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Feature - On the trail of Fox Talbot - Brian Clegg

When researching Light Years, Brian visited the picturesque Wiltshire village of Lacock - here is his light-hearted tour of the village:

It was early when I arrived. I wanted to soak up the atmosphere of Lacock and peruse its museum before moving onto Lacock Abbey, the remarkable building that inspired young Fox Talbot to perfect his photographic technique. My eagerness was a mistake. I had not bothered to consult my National Trust guidebook to check opening times, and had forgotten that this British treasure, devoted to preserving anything from stately homes to urban semis in aspic, operates on its own idea of time that is entirely detached from the bustling, 24-7 modern world.

I had managed purely by accident to avoid Tuesday, when the house was closed – how often in the past have I excitedly followed a National Trust brown sign with those encouragingly friendly oak leaves, only to join the other idiots in the car park milling around the ‘Closed’ sign. Like everyone else I then would try to look as if I knew all along that the place was closed, and I’d just stopped to make a phone call or eat a sandwich. This time, though, I had got the day right, and rolled up early to avoid the rush. I also avoided the National Trust’s employees, who, it seems, can only stagger out of bed late enough to open the museum and grounds at 11am. The guardians of the house itself are obviously even more addicted to late night partying. They don’t pull back the shutters until one o’clock in the afternoon. Dirty stopouts.

Still, it gave me a chance to wander around the village, which proved almost too perfect. Because it has been protected against change, it’s a favourite of film makers who want to present a picture of pre-modern England. It helps, too, that the whole thing belongs to a single owner, the National Trust, so it’s hard luck if you don’t want your street covered in a three-inch thick layer of mud and horse manure yet again. As the National Trust’s handbook points out ‘descendants of William Fox Talbot gave the Abbey and village to the Trust in 1944’ and this has meant that Lacock has featured in numerous TV and film productions, an unexpected spin-off of Fox Talbot’s photographic experiments. Still, even if the locals don’t like the film crews, the manure’s probably good for the roses.

It was easy to imagine oneself as old Fox in person (I know it was a surname, but I’ve watched too much of the X-Files), strolling around, enjoying the comfortable knowledge that this confection of gorgeous old buildings, a mix of timber-framed beauties and warm old stone, was all mine. I suppose, technically, as a member of the National Trust this was almost true – at least I could think of myself as the owner of that speck of mortar below a mullioned stone window. Control by the National Trust has left the village preserved in a way that even the most idyllic location normally finds difficult. The result is stunning, though it can’t always be easy for the residents.

There was a single, solitary sign of dissent. One house and one house alone dared to be different. Instead of the mellow stone of the others it was painted a vivid mustard yellow. It stuck out like a dandelion in a bunch of red roses. To be honest, it looked awful – yet I had to admire the courage of the owners in being different. After all, living in Lacock was not without its pressures. I didn’t get much of an impression of a village under siege, but only because this was the last remnant of the season. You could see an entire street without a tourist in. Yet the pathetic little signs in the house windows from the Lacock Tenants’ Association (just tenants, remember – none of Maggie’s home owners here), pleading with the public not to park outside their houses told eloquently of summer mayhem.

Lacock is not a big place, but there are a surprising number of little lanes, lined with enough exquisite cottages to elevate an estate agent into a state of nirvana. One particularly appealing street led me past the rich, spicy scents of the old-fashioned bakery and a worryingly trendy restaurant to the church. St Cyriac’s was a solid if not unattractive building, squat and high as if it had hunched up its shoulders in an attempt to protect itself against the ravages of time. The high, square tower faces squarely down the street, turning its back on the manor house beyond. I went in, partly because I like churches, but also to look for traces of Fox Talbot. There were, of course, but I was distracted first by the story of the church’s name – this was apparently the only church with this sole designation in the country.

St. Cyriac must have been one of the most precocious saints (and sadly martyrs – it often goes with the job) around. At the age of three he and his mother were hauled in front of the Roman governor of Byzantium, charged with Christian tendencies. The governor was apparently fond of children and dandled the young Cyriac on his knee while he berated the mother in the sort of language that shouldn’t be heard by a three-year-old. Cyriac, despite his tender years, was horrified at the blasphemy. He turned round and boxed the governor’s ears. Now the governor may have been partial to kids, but this was a bit much, so he picked up Cyriac and threw him head first onto the stone floor, killing the child. There was even a rather faded etching cartoon strip illustrating this process for the hard of imagining.

Once I’d recovered from the gory image of Cyriac’s demise I was able to find plenty of Talbotiana. Apart from the heavy duty, but unexciting family monument, plumbed into the wall in the North aisle, there was a fascinating chart of patrons of the church. Originally this role fell to the Abbesses of Lacock Abbey, but when Henry VIII’s reforms got this holy place converted into a des. res., it seemed natural that the new owners should take over the job. For nearly three hundred years, bankrolling the church had fallen on the Talbots, with Henry technically in charge from being a baby, though someone did stand in for him until he could do more than gurgle. Amazingly the practice continued up to the 1980s when the diocese took over.

By the time I had completed my wander around Lacock, the museum was open for visitors. It doesn’t give much away from the outside – a great, long stone barn of a place in which a doorway opens on near darkness. I had to pause for a moment outside under the threatening grey skies to prepare myself for the inevitable, rather intimidating National Trust greeter. And there he was as I crossed the threshold, a big, hearty looking chap, clearly most happy when walking the dog in wellies (that’s the man, not the dog, wearing the boots).

Was I a member? Yes. Did I have a brochure? No. Was I pure bred English stock? Well, no, I’m also part Irish and part Scottish and… actually I made that last question up. Before he had a chance to ask I had scuttled into the exhibition area. It was a typical juxtaposition of modern fittings in a hacked-clean ancient shell that works better than it has any right to. In truth, though, the museum was a trifle worthy. It could have made more of Fox Talbot’s work than objects in glass cases and those arty-print-on-white-plastic signs that have become staple fare in museums now badly typed little cards with interesting brown stains have gone out of fashion. Yet even so it was worth the visit and it got the message across.

Or at least, I thought it did, though I wasn’t too sure by the time I was half way round as I couldn’t help overhearing a pair of middle aged women, heavily clad against the cold in overcoats and scarfs and reddening noses, passing me by and commenting:

‘Do you understand this?’

‘No, I’m afraid it goes right over my head.’

To give them their due, it didn’t stop them trudging nobly round the whole exhibition, though. After dismissing the brief, vivid images of an Alice in Wonderland scene where all the exhibits went flying over the speaker’s tightly bunched head of hair, knocking her wire-rimmed glasses askew as it did so, I was able to step back and look at what it was that had been so hard to grasp. It didn’t seem too tricky, so maybe it was just the over-familiarity of the photographic process that made Fox Talbot’s wonderful achievements seem obscure.

I hadn’t realised that young William Henry hadn’t actually moved to Lacock until he was 27, though he had technically been lord of the manor since the age of six months. With his mother, Lady Elisabeth, he had spent his youth shuttling around the stately homes of various relatives before being packed off to Harrow School and then following in the footsteps of Isaac Newton to Trinity College, Cambridge. There, apparently, he became 12^th Wrangler in Mathematics in 1821. Either they had got rid of this bizarre term by the time I was at Cambridge, or everyone who received the award was too embarrassed to admit that to being a Wrangler. As a result of this as I never came across one, but I assume it was a good thing.

Rather than rush home and start inventing photography (‘Would you like a cup of tea, Fox?’ ‘Not now my dear, I’m inventing photography.’), William Henry spent a fair while enjoying the European tour, and though he did take up residence at Lacock in 1827, it was out on Lake Como in 1834 that he had the inspiration that would make snaps available to the masses. At the time he was using various trendy optical devices like the camera lucida to help sketching. The principle such designer gadgets of the 19^th century used was simple. A system of lenses either allowed the artist to see both subject and paper apparently in the same place, or projected an image of the view directly onto the paper.

Cue the light bulb over Fox Talbot’s head (except, of course, it hadn’t been invented yet, so it would have to be a gas light). Here he was, tediously tracing the image that was being projected onto his drawing paper. Yet he knew that various chemical substances – usually compounds of silver – would darken when exposed to light, just as if the light itself were drawing on the paper (this had been known for at least 200 years). So why not soak the paper in a suitable silver compound and let the drawing handle itself?

After experimenting with simple silhouettes, in August of 1835, Fox Talbot was ready to take the revolutionary step. He set up a camera obscura – a simple projection device – in the South Gallery of Lacock Abbey and allowed the light from the beautiful central oriel window to fall onto his treated paper. The result (or at least a copy of it) can still be seen. It is tiny, only 3 by 2.75 centimetres, and it’s the world’s oldest known photographic negative. The negative bit is fairly obvious when you think about it. If light turns the silver black, then the bits of the picture that are most bright will get blacker, while those with little light falling on them will stay pale and interesting.

The apparent disadvantage of producing a reversed image was in fact a real plus. The other photographic processes invented around the time, like Daguerre’s highly successful Daguerreotype launched a couple of years later, produced a positive result. A normal picture. But this made it a one-off. Fox Talbot found that his negative originals could be used to produce many prints. Fox might have been a great inventor, but he wasn’t so hot with terminology. He called his photography ‘photogenic drawing’, and didn’t even come up with the term ‘negative’, which was left to his friend, John Herschel, the son of the famous astronomer William Herschel.

Fox Talbot’s contributions to the world weren’t limited to this process. Soon after he was the first to discover that it was possible to make shorter exposures by developing the ‘latent image’ using a new mix of chemicals – instead of waiting for the picture to appear on the paper he would bring out the initially invisible picture in the darkroom, the process that remains to this day. He also was equally at home in Egyptology, or playing with electrical coils with Michael Faraday. Yet it was that tiny negative of the window in Lacock Abbey that will always be his real claim to fame.

As I neared the entrance of the exhibition again, I was taken by a rather random collection of old photographs. Two artists were at work, or rather one was sketching and the other was talking. The man with the pencil was the sort of artist it’s easy to misunderstand if you meet him at night in a dark alley. With a ferocious, sheep-sheared haircut and every visible fold of skin pierced, he was a bizarre contrast with the demure Victorian portraits (though the Victorians did have a secret passion for nipple rings). His colleague, an American was more conventionally dressed.

‘They’re amazing,’ he said. ‘I spend most of my time now making engravings based on old photographs. There’s something special in them.’ And he might have been a pretentious poser, but it’s true. Just look at them, particularly the portraits. There is something special.

Right at the end of the exhibition, just before the little nook that seemed designed for you to drop your offspring in before seeing the place, in case their little minds were infected with culture, was a glass case that made me realise that I must be verging on the historical myself. It held a collection of old cameras, and one was identical to my first serious piece of kit, a Praktica FX2, a single lens reflex without the fancy prism thingy on top, so you had to look down onto a ground glass screen as the camera wobbled around somewhere near your belly button. Oh, it took me back.

Even after I’d done the exhibition as slowly as I could and flicked through endless over-priced books on photography in the bookshop it was still too early to get in the abbey itself. But it was about time for a spot of lunch. In hindsight, I realise that by this point I had already fallen under the National Trust spell. My natural inclination would be to head for one of Lacock’s inviting looking pubs, all of which seemed well equipped to feed the visitor, but I had got it in mind that this would be a National Trust day, and that meant only one thing – a National Trust Tearoom. Scones, crusty bread and jolly wholesome rustic fare with plenty of fibre.

There was, however, one snag. The National Trust has not seen fit to supply Lacock with a tearoom. But an enterprising independent has managed to provide a passable clone, so it was only with a slight regretful glance in the direction of the pubs that I crossed the road to the Stables Tearoom. It was everything one would expect. High ceilinged, rustic, ever-so tastefully furnished and just a little too cold. By the time I reached the counter (it was, of course, self-service), I had decided that I would have to go for the soup (tomato and orange, with homemade rustic rolls, no less), which was just as well as I was about to lose the power of logical thought.

The girl who was serving behind the counter was quite stunningly beautiful. She had electric blue eyes, translucent skin, pale hair framing a perfect shaped face – she was a painter’s dream subject. So, to be honest, she was not the right person to be serving in a tearoom. At least, to be serving me in a tearoom. In part this was because I was immediately returned to that disastrous teenage state where just getting your words to come out in the right order is near-impossible. But it was mostly because it made it so much more irritating than usual when she made it obvious that she had better things to be doing than serving old folk like me. Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

The soup, when it came (complete with those ever so rustic rolls) was blisteringly hot. The microwave must have been on overtime. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the spoon’s end had melted and run into the bowl, Salvador Dali style. I could almost feel the skin peeling off my lips as I attempted to sip it. Even so, there was a fascinating sweetness to the soup, quite unlike anything you might expect. As I waited for it to cool, peering through the steam that rose from the bowl as if it were a Mesolithic swamp, that taste took me back a good few years to a country house in Kent.

My wife and I (this lord of the manor things rubs off) had gone down to stay for the weekend in one of these places that would have been a guesthouse if it wasn’t so expensive and in such beautiful surroundings. It was the sort of place where all the guests (six of us) sit round a table with the owner to share a meal. The sort of place than can be great fun, or a nightmare.

It had started quite well. The owner also had the surname Clegg, and we shared that frisson of companionship that a mutual name can give. Sometimes people take it a bit too far. I remember buying something in a department store in Swindon (don’t ask me why) a number of years ago. While I was signing the credit card slip another customer with a suspiciously green anorak was staring hard at my paperwork. A bit of an invasion of my space, I thought, but otherwise ignored him.

‘I’m a Clegg too,’ he said triumphantly.

‘Oh, good,’ I said, in a way that was supposed to show that the conversation was at an end, only he was quite clearly not the sort to take a hint. Anyone who ostentatiously reads other people’s credit card slips doesn’t care about appearances.

‘We’re from the Isle of Man, you know, the Cleggs,’ he said proudly.

‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘that’s nice,’ and hurried out of the shop before he could follow me. I do get a little fed up of people telling me where the name Clegg comes from. ‘It’s a Yorkshire name,’ I’m often informed, and it doesn’t matter how much I tell them they’re wrong, they don’t listen. In fact the name comes from a small village to the east of Rochdale in Lancashire, admittedly near the border with Yorkshire, but still on God’s side. The reason I’m reasonably sure of this is that Clegg Hall is still there to prove it, and all the evidence is that the owners took their name from the place (Little Clegg and Great Clegg) rather than the other way round.

But this is one digression too far. Back in Kent, we had discussed our joint name more amicably, and then the other guests arrived and all we had to do was listen in delight to the stories of one couple. He was a New York financier who had to come over to this country very regularly. She was his mistress, or rather his wife for the time he was in the country and left the US version back home. Not only was their lifestyle fascinating (how very different from the home life of our own dear Queen), but it was a joy to see the American disdain for distance applied to little old England. Here they were in Kent and they had every intention of having a daytrip to Cornwall the next day.

Anyway, and here’s the point at last, when we all sat down to the table, the starter was a tomato soup that was unusually sweet, just like the tomato and orange in Lacock. The taste was quite remarkable, and someone inevitably asked how it was made. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Clegg, ‘it’s very simple. I just open a can and throw in some tomato ketchup to make it more interesting.’ We ate at the pub the next night.

By the time the Lacock soup had cooled enough to finish it was past the witching hour of one in the afternoon, when I would be graciously allowed entry to the abbey. The entrance was through the museum – grit your teeth and face the greeter again – which disgorged the visitor onto the curving driveway of the abbey.

Across a field comes the first glance of this jewel of a building, glowing in the brightening light (those clouds were finally shifting). I should have stood longer, appreciating the view, splendidly asymmetric, so much more pleasing than those nauseatingly regular neo-classical buildings, but the anticipation of a possible highlight of the visit dragged me on. Would it be there? Could they really do it? I hurried around the corner, momentarily losing the abbey in a clump of trees and passing a small but decidedly sexy statue of a sphinx, perched perilously on a tall pair of standalone pillars. I couldn’t stop to admire her either. Would it be there?

Round another corner, through a stone arch and up a shallow set of steps to the door. It led straight into a high, vaulted hall, the sort of room that makes you reel a little as you look up at the ceiling, but I wasn’t going to be distracted by that, nor by the rotund figure of a classic battleaxe of a door guardian who boomed at me that WHEN (and only when) I had looked around the hall I should proceed through THAT door. I could do no more than nod. For ahead of me was the sign I had been hoping for, a piece of irony that surely even the National Trust should have spotted.

Here, in the entranceway to the home of the man who all but invented photography, squarely in the middle of the route to the room where the first known photographic negative was produced, stood a notice, embellished with an explicit pictogram for the hard of reading. NO PHOTOGRAPHY. I sighed happily and obeyed the order to look around the hall. One thing you have to say for the Talbot’s – they liked their organs. There are a pair in the hall, one at each end. This was not the result of some bizarre dismemberment ritual. We’re talking musical instruments here, though compact jobs, not full sized church Wurlitzers.

They looked fascinating (though of course one was encouraged NOT TO TOUCH and could feel the dragon’s breath of the watcher of the door behind, just waiting for anyone to lay a finger on the keyboard), but were a distraction from the purpose of being there – to follow in the footsteps of Fox himself. It was surprisingly easy. Through the dining room (by memory a rather disgusting shade of green, though I forgot to make a note and I do find colours have a nasty habit of changing in my recollection) and out another door and you were into that famous South Gallery.

It looks wonderful from the outside – three fancy stone mullioned windows bulging from the walls like handsome fungi, each different, endued with the mellowness of hundreds of years of maturing. Actually, the whole gallery, windows and all is relatively modern, the result of some structural rearrangement that William Henry had fancied. He had been building a drawing room on the site, but before it was finished he took a dislike to it, had it knocked down and replaced it with the current gallery. The windows – one big bay and a pair of smaller oriels – all date to around 1830. It doesn’t really matter, though, they’re still beautiful.

It was the smallest, centre oriel window that formed Fox’s subject. There were obvious technical reasons why he might have chosen a window. His early attempts at creating images took a lot of light to blacken the silver compounds. What better subject than a natural light source like that window. Equally, though, realising that this was a new addition to the Fox Talbot household, William Henry might simply have wanted to show off his latest addition, the way you might proudly take a guest to see your new en-suite shower room.

He certainly seemed more interested in showing off the house than displaying himself to the world. There are very few of photographs of Fox Talbot. He seemed to shun the camera’s eye. In the few prints that there are it is difficult to see past the Victorian paraphernalia. You seem him dressed like Isambard Kingdom Brunel in a stovepipe hat, or posing at his desk looking decidedly worriedly at the camera, as if he is concerned that his balding head with fly-away tufts of hair either side is going to prove altogether too shiny.

When I arrived in the South Gallery, there was already a lively discussion underway between the room’s guide, an elderly chap of the twinkling eye variety, and a college lecturer who had obviously spent much too long studying copies of the photograph in one of those expensive books I’d seen earlier. By simply standing still I found myself part of the conversation. It just happened that way. The guide was pointing out that the gallery wasn’t very wide – it hadn’t given old Fox much room to get away from the window. But our lecturer friend was more interested in the image itself. He peered through the glass of the real window.

‘Were those trees already there when Talbot took the picture?’ The glass had the faded translucency of age – it was difficult to tell just what you were seeing.

‘I don’t know,’ said the guide.

‘What sort of tree is that big one? An oak?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the guide. I was warming to him already. He was small and gnarled, rather like a tree himself, and he smiled a lot.

‘You see, it’s this blob,’ said the lecturer. We all crowded round the small reproduction of the Fox Talbot picture –negative and positive print alongside each other – framed on the wall. Sure enough, on the right hand side of the negative is a near-rectangular blob with a rounded top corner, a bit like a loaf of bread. ‘I’ve always wondered what this blob on the right is. I suppose it would be on the left in the real window.’

We all stepped back in unison like well-trained members of a Busby Berkley cast, to stare at the real window. There was nothing outside that could possible have been the blob. The trees were nowhere near the corner, and much fainter.

‘They could have chopped a tree down,’ said the guide helpfully.

Daringly I had approached the negative without my colleagues. ‘Is it in front?’ I said. ‘Could the blob be inside the window?’ The other two joined me as we stared at the faded print.

‘No, you can see the bar,’ said the lecturer dismissively.

Personally I think he was wrong – the mullion does seem to go past the blob, but I reckon it’s an optical illusion and all we are seeing is Fox Talbot’s hat or his case or something. It’s much too dense for an object that lies in the distance. But that’s just my opinion and I’m not a lecturer.

By now I had dropped out of the conversation, which had moved onto the subject of the lecturer’s students, who were accompanying him on a tour of the birthplace of photography.

‘I’ve had a lot of your youngsters through,’ said the guide. ‘Some of them take lots of pictures, others they’re through in three seconds.’

Take lots of pictures? I thought. What about that glorious sign? Have they no sense of place? But then, they were students – what more could I expect. They didn’t appreciate culture. The lecturer confirmed this by reminiscing about one favourite essay on Lacock, which had quite clearly been written from the seclusion of the pub and said much more on the choice of beers than it did on the father photography. What’s wrong with these students? Haven’t they heard of tearooms?

It was surprisingly difficult to make a mental superimposition of the interior of the house on the abbey that it had been built from. This struck me particularly as I ventured into the Brown Gallery, which was built over the nun’s refectory. It was just a passage with books and rather ordinary looking rooms off that could have been a pure Victorian construct. I was so taken by this difficulty that for a moment or two I didn’t notice the hat.

If you aren’t familiar with National Trust properties, all the main rooms are policed by a volunteer, normally verging on the elderly, who lurks there to make sure that you don’t nick anything, and to pass on engaging titbits of information. Squarely in the middle of the Brown Gallery stood a lady in her late middle age, whose entire appearance was dominated by a bizarre black confection that sat courageously on her head. She peered from beneath it and commented: ‘You can see through to the original medieval parts below. The covering is all Victorian, of course.’

For a moment I thought she was referring to her hat. No expert in millinery, I could easily be fooled into thinking that you could see the medieval parts below. This hat was like a gigantic black globe artichoke, hacked away in the centre to fit a head. It was impossible to drag your eyes away from it – this vision followed you around the room. Suppressing an urge to break out in hysterical laughter, and pausing as briefly as I could to examine the medieval flooring exposed beneath the Victorian boards (yes, that’s what she meant) I hurried out of the gallery, through a small winding corridor that gave every impression of being a part of the house that visitors weren’t allowed in, and back out into the main hall.

The dragon on the door was waiting. ‘HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE CLOISTERS?’ she boomed. It was strange, she wasn’t really all that loud, but every word was clearly pronounced in capital letters.

‘No,’ I muttered, feeling unaccountably guilty, ‘but I’m just going.’

And I’m glad I did. Lacock is a real two-for-the-price-of-one treat. (You might even say ‘buy one, get one free’, if only for the acronym.) When you enter the cloisters, all of a sudden the ancient abbey reappears. The place that Ela, Countess of Salisbury had chosen for her nuns back in the 12^th century when this was untouched pasture by the river Avon. It’s not only the cloisters themselves, but the rooms off them – when you go around the house you just don’t notice that the whole thing is suspended above its medieval origins.

The elegant little chapter house was fun (it shows my ignorance – until I read the handy notice, I hadn’t realised that they’re called chapter houses because they used to read a chapter from the rule of St. Benedict there every day). And the cloisters themselves were wonderfully peaceful that day, though they probably heave with bodies in the height of summer. But my favourite was the nuns’ warming house.

Just the concept was a delight. I couldn’t help but imagine frozen nuns standing in front of the high fireplace like those chilly gentleman in Victorian etchings who lift their coat tails to let the heat through to their backsides. Did the nuns lift up their habits? The mind boggles. In fact the nuns must have been much taller than I expected, because the notice informed us that one of the window seats, the one by the fireplace, was original and it was practically two metres up the wall. Perhaps the abbess hauled herself up there to avoid seeing anything being warmed that she shouldn’t.

Apart from the delights of the fireplace, the warming house also contains a huge cauldron dating back to 1500, the sort of thing that missionaries used to be boiled in when depicted in those totally humourless cartoons that were featured in Punch. And then there was a great stone tank, taking up about a quarter of the floor space. The guide book claims that this was not originally there, and probably started life somewhere outside for keeping fish in or washing clothes. I’m not convinced, though. I reckon it just showed that this was the medieval equivalent of a health spa. After warming themselves in front of the fire (next best thing to a sauna), the nuns could do a few lengths of the tank, or just bubble away in the Jacuzzi cauldron.

I heard a giggling from the antechamber to the warming room, a parlour according to the sign, although it’s now a dark, dismal place with stone coffins strewn across the floor that had been moved from locations out in the grounds. I crept to the doorway and saw a pair of girls in their early twenties, probably Scandinavian from their extravagant sweaters. One was lying in a coffin, the other trying to take a photograph, but the corpse was corpsing, as they say in the theatre, unable to lie still, torn with laughter. Suddenly I felt voyeuristic, as if I was peeping into a bedroom scene. I backed up a little and took heavy footsteps towards the door. The Swedish (or possibly Norwegian) corpse shot out of the coffin with a rapidity that would have taken Buffy the Vampire Slayer by surprise. Somehow it finished off the visit to perfection...

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