Isosceles Triangulation

 

Isosceles Triangulation is nowadays not often associated with the sport that made him famous. However, throughout most of the civilised world during the Victorian era he was regarded as one of the leading celebrities of the 19^th Century, alongside Darwin, Tennyson, Wilde and ‘mad’ Nigel Widdershins – the infamous Victorian Badger-Electrolysis enthusiast.

Triangulation, though, was the All-England Poking An Elderly Relative With A Stick team captain for around twenty years. A feat inconceivable in this day and age where the professional Poking An Elderly Relative With A Stick player has – at best - a top-flight career of ten years, if he (or - increasingly these days – she) is very lucky.

Instead, Triangulation is, these days, associated with that unfortunate incident that even today is still known as The Triangulation Incident. The Victorians – as we know – lived by a strict moral code, and - despite a certain amount of hypocrisy that today would be untenable – still believed that certain standards were inviolable.

Despite the hectic activity that could take place on a Poking An Elderly Relative With A Stick playing field it was assumed that a gentleman – as all players were naturally presumed to be – would under no circumstances poke anyone on the pitch who was not his own elderly relative. Therefore, when Triangulation, with only 17 minutes of the last 16^th of the final day’s play left, brushed the doddering Great Uncle of Numbert Unguent-Smythe with his poking stick the match dissolved into uproar and was hastily abandoned. The Times leader the following day condemned Triangulation outright as a cad and a bounder of the first water and questions were asked in both Houses of Parliament about the incident.

Consequently, shunned by polite society, Triangulation had no option but to see out the remainder of his days in the obscurity of one of the furthest corners of the British Empire… in a small coal-mining village just outside Manchester where he eked out a precarious living in the dangerously shady world of homing pigeon rustling.