You’ll need a sharp pair of eyes to spot the figure on the end of this bungee rope, right in the centre of the photo.

You can see rather more easily the Sage, the Tyne Bridge (complete with Olympic rings), the Castle Keep, and St Nicholas’s and St Mary’s cathedrals, all of which I’ve featured previously!

You can also see the quayside’s Sunday market in full flow; a bit of the 136 year old Swing Bridge, whose predecessors date back some 1,800 years or so to the Roman Pons Aelius; a smidgen of Robert Stephenson’s High Level Bridge, from which hundreds of people watched the Great Fire of Newcastle and Gateshead in 1854; and the roof of HMS Calliope, the stone frigate on the Gateshead bank of the Tyne.

You can’t see the talented young musicians performing in the North East Youth Steel Pan Festival, part of ¡Vamos! 2012. This festival was actually my reason for visiting the quayside this afternoon, but inclement weather moved it indoors, which would’ve made a fairly dull photo. So you’ve got a bungee jumping nutcase from outside instead!

Is there anything summerier than a bit of lemonade? There are, admittedly, plenty of things summerier than Asda’s Diet Cloudy Lemonade (“Made with real lemons”) – I’d love a bit of fresh ice cold still Sicilian lemonade, but this is the nearest thing I can find in the house! It’s 4% comminuted lemon from concentrate and 1% lemon juice…!

Hartlepool’s Middleton Grange Shopping Centre used to be home to a Co-op department store, but the shop closed in October last year. However, in a somewhat bizarre state of affairs, the coffee shop it contained remains open. To access the coffee shop, one must walk through the empty department store.

This surely makes Eugene’s one of the strangest coffee shops in Hartlepool, if not the UK. As coffee shop locations go, the back of an empty department store is hardly the most obvious or everyday choice! Despite this, it did appear to be pulling in customers – certainly far more so than the almost deserted Esquires in a more conventional mall spot!

Quite what will happen to Eugene’s when the Co-op store is ultimately let to new tenants remains to be seen.

Abandoned buildings always pique my interest: I always wonder what’s inside, and quite often find myself looking, with fascination, at the blogs and forums of urban explorers.

This gym is just round the corner from the halls I lived in during my first year at uni. Back then (2003), this gym seemed popular, and the car park was often busy. Clearly, somewhere along the line, something went wrong: it’s now an abandoned and increasingly dilapidated site. This seems bizarre given that it’s part of the thriving Teesside Retail Park, where new buildings are being added all the time. Why hasn’t this one been refurbished? Why hasn’t it been flattened and some much-needed car park spaces added? What went wrong? And what’s left inside?

All interesting questions… though the answers are no doubt prosaic!

I’ve had what’s now called the Kindle Keyboard since the day of its UK release – that is, just under two years. I’d never bothered following any of the hundreds of online guides on changing the screensavers until yesterday.

Now I have a pretty collection of all sorts of pictures, including this favourite of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner!

Some of the attractions of The Hoppings just poking above the trees. The Hoppings is the world’s biggest fair of travelling attractions, and it congregates annually on the Town Moor here in Newcastle each June. This is its 130th year.

I’m sure I’ll get along at some point this week for a closer look!

This Costa Express machine is in my local Asda, but they’re spreading all over the place at the moment. When they were first announced, I ridiculed the idea: Costa, Britain’s biggest coffee chain, had just spent a whole heap of money on ads to convince us that their coffee was different because it was made by highly trained baristas, not monkeys with machines. Then they decide to brand, erm, machines. It didn’t make sense to me.

But it turns out that I was wrong. I recently read that these machines have been doing a roaring trade, and sales have soared in places where they’ve displaced other machine brands. Which just goes to show that I know nothing about retail branding!

This rain greeted me as I reached the supermarket earlier today: I sat and sheltered in the car for ten minutes or so while it passed!

Inspired by this article, today’s picture is a cup of coffee. In 1999, there were 700 branded coffee shops on Britain’s streets; there are now 5,000. Independents have also increased in number, but to a lesser extent: there were previously 4,100, now 5,633. So I guess I should probably have featured a photo of an independent… Look back to photo 113 if you feel bad about me featuring Starbucks!

This is a little welding shop across the river from work. I don’t know any more about it than that: I’d never really registered its existence until today!