It's Still Life

It’s Saturday, 21.00, and I am watching Wisting on BBC 4, Norwegian, subtitled in English, although I don’t need the subtitles, and there’s a man standing on a wooden dock that rocks with the brush of each wave under its pontoons, and a large dog standing on heaped mounds of rock that look shaped by the warm hands of Odin, and the man has a broom in hand sweeping the dock, guts and blood everywhere from a catch of cod that hangs on a hook from the side of a large metal lidded container, and the dog is barking—not incessantly, more like that annoying bark you hear when your dog is bored to death of standing on a heap of rocks watching you gut fish when it would prefer to be lapping up fish guts because Oh my god like woof, (and that’s one hundred forty words so far plus 8), and the camera swerves away from the dog and the man to a police car braking into a skid on the pebble driveway, where, of course, as you’d expect if you watch police-mystery-cold-case telly—the man is nowhere to be seen, but the dog is everywhere to be seen and barking at the metal lidded container. The man is unconscious, blood (his, not fish blood) pooled under his head, and surprisingly, he’s not dead. And I think to myself, I remember seeing an image prompt with a broom, but I’ll be damned if I can remember where.