Fire Hydrant

When I was a child and had just arrived in Norway from England, I used to go for walks of discovery close to where our we first stayed. As I was young and in a new country, everything was an adventure, and even the most mundane things took on an exotic hue simply because they looked different to what I had known before. Once I came across an old fire-hydrant that very oddly was placed in the middle of a lawn, almost as if had grown there like some metal toadstool. I remembered it as being colourful too, and rather handsomely designed. This was 35 years ago. A short while ago, being in the vicinity of where I had stayed then, sheer curiosity led me to follow the old path from my childhood to see if it was still there –and to my delight, it was! Very little had changed in the area; there were still the same old farm buildings and greenhouses, and the landscape was just as I remembered it. The paint on the fire-hydrant had perhaps faded a little, flaked off here and there, but it still seemed to grow out of the ground and be both out of place and perfectly placed. It’s surprisingly uplifting to re-discover such odd icons from one’s childhood; of course this time I had to photograph it. Location: Valler, Norway