812 - Little Blue

Today I set out to meet with my father in Klagenfurt. We needed to fetch a piece of furniture that had just arrived, and then to do some work in Villach that we had let come together. I expected us to be done with it by 2pm, and had planned to take him up on a mountain, most likely Dobratsch again, as he seems to like being with me while I take photographs.

Normally when I go down to the garage, I take the stairs or sometimes the elevator, but when I bring down the garbage, I enter through the ramp. Today I was about to do so, and just as I rounded the corner, I saw this poor little hydrant standing among all the dirty snow. Light was poor, the sky a solid cover of dense fog. Heck, I thought, I’ll be up on the mountain and shoot grand landscapes, but I can just as well start photographing here.

I did so, and just as I did, one neighbor, German by sound (many Germans work at the Infineon plant just 500 meters away, thus we have an unusually big share of Germans here on the block), brought out some garbage as well and said to me “Oh, no need to photograph this hydrant. Drive up the mountains. The weather is gorgeous up there. I just saw it on the Internet. You’ll get much better motifs there”. “Thanks, but you never know”, said I.

It remained the only image I shot today. We spent much more time in Klagenfurt than expected, and when we were done with work, it was 3:45pm and just that tiny bit too late. I’m glad I didn’t dismiss this image for a grander future 🙂

The Song of the Day could have been “Little Boy Blue” just like in “682 - Little Boy Blue”, at least that was my initial impulse, but then I found “Little Blue” from the 1996 Beautiful South album “Blue Is the Colour” (hear it on YouTube), and I’m glad for that as well, because I learned two things:

Paul Heaton has a new album (old news, it’s been out for 7 months, but I didn’t know), and the Pound Sterling is on an all-time low, about parity with the Euro.

The album costs £12.98 at Amazon.co.uk, while it’s €17.95 at Amazon.de. That gave me this kind of buying frenzy, you know, and I ordered it along with all those James albums (the band from Manchester, we’ll get to that, sooner or later) that I had assembled on my waiting list at Amazon.co.uk, but never dared to order 🙂