Rain stops work

After yesterday's DIY success, today's scheduled task was decidedly more mundane: applying woodstain to the patio doors to complete the ambient patio-and-conservatory look of burnished mahogany.

The Lords of the Cumulonimbus had other ideas though, and as I stepped out onto the patio in my painting duds with stirrer in hand, a few drops fell splashily onto my ever-baldening pate. I stepped back inside sharpish. Never let it be said that I'm a determined and weather-defying wielder of a well-loaded brush. No, the slightest excuse is enough for me, and even though the rain passed over in a few minutes the sun that followed it was sufficiently strong for me to declare the task void for the day.

I busied myself instead with a few more chapters of Rebecca - the book club book for June - and followed this up with chopping the chicken and veg for Nikki as she prepared a chilli chicken dinner for the four of us. And then, as it was Father's Day today, I indulged myself with the director's cut of Blade Runner, which neither of the girls had seen before as far as I could tell.

This has long been at the top of my list of favourite films, but for some reason I watched it today with a more critical eye than usual. The story is set in 2019 and the closer we come to that date, the more far-fetched the image of "futuristic Los Angeles" becomes. I've written before on the dangers of predicting the future. I guess when Blade Runner was made (1982), 2019 sounded sufficiently far into the future to be credible. Now it's not much more than ten years away, flying street cars and genetic designers creating snakes and owls (not to mention humans) from scratch seems laughable. We're only just on the verge of creating the very first lifeform from man-made DNA, but it'll be a bacterium of some sort, not an owl. And off-world colonies? We were closer to that in the 1970s than we are now. Note to self: if I ever write any hard science fiction, make sure it's set at least a hundred years in the future. At least I'll be dead by the time it's proven wrong.

The old film still manages to move me at the end though, with Rutger Hauer's impeccably-delivered line: "I've ... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like ... tears ... in the rain. Time to die." It's worth watching just for that.