Aunty Agony

Over at his blog, James Stephenson is bemoaning the lack of "authentic"-looking canes on the market today. However, it seems he has spent some time digging through online auctions in search of the real thing.

Aunty's pleased he went to the trouble, because the story attached to the unusual-looking cane (pictured with this post) is an amusing peek into a lost era of British corporal punishment.

Whoever was auctioning this cane wrote:

[This cane] belonged to a female pal who went to a girls school in Birmingham in the early 1960s. The cane itself was once a standard rattan crooked handle style of 36", and belonged to the deputy headmistress until one day my friend decided to hide it and put it in a trough outside the school which contained water and, unbeknown to her, a green algae. Unfortunately it was reported to the deputy and found.

Read the whole thing ...