ouch!!!

I was just looking through my online photo gallery (link in previous post) and I spotted the set taken in Reading a couple of months ago. You'll notice it's titled "Operation Spanner"; this is because the purpose of the weekend was to engineer a surprise meeting between Anna and Hazel following Hazel's return from 8 months in Australia - i.e. the idea was Anna wouldn't know about it beforehand. Doug dubbed the whole elaborate (and, to my complete surprise, successful) subterfuge Operation Spanner - there's a rhyming thing going on there (Anna/Spanner - geddit?). I thought the phrase rang a bell at the time but forgot all about it, and it was only on seeing it again earlier today that I was reminded to go and look it up.

It turns out Operation Spanner is Manchester police's name for the 1987 operation involving a homosexual sado-masochism ring (if that's the word). Quite a cause celebre at the time as the court case had to address various complex issues about "consensual assault", i.e. is ABH ABH if the "victim" requests or consents to it? The thing all the tabloids picked up on, as I remember, was some video footage of a bloke having his genitalia nailed to a (presumably wooden) chair. The link here is to Wikipedia's page on the subject; there are further links at the bottom of that page, but I'm not going any further on my work laptop!

Whether Doug knew all this at the time I have no idea - what he and Anna get up to in private is their own business. I will be inspecting the kitchen chairs carefully next time I visit though....