One of the cabin crew panicked upon landing. She was screaming like a banshee – ‘Get off, get off’ – she was pushing people down the chute.

Tom Alrigde, complaining in a BBC News article about a member of cabin crew trying to evacuate a plane suspected of being on fire as quickly as possible. Yes, really.

This is MS Princess Seaways, one of the big DFDS cruiseferries that runs from North Shields, here in Newcastle, to IJmuiden, in the Netherlands.

It’s probably a ship with deep psychological issues: it was “born” in Germany in 1986 and was christened MS Peter Pan. It underwent a definitive sex change in 2006, when it became Princess of Norway, having used three other fairly gender neutral names in the interim, but has remained a princess of one sort or another ever since.

I always thought it was unlucky to rename a ship, but perhaps I’m wrong…!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l_cZ3_bJGg

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far! If you haven’t, and you’d like to donate something to Marie Curie and support my 10k swim, please do at http://sjh.im/SimonSwim. Thanks.

This is just a few of the postcards I’ve received in the few weeks I’ve been Postcrossing. You can see them all on my “Postcard Wall”.

Postcrossing is slightly geeky but oddly fun as an occasional diversion – why not give it a try?

I’ve spied the new BHS on Newcastle’s Northumberland Street this afternoon. It’s in the building vacated by Next after they shuffled off into Eldon Square, and is a few doors up from its previous home, which has been subsumed into the expanding Primark.

Graham Soult has some great before-and-after comparison shots to see the impressive scale of the building’s transformation.

On my visit, my eye was drawn to the cafe on the second floor with floor-to-ceiling windows, which strikes me as a little vertiginous. I’m also not entirely keen on having two BHS signs above one another – I understand the logic (the higher one isn’t terribly visible from the doorway), but couldn’t they just have put a logo on the doors? There were six big visible logos on the frontage on my visit (four on posters), and it really cheapens the brand.

Anyway, I’m being picky. It’s a nice looking shop from the outside – certainly moreso than the old, unloved Next – and it’s a relief to get rid of some of Northumberland Street’s scaffolding!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bLaCWMYeg4

If you want to sponsor me and support Marie Curie, go to http://sjh.im/SimonSwim. Many thanks for your support.

I know that JC especially likes my photos of everyday objects… so here’s my milkshake from the Handmade Burger Company tonight!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVR486PwEFk

As you’ll see from the above video, I’ve agreed to swim 10k in just over two weeks for Marie Curie Cancer Care. Please sponsor me!

10k is a long way – for those of you in London, it’s roughly the same as swimming along the Thames from the London Eye to the Millennium Dome. It’s 400 lengths of my local pool.

So, please sponsor me! If you gave just 5p per length, that’d be £20, or enough to pay for an hour of nursing care for a terminally ill patient. Even £1 – 1p for every 10m – would pay for a patient information pack.

If you’re still not convinced, look at the video below which explains a small part of the work that Marie Curie nurses do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oykbix0C-E0

I’ll give you regular updates on my progress over the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for your support.

Gosforth High Street features these two Victorian churches next to one another: a quite remarkable sight!

The church on the left of the photo is now a Loch Fyne seafood restaurant. It used to be Gosforth United Reformed Church, but in 2000, merged with two Methodist churches – one of which was the church on the right of this photo – to form the Trinity church, in the church on the right. Are you still following this story?

As an atheist who doesn’t like seafood, neither of the two buildings is especially likely to attract me. It seems fascinating that two branches of Christianity that were so split that they’d bother to build competing churches next to each other have now resolved their theological differences to such a degree that they’ve merged. Heigh ho, religion works in mysterious ways, and it’s always nice to see people patching up differences!

I own a house in North Kensington and my house in the constituency in Oxfordshire and that is, as far as I know, all I have. Do not make me sound like a prat for not knowing how many houses I’ve got.

David Cameron, talking to Ginny Dougary for The Times, in 2009. I missed this first time round, but have just found it via David Eaton in the New Statesman.