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My Tawsingham Vision for Dragão Verde

My name my new Portuguese property, from The Green Dragon, the pub in my Tawsingham novella, this gives the inspirations and final objective.

When I first was seriously involved in the scene, organising Muir Academy with Miss Prim, in the late 1980s, I conceived, and I then wrote half a novel, with a co-author. It is called Tawsingham Autumn 2017 (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tawsingham-Autumn-2017-Guy-Masterleigh-ebook/dp/B007RGBFCW). Do buy it on Amazon or Lulu, please! It predicted reality TV shows, a pan-European currency, the internet and the fragmentation of the US, not bad for 1991!

In retrospect it was not a great novella, because frankly the two of us were writing different stories that diverged and the published result tried to cobble them together!

However some core concepts, about the place in which it was set, grabbed hold of my psyche.

The ideas sprang from a lifetime of reading voraciously, living life to the full, as an engineer, a politician, a husband and father, reading deeply in fiction, politics, feminism, religion.

The challenge I set myself in writing the novella was to create a world that could work at every level: physical, social, emotional, sexual, financial, etc. I think I succeeded, though the huge level of investment required to create it made it unviable then, and impossible now.

The first influence I can trace would be Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, read when I was 7 years old, and his accounts of travel in C19 China with his special interest in judicial and extra-judicial methods of corporal and capital punishment and torture, which I read when I was eight years old.

There were many more, fiction and non-fiction, tales of boarding school, slavery, fantasy and science fiction; ones by Harry Harrison, Ursula K Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, stick in the memory.

Then there was reading Forum magazine regularly through my early teens, any other erotica I could get my hands on, including Story of O, Venus in Furs, The Beauty Trilogy and countless others.

Ever since, through the years of Miss Prim’s Muir Reform Academy, The Other Pony Club, etc. I had an obsession to create The Tawsingham Community, in which I had set the story, in some form.

So I looked very closely at other such communities in the real world, people and places who created a fantasy world for longer than the few hours a scene club event lasts, looking for their strengths and weaknesses, what lasted and what didn’t.

One of the first, and in many ways the richest culturally, (though not in money terms), was Aristasia (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki./ARG/Aristasia

), Miss Martindale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Martindale

). We never met, but I read and sold their books and I often spoke with and liked her, and The Wildfire Club (http://www.wildfireclub.co.uk).

Their St Bride’s Boarding School (https://www.gamestm.co.uk/features/how-a-1920s-boarding-school-created-the-c64s-defining-text-adventures-discover-the-mystery-of-st-brides/) in Ireland was the main inspiration for Muir Academy.

There was of course Miss Prim’s Muir Reform Academy (http://www.muire-academy.co.uk), one of the longest-running and most prolific generator of ‘real fantasies’ for pupils and maids alike. I was variously Chairman of the Governors, Bursar, Transport- & Tuck Shop Manager, Head Boy and Milk Monitor, though I am no longer involved, since 2011, but still friends.

There was Ishmael Skyes’ Church, State and Household and Arreton Manor events; not strictly speaking kink, but an alternate reality as Living History.

There have been many other Living History events I went to, most notably the Gosport Living History village, again very much a vanilla place and event.

Then my The Other Pony Club from 1993, until I wound it up in the early 2000s. I ended that as I couldn’t compete with the De Ferre Pony Farm, run by a couple I helped into who pony-play: so I helped them out instead. They ran weekends there; they turned out to be better at running events, making pony carriages, pony harness, had a 17 acre wood and were both attractive women too.

After winding up The Other Pony Club I created The Tawsingham Society and ran two several-day, multi-household events in 2004 and again in 2007, each involving a couple of dozen people, under that banner. The events were a great success at every level, people really enjoyed themselves, though I lost money on them, and I’ve been looking for a better formula ever since.

There was Gord; his amazing novels published by Olympia Press, IoW, and his stories when we met, after he heard of The Other Pony Club and came to see me for a pint or three.

I watched The Other World Kingdom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_World_Kingdom), in the Czech Republic from afar, wondered about their excesses, read their books (and sold them on), sold them stuff and talked to folk who went there.

There were Kai and Birgit who ran Pet Week at SISC Camp in Denmark 1999-2004, which I helped with in most years, except 2003, great fun!

There was West Wales, with others, 2008 -2011, then again 2013-2014 with a partner. Malicious arson, etc. put paid to the venture, just after my relationship ended, just before our first season there, just before Easter 2014.

Then there was SISC Camp (https://sisc.dk/), where I’ve been lucky enough to speak to many of the principals, the original owner and several closely involved from the early days.

Aside from Muir Academy, which still continues without me, SISC Camp is the only one still going.

I’ll summarise their story, reconstructed from memories of conversations with those involved. If you were one and it wasn’t quite as I’ve said, do please privately let me know!

Back in the 1980s or so a group of (mostly gay) BDSMers got together to campaign for the acceptance of homosexuality and BDSM in Denmark.

The reaction they got was; ”Why, we already do!”

So they settled for monthly play-meets and organising holidays in the summer, where they could do their often fairly extreme stuff away from prying eyes on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Baltic.

Then one member, Berndt, a sea-cook, retired; and did what many servicemen and sailors say they’ll do. He bought a redundant farmhouse with an acre of land. He lived in it through a winter.

Then he went to the local planners with a proposal to demolish the cowshed, pig sties, barn and stable and recycle the materials to rebuild and extend the main farmhouse.

The planners said in effect, “No it is a traditional Danish quadrangle farmhouse, you must restore it to a standard that it never has been at in its history!”

He couldn’t afford that. So he said to his club: “Come and help me fix my farm up, then you can play there all summer.”

So they did, work-weeks every spring and autumn, running event-weeks June to August for a couple of decades, with the owner acting as cook and caretaker.

The first thing he did, when the club agreed to his proposal, was to go to the local café/bar he frequented and told them what he planned and that he’d try to ensure visitors did nothing to upset, shock or annoy the locals, bought their supplies in the local co-op shop and didn’t do anything illegal or immoral.

So when a tabloid scandal-sheet from Copenhagen came, it was an open secret amongst the locals. Neither the local Mayor nor Priest returned the reporters’ calls, so they door-stepped the shopkeeper at the local co-op shop, asking, “Do you know these guys who wear black leather?

“Ach,” he said, “you mean the fundamentalist Christians?”

They left, no story.

As the shop-keeper later reported to those at the camp, 60% of his annual turnover came from the camp, mostly from the daily re-stocking of the beer and wine fridges, when he collected the empties. Without the camp, he’d probably have to shut up shop.

Another incident I witnessed was that an ex of one of the guys at the camp made some very serious and possibly false malicious allegation about him to the police, who didn’t turn up mob-handed with battering ram, guns, CS gas and dogs, as they would have in many places. They just knocked politely at the door, waited until someone came and then suggested gently that he come and see them, when convenient, with his lawyer.

When I last visited, in 2005, they had accommodation for 60 or so singleton visitors, a half dozen or more rooms for couples or groups, places for touring caravans and tents, a dining hall that could seat 120, a fully certified stainless steel catering kitchen, and being Denmark a sauna, and a wood-fired outdoor hot tub.

For kink facilities, there is a big sand-floored dungeon with two of everything you’d expect, an ‘ecclesiastical dungeon’ for ‘Spanish Inquisition’ witchcraft trial or similar play, a fully tiled wet room with shower for piss and scat play, a full range of cages and cells, a stable for human ponies, a fully equipped leathercraft workshop, (with other tools for maintenance, etc.)

There is/was a lecture theatre come schoolroom, a medical / veterinary ‘clinic’, a harem room, suspension frames out in the farmyard, and probably by now, much else besides.

They run weeks where English is the camp language, German, or Danish, themed weeks like ‘Gay Fisting Week’ and Hotel Weeks when you can do as you please. The only rules are that you don’t do anything that pisses others off, on or off camp, buy local if you can, do your share of the chores and recycle the empties! The place can also be hired by the week too, as Kai and Birgit did for Pet Weeks, though the last of them was in 2004.

When age and infirmity meant Berndt was no longer fit enough to live on site as caretaker, SISC used money they’d put aside for years to buy the premises from him; it is now a co-operative, fully owned by its members.

Anyway, they essentially are the model I take as a guide; though there are obvious differences.

I am not yet, as Berndt then was, part of the local community, though I try to be a good neighbour. I do hope to patronise the local café a lot more, come the warmer weather, and learn Portuguese better. I won’t be announcing what I plan to the locals either; but I do not plan to ask visiting transwomen to pretend to be men either.

If asked about that my reply will be that I am providing a haven for them, from the hassle they get elsewhere. Beyond that, I will point out that the place is for adult volunteers only. What we get up to is our business, and ours’s alone.

Short-term, for the next year or three I won’t have the nerve to charge anyone to come and visit, the place is far too much of a building site, having been semi-derelict for nearly 50 years. Especially if they muck in to help with the development work here, or just to get or help to keep the place clean and the people housed, fed and watered; though I won’t turn donations of money or materials away. I have racks of ladies’ clothes, maid dresses in most sizes, coats, boiler suits and protective gear, a full range of tools and recycled materials, so folk can fly in and travel light.

There are plenty of tasks to be done, unskilled and for all trades from groundwork to roofers, architects to plasterers, bricklayers, joiners, plumbers, electricians, architectural draughtsmen; you name it, I’m looking for that skill set. As well as web site developers, marketing expertise, etc.

As well as maids, gardeners, cooks, etc. for domestic work.

Some of the outdoor work to be done includes: brick-up a window, a wall built higher, fit curtains and shuttering downstairs to ensure privacy, move the several heaps of tile waste from where they are to where I'd like them, gather up the gravel in the yard, sifting it from soil where necessary and putting it in a builders bag for use in concrete, sieve the heaps of soft and sharp sand to get the weeds, fragments of tile and wood out from them, again for use in mortar or concrete, level the remaining soil in the yard, clean up second-hand bricks and blocks for later re-use, demolish a couple of redundant walls brick by brick, for re-use, lay foundations and build new walls, concrete floors, etc. and render walls to protect them from the weather, demolish part of a garden wall to create parking, build an outdoor store for tall gas cylinders, cut up a bar and wine tanks into slabs of concrete to create hard-standing, put in access doors, build the garden walls higher, make the well safe and install a pump.

Indoors, again demolishing redundant walls brick by brick, filling holes in walls where rafters had been inserted, repairing, rendering and painting walls. Rewiring throughout, fully plumbing and installing several bathrooms, a couple of gas water heaters, showers, sinks, double-glazed doors and windows, installing a ceiling and loft and roof insulation, and three wood-burning stoves.

I will try to keep track of who helps, and be able to offer them some kind of credit towards membership of a club or events I hope to hold when I do start charging money to come to events.

Once I have the place in sufficient order I plan to run events, for which I will charge money, as I will provide food, accommodation, service which all deserve repayment. I hope to run them in a business-like way, but not as a profiteering business, though I will charge several times the direct costs, to help cover development and maintenance costs.

I hope too to put some of that income aside, as a reserve under the control of a steering committee of close friends, against the time in 15-30 years’ time when I want to move on, as at SISC Camp.

Perhaps in time, that steering committee may become more actively involved, even a larger committee elected from an electorate of club members who have been to the place and have not been banned.

I make no apology for reserving the right to ban folk for any reason I choose, not even giving a reason if I think that wisest. It is my home and I see no reason to share it with people I don’t respect; or who disrespect me or my friends, in person or online. Or anyone who seems manipulative or seem otherwise disruptive of my, or our, aims or objectives. Those who know of my back history will understand.

The kind of events I’d hope to run would include weekends for pony- or puppy-play fans, (separately or together), for t-girls who want to dress up and be girlie away from the world, another for t-girls who want to meet admirer men to use and abuse them, one for adult babies and littles (again separately or together), for rope and shibari fans and adult school and/or corporal punishment fans.

I’d like to hear from anyone who may bring a party along for one of the fields I am less personally involved-in; naturists, gay men, lesbians, FemDom, rubber fans, suspension play; though not for any illegal or high-risk activity. No real dogs, horses or other animal, high-risk sex, etc. Or perhaps for events where the house language is German, French, Spanish or Portuguese.

There’d be a chance for couples or groups to come for a week, or weeks, perhaps as a base for tourism, with chances to play too.

Or singletons to come as helpers, workers, servants, slaves or inmates of The Tawsingham Workhouse, for a day, a weekend, a week, or longer.

Long term, planners permitting, I envisage a place where in addition to the main house with my bedroom, I have several en-suite guest bedrooms for ‘bed and breakfast’, staff quarters for several semi-permanent maids, etc., plus anything up to six self-contained gites ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%AEte), with kitchenette, shower, toilet and elevated double bed (s), plus two separate dormitories to accommodate a score of maids and male servants.

Plus a large banqueting room for dinner parties and to serve as a common room. Out in the yard a whipping post, stocks, pillory, human-dog run and kennel, human-pony stable, human piggy sty and prisoner cell, barbecue and other associated facilities. As with SISC camp, a hot tub and sauna too. This may require finance beyond my own limited resources and I may look into timeshare or crowdfunding options, closer to the time.

All together it will be The Tawsingham Community, my dream come true, just as for the last 30 years or so, that I have turning other peoples’ fantasies into reality.