In July of 1999 I bought my first ever internet-capable PC (which compared to modern ones, seems like a ZX Spectrum in comparison) and the first thing I searched for on Yahoo was “foot fetish”, something I’d been aware of having for a very many years.

Within a couple of days I’d found Realtickling.com, home of the Tickler in Black and Priscilla James. At 21, this was the first I’d ever heard of a tickling fetish, but after buying a couple of videos I very quickly discovered I was hooked.

Making contact with other people in the tickling world was kinda difficult in those days. The closest I found to a community focal point before 2001 was a site called Tom’s Adult Tickling Website, which featured a number of articles based on New Jersey renfaires that featured tickling, and… thank God… a chatroom! It was all there was for a year and a half, and in all that time I only ever remember speaking to one person of the opposite sex who was UK based in there. Sadly, I never saw her anywhere else.

As I located various different tickling video sites (all vendors of VHS – this was before the days of clip downloads in anything but 10-45 seconds previews) I stumbled across Magic Touch, a link on whose website led me to the TMF.

In those days the chatroom was just a case of type your name and enter, you didn’t have to register for the forums too (although moronic and malicious troll activity put paid to that a few years later), so I just started chatting, eventually registering on the forums in June 2006 and started posting not long after that.

There were only two Brits posting regularly at the time: myself and Ticklemad. It took a long time for anyone to join us. We had (and still have) a UK personals and gatherings board on this new site, but virtually no-one used them and any contacts I made in those days, I made through the chat room. That provided me with three friends early on, which was like water in the desert.

Eventually, as a smattering of Brits made it to the TMF and membership in general was going through the roof, some people started to suggest we should have a board of our own. On the TMF I could see that the presence of very active boards like General and Tickling Discussion were causing most people to ignore the UK personals and gatherings board altogether, so I thought this might be a good idea. We certainly needed a focal point to help get our own gatherings going. I was the most prominent member of the British community (I was actually the highest poster on the whole TMF at the time) so a few of the people around at the time asked me to do something about it. That was where the UKTF came from…

The TMF had originally started out as an EZ Boards (the forerunner to Yuku) community, so that was my first choice of places to go. It only took a couple of minutes to set a basic forum up and someone (Venray I think - that's another guy who was invaluable to me in our early days) very kindly helped me by designing a banner that included the present logo and a spinning UK flag with my screen name on it.

For at least two years things were quiet as hell. A few of the Brits I knew from the TMF came across and joined the UKTF too, although some sadly stayed away. Among those who came with us were the likes of Mercy and Ticklish Kelly, who I'd known for some years. There were only four of us with more than five posts and one of them eventually left. But we had a start and we kept the place up and going and eventually people began to come to us.

Eventually it was obvious that EZ Boards were too low a standard to do all the things we wanted, so we ditched them and converted the board to a PHP bulletin board on our own server, which is what we have to this day. HisDivineShadow bore the brunt of the technological work at the time as I am, and shall probably forever remain, a complete technophobe. Anyone ask him today what he thought of the process of moving the posts across to the new forums and you’ll be able to sense the fists bunching and the hair growing out of his teeth from across the Net! Heh heh heh.

After some time others joined us in dribs and drabs, including the admin staff you see today, who remain the UKTF’s most valuable asset. It’s true I started it and I do pay the bills for its upkeep today, but it’s a point of fact that the contributions of many people, in particular BOFH and HDS with their technical skills and Kat and Alphano with their drive for getting gatherings going, that have made the place grow into what it is and who keep it going. We’ve had some complaints from people who regard it as “cliquey”, but I know these people and they would do anything to have more people join up who’d help the place expand and have meaning, just as they did.

Sound like what you want to be? I hope so. Every week new people join us. Some just join to see the pictures, some join so they can make one or two posts and then lose interest and a precious few join and contribute with anything from opinions to artwork. We also have a now very active scene with munches and gatherings, organised by BOFH, Morning Angel, Kat, Alphano and others, which is miraculous, considering we had less than nothing just a few short years ago.

There’s a lot to be gained from being an active participant in the British tickling community, including tickling. The more people who come out of the shadows and become those participants, the better.

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