As Olympic preparations continue apace, the country’s biggest metal Olympic rings have been clamped to the Tyne Bridge to celebrate Newcastle’s status as one of the host cities. They look really quite smart. They are the correct colours, of course, though the contrast with the bright sky in this photo makes that hard to see.

At first glance, from a distance, they didn’t look much different in size to the ones at St Pancras. But closer up, it’s clear that they really are quite huge: 25m wide, in fact, 50% bigger than the ones on The Mound in Edinburgh!

When I first came across Read it Later and similar services, I struggled to understand what they were for. This might sound odd, because I had a long-term habit of emailing myself links to stories and videos that I wanted to deal with later. For example, an interesting link might appear on twitter when I haven’t the time to follow it. Previously, I would (really) email myself the tweet. Then I discovered a better way.

Read it Later is now Pocket, and I use it all the time for saving links that I might want to follow up later. I use ifttt.com to send all of Bobbie Johnson’s If You Only tweets directly to Pocket, and then delete them from there on the rare occasion that I’m not interested in the subject matter.

I do most of my Pocket reading via my iPhone or iPad, but occasionally I fancy reading something on my Mac. I could, of course, go directly to the Pocket website, but I like something a little cleaner. The answer to this problem is a simple app: Read Later, which works with both Pocket and Instapaper. It’s a ridiculously simple app, which shows a list of my saved stories on the left, and a simplified, easy-to-read view of the article on the right. Perfect. There’s a also buttons to share articles by any one of a number of means, be it email, Twitter, Facebook, Pinboard, or something else.

The beauty of Read Later is that it reduces the barrier to reading all of that stuff that I mean to read. I don’t have to fire up and login to a website, it’s a single click on my Dock, and I’m in. It’s fantastic, free, and worth a download.

This is the badge I got a few weeks ago for my 25th blood donation. I couldn’t think of anything else to picture today, so thought I’d go for another exhortation to give blood. Check where your next local session is at blood.co.uk or call 0300 123 23 23. Thanks!

It seems I forgot to take a photo yesterday… oops! Instead, here’s one of the Tyne from South Shields, including some totally massive electricity pylons carrying cables over the Tyne at a height that allows huge ships to pass beneath. I don’t think I’ve seen pylons as tall anywhere else!

This sculpture of DNA stands in Newcastle’s Times Square, which is the central square of the Centre for Life.

The Centre for Life is a remarkable place, uniquely combining world-leading genetic research, NHS fertility treatment, a public science centre, and a series of bars and nightclubs.

Times Square hosts an outdoor ice rink in the winter, and frequently has other visiting attractions: the Ladyboys of Bangkok seems to be annual visitors! Today, a Renault Twizy assault course had been marked out – I didn’t give it a go!

As anyone in Newcastle surely knows, today is the 150th anniversary of the Blaydon Races:

Aw went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the ninth of Joon,
Eiteen hundred an’ sixty-two, on a summer’s afternoon;
Aw tyuk the ‘bus frae Balmbra’s, an’ she wis heavy laden,
Away we went alang Collingwood Street, that’s on the road to Blaydon.

The ninth of June 2012 has hardly seen the summeriest of afternoons – it’s been pin-wheeling for most of it! Blaydon Races mentions a number of local landmarks, most of which would be fairly familiar to 21st century Geordies. But this reference had me a bit stumped:

Noo when we gat to Paradise thor wes bonny gam begun;
Thor was fower-an-twenty on the ‘bus, man, hoo they danced an’ sung;
They called on me to sing a sang, aw sung them “Paddy Fagan”,
Aw danced a jig an’ swung my twig that day aw went to Blaydon.

Where the heck is Paradise? You could say that, for me, it was a case of Paradise lost… but today, I’ve relocated it. It looks like this:

It turns out that it’s a little bit of what’s usually considered to be Benwell, one of the more deprived areas of the city. It was perhaps best known for being the home of the Paradise Colliery, which sounds like something of an oxymoron. There is, in fact, even a road called “Paradise”, but it’s such an unexciting entrance to an industrial estate that I didn’t even bother taking a picture.

At the end of the row of houses you can see in this picture used to stand Paradise Church, which, in a bizarre change of usage, later became a QuaserLaser. It’s now been knocked down, leaving nothing but the long grass you can just about see poking through.

So, that was my trip to Paradise!

This is our local Tesco in Kingston Park. With 119,000 square feet of retail space, it was once Britain’s biggest hypermarket. Unusually for a modern hypermarket, the retail space is almost exclusively on one level, with only the cafe being upstairs (above non-retail space, rather than as a fashionable and rent-reducing mezzanine). It has a number of concessions inside, including a Johnson’s dry cleaners, a Card Factory, a Co-op Travel Agent, and several more besides.

It is really a bit too big, the size rather getting in the way of a pleasant shopping experience. Staff used to zoom around on roller skates, though I haven’t seen them doing that for a little while. That said, I relatively rarely venture in these days. I can’t remember the last time Wendy and I did a big shop there. It’s big, busy, tatty, dirty, unfriendly, and altogether quite unpleasant.

In 2010, Tesco opened a store at Walkden in Salford thats about 50% bigger. I’ve no idea how they fill the space, and I struggle to imagine how the extended pain of pushing a trolley 50% further is met with commensurate benefits… I don’t plan to go and find out!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8

I tweeted a link to this video yesterday… but I liked it so much that I thought I’d post it here too. I defy anyone to watch past 1:36 without cracking a smile.

Meet Jolly, one of the many cardboard cutout corgis currently littering the Metrocentre. This is, surely, one of the country’s strangest Diamond Jubilee celebrations…!

This is Wynyard Hall, a 190-year-old country house in County Durham. I drive quite close by it most days, so thought I’d stop off for a photo today.

It was originally built for the Vane-Tempest-Stewart family, perhaps more famous for Mount Stewart, their estate on the shore of Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. It stands in Wynyard Park, a vast set of gardens including a 15-acre lake.

These days, Wynyard Hall has been converted to a four-star hotel hotel, and part of the garden has been given over to an estate of multimillion pound new build houses (or mini-mansions might be a better description!) A state-of-the-art hospital was also due to built in the grounds before the government ripped up the plans in the name of austerity.

I’ve only ventured inside Wynyard Hall a couple of times for conferences – one of which included a discussion of contraceptive options which, by a bizarre twist of irony, was held in the chapel. It’s really quite lovely inside.