rain

If you thought Bladerunner's constantly rainy, gritty atmosphere was a deliberate nod to the movie's noir antecedents , I suspect you might only be half right, given that throughout the winter months all it does in this part of the world is rain, rain and rain again, and also given that Ridley Scott was partly inspired by a visit to Hong Kong. I'm going to take a guess his visit wasn't during the summer.

Mind you, given the current weather conditions prevalent in the UK (wind, rain, gales, snow, sleet, extreme weather warnings) I'm not exactly complaining, merely observing; it rains here exactly as much as it does in the movie. Which reminds me; one of the ways the movie Children of Men tried to inform the audience that they were witnessing London in the near future was by putting tv screens on board all the buses. Bingo again: every single vehicle of public transport in Taiwan has LCD screens running ads and movie trailers. I'll take a stab these are familiar to anyone living within a few thousand kilometres of this island.

I'm getting close to sticking up a new design for the blog. You can see how it's looking by going to the Stealing Light extract page - be warned, the other two pages you can jump to from there are a long way from ready.