Earlier this month, I said that I didn’t think local glazier Wadds used their distinctive stencil anymore… but here’s a local Subway, proving me wrong!

I’m cheating a bit today, because I actually took this picture earlier in the week. It’s Britain’s quintessential derelict building, Millennium Mills. It’s on the south side of the Royal Victoria Dock in London, just across from the ExCel exhibition centre.

The building has played the role of “derelict building” in any number of TV shows, films and music videos, from Ashes to Ashes to Green Zone. It’s one of those buildings that, when I walk past it, makes me desperate to explore inside. Of course, the law-abiding and safety-conscious side of my brain ensures that the nearest thing to urban exploration that I ever do is logging on to 28 Days Later and looking at others’ fascinating photographs.

In this case, it’s probably a good job: the place is full of asbestos, floors which are decayed to the point of collapse, and nine storey drops. It’s definitely not a good place to go exploring!

The future of Millennium Mills looks uncertain at the moment: many plans have been made, from converting the building to luxury flats, to demolishing it and building an aquarium. All have fallen through. So who knows what’s next for this beguiling building?

This week, I’m recommending a very deep and searching article by Gabiel Arana from the American Prospect magazine. It’s a very personal article about his experience of his exposure to the ‘gay cure’ movement. It’s a stunning, achingly honest bit of writing.

This is a memorial fountain designed by James Woodford in 1954. It stands in the courtyard at BMA House, commemorating doctors killed during the Second World War.

James Woodford served in both World Wars, with the the 11th Battalion Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (Sherwood Foresters) in the First, and with the Air Ministry in the Second. He won the Prix de Rome for Sculpture in 1922, and went on to create his best known work in 1953: ten heraldic beasts which stood at the entrance to Westminster Abbey for the Queen’s coronation.

Now, I’m sure we’ve all experienced one of those awkward moments after a big party when you suddenly think, “Damn, what on Earth am I going to do with all these decorative heraldic beasts?” I know I have!

Well, luckily, Woodford had the foresight to plan for that moment, and made them only out of plaster so that they could be easily thrown away. But – shock horror – the beasts turned out to be very popular. So popular, in fact, that he had to do a nifty bit of negotiation with the Home Office to get a 50:50 split on the takings from the rights to copying them.

And to this day, you can see a complete set in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew.

So I’m more than fashionably late to this particular party…!

I didn’t really appreciated the scale of the Olympic Park until I saw it “in the flesh”… maybe that just means I need a bigger TV. I was slightly amused as a fairly elderly couple told me they were standing and waiting to see the Orbit move: it seems a policeman had told them that it had been lifted while onto the back of a huge lorry yesterday, and that the lorry was setting off for Glasgow later this afternoon. I wonder how long they waited?

This book is a coming-of-age crime-thriller for teenagers. I’m not a teenager, and I’m not really a fan of thrillers. This book isn’t for me. And yet, I thought it was awesome.

The basic plot centres around of group of friends in their mid-teens. As with any decent thriller, there’s sex, booze, drugs and missing people. I’ve often said that moral ambiguity is the key to any good story, and you’ll find that in abundance here.

This book might be marketed to teenagers, but the quality of the writing is very high, better than most thrillers I’ve read that are aimed at adults. Of course, it doesn’t use long words or complex references, and the descriptions become a bit repetitive at times, but the simplicity of the language is barely noticeable thanks to the force with which the plot is driven. I had hoped to make a pun of the fact that Brooks uses the word “dully” so many times in this novel, but it’s hard when the novel is anything but dull.

Brooks cleverly interweaves a genuinely thrilling mystery with neat social commentary and acutely observed humour centred around the teenager-parent relationship. The plot is of it’s time – it’s only four years old, and many of the sociocultural references are already dated – but the themes are timeless: rich versus poor; stereotypes versus reality; childhood versus adulthood.

There are some real benefits to having a teenage protagonist in a thriller. The combination of strong-headedness and strained relationship with parents sets up a clear set of boundaries in which the action can take place. This negates the need for complex, unbelievable expositions of reasons for not going to the police or seeking help. The settings are limited, too, to those that are commonly experienced and relatable: no school child is going to go wandering off to an isolated aircraft hanger, a nuclear bunker, or any such nonsense. Brooks builds tension in common settings: the wrong bit of the local Council estate, the middle of a bit of waste ground. This takes substantial skill, but the familiarity also heightens the jeopardy.

There are, of course, also downsides. Surly teenagers can occasionally make for frustrating protagonists. The central character’s habitual lying (and that of his friends) thickens the plot, but does give rise to occasions where one wants to reach into the book, give him a good slap, and tell him to grow up.

There’s a brilliant thread of hallucinations and psychiatric disturbance that runs through this novel – and there are key plot points to explain it. I mention this only because it demonstrates that this book deals with complex concepts, and uses really quite advanced literary techniques to make its points. It might be for teenagers, but there’s no sense here of writing down to them. And it doesn’t pull punches.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Black Rabbit Summer is the extraordinary and memorable ending. Of all the novels I’ve read lately, this has the strongest ending. And, again, it’s not an ending you might expect from a book aimed at teens.

I didn’t particularly relish reading this, but it completely surpassed my expectations. It is a teen novel, but that just means it’s easy to read. It’s a narratively tight well-written gripping novel. I’d recommend it to anyone.

Black Rabbit Summer is available now from amazon.co.uk in paperback and on Kindle.

This is a tiny bit of the Royal Society of Medicine’s incredible library, which is one of the biggest medical libraries in Europe. It’s spread over four floors, holding over half a million volumes – with around a thousand new ones added each year. It holds books dating back to the 1400s – when the occasional outbreak of Black Death was still claiming the lives of young Londoners. Even I couldn’t resist pulling a book off the shelf and reading for a while.

I think bringing Wendy here would be dangerous: she’s can easily spend an hour looking at the fairly pitiful selection of medical books in our local Blackwell’s, and has even taken her mum to the BMA library when on holiday! If I brought her here, she might move in… especially if she knew there’s a Mango nearby!

No prizes for guessing where I’ve been tonight… The Millennium Dome, now the O2, Richard Rogers’s homage to the Festival of Britain’s Dome of Discovery. Its time-obsessed dimensions reflect the reason for its construction: 12 pillars, one pillar for each month of the year; 52m high, one metre for each week of the year; a diameter of 365m, one metre for each day of the year. And there’s that remarkable statistic that the 1mm-thick glass-fibre fabric of the roof weighs less than than the air contained within the dome itself, yet could support the weight of a jumbo jet.

In the furore over the Dome’s innards, it’s often forgotten that the building itself was constructed in just 15 months, and – at £43m – substantially under-budget.

It’s hard to believe that it’s twelve years since my family and I first visited the site, to see the much-maligned (though highly rated by 85% of actual visitors) Millennium Experience. We had a great time, though I recall that we were really rather baffled over what the unifying theme of the attractions was supposed to be.

I’ve returned quite a few times since, usually just to grab dinner when in London and nearby… which is exactly why I was there tonight!

This is the fairly simple set up I use when I record for Calibre – and, since I started recording for Calibre, it’s also the set up I use when recording for The Pod Delusion.

I’ve just finished a book for Calibre today – just shy of 12 hours of audio in total. I hope my voice doesn’t start to irritate people after the first half hour or so…!

Today, I’ve been to visit Northumberlandia, a colossal sculpture of a woman, 100ft high and a quarter of a mile long. It’s made from the excavated material of the open-cast coal mine next door, leading to its more common colloquial name: Slag Alice.

This is a closer view of the face from atop Alice’s right breast. There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write!

As the sculpture is new, and still bedding in, it is only open to the public on selected days and at selected times. It’s expected to be fully open later in the year.

This is, erm, Alice’s left nipple, with Shotton surface coal mine in the background, demonstrating where the material of her form was gathered. It is still very much operational. The coal mine, I mean, not the nipple.

The sculpture cost around £3m, and it was entirely privately funded. It was designed by Charles Jencks. As well as making lots of landscaped art, he co-founded Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres, of which there are now fourteen across the UK. They provide evidence-based psychological, emotional and informational support to anyone affected by cancer – whether a patient, relative or friend.

This is a slightly whimsical picture of Alice’s right hand, which points roughly in the direction of the exit…!

Admission to Northumberlandia is free. And here’s a mildly amusing unusual sign: