Friday, November 30, 2012

A short letter to the management of the Reading Hexagon theatre

Picture by Chris Downer, Wikimedia Commons
I've lived and worked in and around the Reading area for most of my life, and there's one thing that has bugged me for year. Time to get it off my chest.

Dear the Reading Hexagon
 
Congratulations on maintaining your position as one of the top provincial theatres in the Thames Valley named after a kind of shape!

I have attended a number of events within your hallowed halls - BB King, Rowan Atkinson, The Marriage of Figaro, a pantomime starring TV's Keith Chegwin - and I feel that the time is right to apologise for the behaviour of both myself and my peers when we allowed a drunken former colleague to defacate in one of the plant pots in your downstairs bar many years ago. We were young, we were reckless, we were work-shy civil servants, for which I offer my most profuse apologies.

But this is not the reason I write, for I have a most pressing request to make of you.
 
You see, as we get older, we get more pedantic. And in my tragic case, this involves writing well-meaning but pointless letters to facilities such as yourself hoping - not unreasonably - to address the root cause of WRONGNESS and BLASPHEMY.

It's this: You're not a hexagon. I've driven past you virtually every weekday for the last two decades, and it is abundantly clear you are a Truncated Hexagonal Pyramid.

You heard. And yet you still - quite wrongly - call yourself The Hexagon. Sort it out, me laddo, or I shall write another letter, or possibly invite Dave the Jockey back for another leaving do. Nobody wants to see that happen.

And don't get me started on the Sheffield Octagon.
 
Your pal, etc
Albert O'Balsam

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