The sculptor takes us back to a cold and wet afternoon spent in Norfolk with the woman who would become his wife
I first heard The Waterboys’ Fisherman’s Blues when I was driving to Norfolk with my best friend in about 1990. The song evokes the memory of a very English day spent with my then girlfriend, now wife, Henrietta at Scolt Head – an island off Brancaster Beach on the North Norfolk coast.
We sat on the dunes eating fresh brown shrimp sandwiches and then stripped off down to our pants to cross the estuary, which has very a fast rising tide. We waded up to our chests before turning back to the beach, then, cold and wet and covered with salt, we ran home to light the fire and with a woollen rug drawn up round us, lay back and listened to the heart of Mike Scott’s Waterboys carrying us away “into the garden wet with rain”.
It often rises to the surface now when I’m working in my studio, and it’s become the music our four wonderful children have grown up with: I took them to their first concert in March 2012, to Hammersmith to hear the then new album, An Appointment with Mr Yeats.
Nic Fiddian-Green is a sculptor. Nic will be presenting his first show of drawings outside London at an exhibition running parallel to the upcoming Marrakech Biennale which runs from 26 Feb – 31 March. Click for more information
