All the world's a stage

Starry Starry Blade Runner.....

The year is 2049. The Tyrell cooperation has collapsed decades before in the wake of violent revolts involving their Nexus-6 through -8 Replicants, forcing Tyrell into bankruptcy. After the world's ecosystems collapsed, famine swept the Earth. With his invention of synthetic farming, Niander Wallace ended food shortages and acquired Tyrell's remaining assets. The Wallace Company has reinvigorated the Replicant industry by producing the Nexus-9 Replicants, a new generation of artificial humans with modified behavior to make them more obedient than the older models. These Replicants have implanted memories and open-ended lifespans, and are still used for slave labor on the off-world colonies, but some are also used as Blade Runners, hunting down and 'retiring' the few remaining older models that are still at large.

Agent K, one of these Nexus-9 Replicants, travels to a protein farm outside Los Angeles in his flying Spinner, where he has tracked down an older model Replicant called Sapper Morton who was part of a group of Series 8 Replicants that had gone AWOL. After a brief but violent fight, Morton tells him that as a newer model, K cannot come close to knowing what it means to be human. He implies that K would never help humans kill his own kind if he had ever witnessed the kind of miracle that he has. K retires him and is ready to leave, until he notices an old dying tree next to the farm. An investigation reveals a chest buried in front of it.....

Whatever....

I once had a friend whose biggest problem when he woke up in the morning was deciding which car to drive.....

Others have to decide at which end of the rainbow they are going to start digging..... 

I'm in the Arnolfini, looking out at an intergenerational jam session....

I'm in the Watershed....

I drop into the Small Bar....

Next thing I'm in L’Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise.....

And then, suddenly, as if by Spinner, I am back at the Bag of Nails, keeping the cats company....

Time to leave town.  I head for the countryside.....

But I cannot help but feel I am being watched....

Even in the back of beyond, looking up the valley of the Usk, towards the Black Mountain,

There's always someone.  

Like charming Geoff, with his black cat, who has rented here for twenty years (and I apologise if I misremember his name)....

And then, atop of Table Mountain, having lost my bearings, who should I have the pleasure of meeting?  Yes, it's Dickie and Lindsey Bellringer, from Salisbury.....  Who are really nice. 

In such a brief encounter it is impossible to be sure which of us are Replicants, but there's me trusting holographs, again.....

Then, on my way down again to the abandoned remains of Las Vegas [citation needed] I come across a couple of of feral scavenger people who live among the ruins of the old Satellite Dish Array.....

And narrowly avoid being retired by one of Wallace's Replicants....

But, passing my baseline test by the Sugar Loaf,

I manage to get through the gate, 

And deposit the wooden/stone horse/effigy in the furnace/niche.....

And I return to LA.....(?)

And relax for a moment, with a pie and a beer,  in The Three Tuns, 

With Loving Vincent.....

Which just about rounds off the weekend quite nicely.

Except that I had forgotten about bloody Deckard.....

Who is still just a little trigger happy (after all these years) and insists on knowing what I want to know (as if any of us knew).....

The End....

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts, 

His acts being seven ages.....

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon, 

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; 

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, 

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, 

That ends this strange eventful history, 

Is second childishness and mere oblivion, 

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything......

[For f's sake..... Where will any of us be in 2049?]

Take my hand

Take my whole life too

For I can't help falling in love with you

Like a river flows, surely to the sea 

Darling so it goes, some things are meant to be

[With apologies to all the people whose pictures I have taken, in good faith....]

Really the end.