Since I’ve been back in Kiruna I’ve been feeling a little challenged by the street light shining right in my face when I am sat on the sofa. I’ve felt interrogated, unnecessarily highlighted. I don’t like Kiruna’s over the top street lighting but you have to learn to live with it so I thought maybe I was being over sensitive. But on closer inspection I saw that our street light had taken on a rather quirky look, angled up and out, as if looking for something.
Not looking for me, I reassured myself. It’s not the neighbours wanting a better look at our indoor activities. It must have been dislodged in the wind, or knocked by something. (But at that height? It was hard to imagine. Unless it was a crow preparing to build a nest in the nearby tree that didn’t like the light either.)
We reported it to Tekniska Verken that works for the local council managing street issues. We thought they would forward it to a community surveillance team, who would then realise that their plans to spy on people in our street needed to be dialled down a notch.
A couple of days later, a van – charmingly named Attentiv – arrived. The men inside were straining their necks to assess the nature of the problem by looking at the street light in their side mirrors. The angle was wrong – they had to get out and look. Realising the angle was still wrong, they drove off. Nothing happened so we had to just draw the blind down rather fiercely.
A week later there was another problem. Northern lights, and too much bright lighting all around us to see it. Then twenty minutes later all the street lights suddenly went off. Somebody flicked a switch, which was very nice of them I thought, though surprising given they aren’t usually sympathetic to the need to see aurora.
The next morning I was sitting on the sofa looking out the window when I noticed that our street light was now pointing straight down. During the night, or very early in the morning, someone had come to our street with a cherry picker machine, lifted themselves up to a height above the nearby building, straightened the arm of the light, lowered themselves back down, and driven off. All without a sound. It felt like magic, or maybe an unusually obliging town troll.
That night the light didn’t work at all. Yes, probably a troll.
