Last updated 12:33, Saturday, 03 May 2008

They weren’t doing a great trade in strawberry ices at the stall in Theatre by the Lake’s Circle Gallery the other evening during the local Amateur Operatic Society’s production of Oklahoma!

Despite the efforts of theatre volunteers Graham Thompson and Jim Smith, business hadn’t so much slowed down as ground to a freezing halt.

Then the penny dropped. Right behind Graham and Jim’s stall was a huge photograph of a dead hedgehog.

Not merely a hedgehog in repose, a hedgehog deceased, a hedgehog gone to meet its maker.

No, this spiky chap was flat as a pancake, spreadeagled in gory detail, the victim of a pretty conclusive running over.

As the last remnants of the poor creature’s innards oozed across the tarmac, ice cream sales went into terminal decline.

It was, admitted Graham with glorious understatement, “perhaps not the best pitch from which to sell ice cream.”

The Circle Gallery exhibition is by BA (Hons) photography students from the University of Cumbria’s faculty of arts.

Their contemporary work celebrates “individual approaches” using the medium of photography.

If pictures of dead hedgehogs are your bag, then you have until May 11 to nip along to the lakeside theatre.

Just don’t have your tea first.