Three years ago, while travelling to Oslo for work, I had an unexpected layover in Ålesund, a port town on the west coast of Norway. Having missed our connecting flight, three other stranded passengers and I passed 12 hours together in a place I would never otherwise have visited. It was a surreal, almost mystical experience.
One of my companions was a pretty, softly spoken photographer, whom I had been idly admiring since I first spotted him in the airport. Something about airports does this to me – in them I can fall in love with several people an hour, watching each drift off to different countries, imagining I was going with them. And now, improbably, I was splitting a bottle of wine overlooking a fjord with one of these fantasies. It was summer, so it didn’t get dark. We walked along the harbour wall and out to a lighthouse, and he took a photograph of me and the other two men we were with. I looked at it again when I returned to Ålesund last week, intentionally this time.
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