This isn’t an interview with David Secombe.

It might have been. I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to go like this.

“Oh, the sheep’s head?” Secombe chuckles quietly to himself. “Yes, a tricky one that. I’d been down to the local abattoir and asked them to look out for a likely subject. I gave them a detailed list of the facial attributes I needed for the shot: inquisitive, open to new ideas, yet ever so slightly cynical. Months went by. I’d pretty much given up on it, when one day, the call came through: they’d got my sheep. So then it was just a case of findng the right stretch of road.”

Surely, I ventured, you would choose the road first – plan that in advance.

Secombe gives a wry smile. “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Unfortunately it doesn’t work out like that. I once had a lovely stretch of the B175 lined up for a shot, and when the day came and we turned up with all the props and equipment, they’d only gone and dug up the whole thing. Laying new gas pipes apparently.”

But it wasn’t like that. It was like this.

“The sheep’s head? That was just lying there.”

Also:

“The fox? That was just there.”

“The tennis ball in the generator? That was there.”

“Bart Simpson in the Thames? That was in there.”

Okay fine, but the woman in the pig mask – you gave her the mask and told her to put it on, right? You must have done.

“No, she had that with her.”

She had a pig mask with her.

“Yes”

Why?

“I don’t know.”

The thing about “found objects” though is that they’re very difficult to find. We’ve all of us (or is it just me) carried our new camera around for days thinking that we’ll catch those moments when objects or people suddenly, miraculously coalesce into the perfect shape. When art just happens. And by the time we’ve finally tired of being on the look out for miracles and beauty and suchlike and stuck the camera back in the drawer the sum total of our serendipity is nothing.

Of course, some photos-in-waiting sit there a bit longer. The Eternal Café wasn’t going anywhere. Except that, in a longer frame of reference, it so obviously was. Which is the point. Of that photograph, and perhaps many of David’s. In fact, of all them. And, indeed, all art.

Which is the obvious place for me to stop, except I haven’t mentioned the trawlers, and the ballet dancers and the “turns”.

Just like those found objects, the shots on the trawlers obviously took a lot of waiting around. Coupled with extreme nausea. And fear.

The turns , on the other hand, look rather like fun.

Mark Edwards, Swiss Cottage, 2006