every good wish,” and each line conceals more sting than any prefect’s detention book. Meanwhile, Inez herself is counselled by Mummy in terms worthy of a field manual: play for position, win gracefully, reform from within, and, above all, guard your hands if you value your skin.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.

Lady Gwendolyn de Vries

 

15 June 1955

Dear Headmaster Lewis,

     I hope this letter finds you well and that St. Clare continues to uphold its fine tradition of cultivating young ladies with discipline, character, and common sense. I am writing in connection with an incident involving my daughter, the young Lady Inez deVries.

     I have received a somewhat dramatic letter from her which I have chosen—very deliberately—not to share with our solicitor.

    According to Inez, she received not one but two separate rounds of corporal punishment over the matter of a late essay, along with a most curious document involving the exchange of caning for academic credit.

     While I understand and respect the School’s codes, I sincerely hope this “contractual” arrangement was not sanctioned at the administrative level. If discipline is now to be treated as a competitive sport, I trust the girls are at least being awarded points and prizes accordingly. I need hardly remind you how swiftly such matters, once whispered, can alter the tone of a Headmaster’s tenure.

     Please reassure me that your staff understand the distinction between correction and coercion. Further, that Inez is studying the violin at my request. To strap a budding musician’s hands seems uncalled for, though perhaps your present geography master prizes percussion above bowed instruments.

      Yours sincerely,
      Lady Gwendolyn  de Vries née Randolph

P.S. Inez also mentioned interrupting a lesson on the Marshall Plan, which she appears to have found illuminating. If nothing else, thank Miss Clark for me.

 

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amigas A watercolor sketch of a huge stack of luggage and a small black dog,

Mija and Her Brave Furry Companion in the British Isles OR Five Suitcases, One Dog, and the Case for Simplicity

Posted on By Mija

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Preview — To be read in BBC Radio 4 style

A summer adventure across the British Isles with Mija and her faithful furry Sutti girl: castles and cottages, uniforms and ferries, triumphs, tribulations, and luggage of mythic proportions. Part travelogue, part comedy of errors, and wholly a tale of old friends, new discoveries, and the surprising case for simplicity.

Chapter 1 — Long Beach: Paperwork, Panic, and Packing

In which bureaucracy meets AuDHD and luggage multiplies like Gremlins.

The days before July 4th were chaos. The house had to be left in order: weeds pulled, rocks shifted, spiders relocated from their Olympic training ground. Errands multiplied — medications, safe deposit box, vaccinations (for Sutti, not me). I was just about keeping up when United rang with the kind of breezy cheer reserved for delivering ruin: “You’re missing a Heathrow Certificate for your service dog. No papers, no entry. Cargo is an option?”

“No, cargo is not an option.”

My voice probably cracked. I’d been so careful about everything to do with Sutti, working on it months in advance, working off a series of lists, paid a veteranery service to make sure her certifications were correct.1Turns out those were for her health. Heathrow needed to document *mine.* This had not been mentioned prior. Sigh.] 

Numbly I stood and listened to the nice woman from United outline what documents needed to be obtained and emailed and what would be required to get them. That they usually took a month or so to process, but I could try and get them done faster if I followed her instructions. These included calling Heathrow. “I can’t” I whispered.

She didn’t hear me.

“Email them to me when you have them. Then call so I know they’re there.” 

I sat staring at the clock. It was late on July 3rd — the Friday before the biggest holiday weekend in the U.S.2Businesses that had opened all had mostly closed by 12PM. — and suddenly I understood the particular horror of being told doing something isn’t impossible, but almost is. Traveling with my dog in the cabin into the UK in 18 hours wasn’t closed off entirely — it could be done, there is a process, but only with Herculean effort, panic, and possibly a pact with Satan. That was, in too many way, worse than an outright “no.” 

Because I was already exhausted and anxious to the point of burnout. I spent most of the previous year feeling stressed and stretched beyond breaking. By the time the semester ended being told I had to resubmit a single form caused tears and a sense of overwhelming despair.

 

I am not cargo.

Soo, not at my best. But this is Sutti. I couldn’t go without her — she needed to be on the plane. And not as cargo.

So began twelve frantic hours of bureaucratic hopscotch: PDFs, rabies certificates, microchip scans, vet letters, panic disorder paperwork, and, I swear, fragments of the Magna Carta. And so many phone calls.3Real calls. Like where I dialed and talked to people. People I didn’t know and weren’t expecting my call. Who were really helpful. At one point I tracked down Sutti’s trainer on his 25th anniversary trip to Paris.4Okay, but I didn’t know that’s where he was. Or why. By dawn, miracle of miracles, Heathrow approved her. When the LHR certificate finally landed in my inbox, ready to forward triumphantly to United, the sense of accomplishment I felt was on par with getting my doctorate. My vet’s office later told me no one they knew had ever flown a dog into the UK in the cabin of a commercial airliner. I credit academic-deadline stamina, indignation, and loyalty to a small dog who is Not Cargo.5I was also extremely fortunate that my employer had had me document Sutti’s training, skill, and my need for it so I already had letters from my doctors testifying to my PTSD, anxiety, and panic disorder. So I guess I should thank my university’s HR office. Someday. The Heathrow Animal Reception Centre, brisk, friendly, helpful, and sensible (July 4th being just another day to them), were also exacting. I had to call after I’d mailed each batch of documents to find out what they needed next. Finally they determined that my paperwork was valid, Sutti s a service dog, but since her school isn’t on the official ADI list, I could either prove her training in 47 different ways, none possible from outside the UK, or pay £447 so she could enter with me.

I gave them my credit card number. It was 5AM and I still needed to pack. Yeah, my packing never stood a chance. Executive function is, for me, a single-use tool, and mine was entirely eaten by the paperwork marathon while it was going on. Once that fire was out, nothing was left for choosing clothes. So I defaulted to the only possible strategy: bring everything.6It was pointed out to me, that there was another choice. Bring nothing and buy the things I needed. Sensible in retrospect and would have proved far cheaper in the end, but I’m not lying when I say it never crossed my mind. Surprised? In the end I had two giant 60-pound7To be fair to myself one contained a 20 pound bag of Sutti’s Very Special Food (sold in the UK it turns out) and all her toys and stuff. suitcases, a carry-on roller, and a backpack. The Luggage Hydra Gremlin was born. And unfortunately had been fed after dark.

More after the jump

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  • 1
    Turns out those were for her health. Heathrow needed to document *mine.* This had not been mentioned prior. Sigh.] ↩︎
  • 2
    Businesses that had opened all had mostly closed by 12PM. ↩︎
  • 3
    Real calls. Like where I dialed and talked to people. People I didn’t know and weren’t expecting my call. Who were really helpful. ↩︎
  • 4
    Okay, but I didn’t know that’s where he was. Or why. ↩︎
  • 5
    I was also extremely fortunate that my employer had had me document Sutti’s training, skill, and my need for it so I already had letters from my doctors testifying to my PTSD, anxiety, and panic disorder. So I guess I should thank my university’s HR office. Someday. ↩︎
  • 6
    It was pointed out to me, that there was another choice. Bring nothing and buy the things I needed. Sensible in retrospect and would have proved far cheaper in the end, but I’m not lying when I say it never crossed my mind. Surprised? ↩︎
  • 7
    To be fair to myself one contained a 20 pound bag of Sutti’s Very Special Food (sold in the UK it turns out) and all her toys and stuff. ↩︎
discipline sketch of a folder and pen on top of a skirt and blazer

The Elwood Files – Inez of the Upper IV

Posted on By Mija

4 comment(s) so far. Please add yours!

How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”

Banner of "How to Read Inez of the Upper iV"The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover your responses and ideas are included in the archives and may shift and change the story’s evolution.

Forward to the Elwood Files

It is one of the consolations of life in a girls’ boarding school that, although hairbrushes vanish before prayers only to reappear at bedtime, knee socks sag at inspections, and knicker elastic betrays its wearers at the worst possible moments, one may always rely upon the ingenuity of the pupils. The present dossier — christened in pencil The Elwood File — began with a folded scrap of green ink and a doodled key, and swelled, in due course, to the proportions of a minor parliamentary scandal. Or so it felt to Ronnie Elwood at any rate.

decorativeThe dramatis personae require only the briefest introduction. Veronica (Ronnie) Elwood (Upper V) is amiable and obliging, with a handwriting that proclaims every secret long before she intends it. Inez de Vries (Upper IV) is armed with both daring and design, seldom without a plan calculated to vex her elders. Keeping them under ceaseless watch is Georgina Fairfax, Senior Prefect, whose close supervision might well recommend her to the quietly vigilant MI5. Among the staff, Matron persists with her infallible spoonfuls of of cod-liver oil, Miss Kelley keeps a close eye on her house with rather sharper judgement than some expect, and the Headmaster, from his lofty perch, maintains that martyrs are not to be manufactured at any cost.

The scheme itself — to smuggle a page of prose through the mighty bulwark of school protocol, hidden inside another girl’s letter home — did not succeed. Prefects pounced, staff rummaged, and the mail-bag emerged none the wiser. And yet — here is the rub — Lady de Vries, many miles away, somehow contrived to receive the very intelligence intended for her, and with remarkable promptness.

How Lady de Vries came by her intelligence is not disclosed in these pages. That she had it — and was corresponding about her daughter with the Headmaster before the week was out – is beyond dispute. The archivist can only remark that Saint Clare’s leadership is already discovering how very little control remains within its grasp.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.

Notes Found

[Folded small; tiny key inked at the top.]

 


Strictly Between Us — Dispose Wisely
Do you have space in your letter home for a stowaway?
Thought you might add something for me next time you send yours — nothing shocking, just something better not left in the St. Clare’s pigeonholes. I’d owe you a favour (real currency, not just toffee).
Your mum wouldn’t mind a stowaway page, would she?
P.S. Your hair looks like it’s plotting mutiny today. In the best way.


Margin (G. Fairfax): 11/6 — confiscated, folded tw

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Clarissa’s Letters Home or The Jelly Baby Files

Posted on By Mija

4 comment(s) so far. Please add yours!

How to Read “Inez of the Upper IV”

The story of Inez de Vries unfolds through a series of documents—some official, pulled from the prim and unforgiving files of Saint Clare’s School for Girls; others are more intimate, drawn from the journals, letters, and scribbled notes of the girls themselves. Some will appear typed and orderly; others will retain the texture of handwriting, rendered in a cursive-style font. Readers are invited to step into the role of archivist, assembling the story from these traces, and imagining the lives that fill the gaps between pages—the tensions, the alliances, the secrets too dangerous to write down. Not everything will be explained. But Inez is watching. And she remembers.

Note: Comments are read and much appreciated. Much as I like reading them on Twitter and Bluesky, I love getting them here and promise to respond. Moreover, as this post indicates, your responses and ideas can be included in the archives, shifting and changing the focus.

 

Forward to: “Clarissa’s Letters Home”

Archivist Note: These letters, begun and co-authored by reader JustAnotherBoomer, were the private correspondence between a widowed father and his fourteen-year-old daughter.

Clarissa Elizabeth Charrington and her father, the Rt. Hon. Gerald T. Charrington, weren’t writing for teachers, headmasters, politicians, or biographers sifting through archives in search of origin stories. Clarissa, newly arrived at Saint Clare’s School for Girls in the Lower Fourth during the summer term of 1955, could never have imagined these early letters home would be treasured decades later—by a daughter who may have walked the same school corridors, or found by a granddaughter after a lifetime of stories. The letters themselves spoke to no one but sat quietly for years in a forgotten tuckbox, hidden behind a yellowed copy of Jane Eyre, a single petrified Jelly Baby, and a torn wrapper from an ancient toffee.

This first exchange between Clarissa and her father captures her earliest days at Saint Clare—tentative, observant, and already sharpening into something unmistakably her own. Clarissa’s letters home are notable not only for her frank admiration of one Inez de Vries—already firmly on the staff’s watch list—but also for the affection and respect she shows her father and his public life, and for introducing a private code between them: their “Jelly Baby Ledger.”

Clarissa left the ledger on her father’s desk the morning she departed for school—a small, deliberate gift in her careful handwriting. Its pages are marked with doodled sweets in the margins and a hand-drawn scale that ranges from “catastrophic” to “triumphant.” In her letters home, each Jelly Baby count is shorthand for how she is faring—socially, strategically, and in terms of her all-important tuck supply.

The paradox is part of the charm: Clarissa is still young enough to count her sweets in Jelly Babies, yet already capable of nuanced political metaphor and a subtle, sidelong interest in the de Vries family. Something is awakening here—not a rebellion exactly, but an alertness. She is watching Inez. She is watching the adults. And, increasingly, she is watching herself.

You may already be familiar with other records from this term—the official school reports praising Clarissa’s eloquence, the stern notes cautioning against questionable friendships, and the famously provocative essays. Yet these letters offer something different—personal, candid glimpses of Clarissa quietly shaping her conscience beneath covers and torchlight, with Inez’s daring casting long, flickering shadows across the page. In these early exchanges, we glimpse not only the schoolgirls they are—but hints of the women they will become.

The archive cannot answer every question. But the Jelly Baby count will shift, and the careful observer might notice that while Clarissa watches Inez, others have begun watching Clarissa.

Read on, gently, knowing these letters are not merely relics, but snapshots of a life becoming—quietly powerful, subtly courageous, and, well, interesting.

Having trouble with the handwriting? Try the simple font version.

 

This sort of stationery/letters attache case was a frequent and much coveted gift to boarding school girls. Many Old Girls used them their entire lives.

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