Towards the end of last year, my Kindle cracked. Despite it being well out of warranty (I’d had it since August 2010), Amazon replaced it for free.

Today, the replacement broke – as you can see, the screen has died. Bizarrely, this seems to have happened totally spontaneously while the Kindle was sat on my desk. I don’t understand how that’s possible…!

Sadly, Amazon wouldn’t give me another free replacement this time around – but they are sending me a replacement for £50. As this model retails at £149, that’s still considerably better than most of Amazon’s competitors!

This is Newcastle’s former Grand Hotel, built in 1891. I’m not sure when it stopped being a hotel, but it now houses a Health Fayre sandwich shop, a branch of Blackwell’s, a Campus Coffee shop and Newcastle University accommodation.

One interesting conundrum about this building is its location. The road you can see running in front of the shop changes at some point from Percy Street (to the left of this picture) to Barras Bridge (to the right).

The Grand Hotel building is listed by the Council (and the architects’ original plans) as being located at 1-24 Barras Bridge. Yet Health Fayre, Blackwell’s, and Campus Coffee – which are all located within the building – are listed being on Percy Street. However, the Newcastle University accommodation situated above these shops, and whose entrance lies between them, is listed as being on Barras Bridge.

So there’s the intriguing reality of several doors located next to each other on the same side of the same building, with the middle one listed as being on a different street to the others!

I’m glad I’m not a postman!

I don’t understand who would rummage through their local clothes dump Zara store for the pleasure of spending £9 and 99 tiny pence for a screwed up, thrown on the floor piece of clothing. However, Inditex’s bulletproof financial performance proves that lots of people do! Mystifying!

If you judge your bloggers by the photos they take, then I expect you won’t be very impressed with me today.

Last night, I visited the art deco masterpiece that is the BBC’s Broadcasting House and its Radio Theatre, but emerged with only a single photograph showing this gimmicky interpretation of the BBC logo, from the Media Cafe.

I was there to watch a recording of Arthur Matthews’s new comedy, The Golden Age. It was very funny. There was even a small amount of audience participation, including singing – I expect that I, along with the rest of the audience, will be signed by Simon Cowell as soon as it’s aired. It was quite interesting to see a Radio 4 audience in the flesh: the stereotypes are all true!

Peering through the window of the Media Cafe, it was fascinating to see the new newsroom. From that perspective, it seemed rather smaller than I’d imagined, though it still looked like a pretty nice office to work in. There was also a corner upstairs for BBC Weather, which surprised me somewhat – I thought all that was done at the Met Office.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience – and free as well. I’d definitely go back!

A few days ago, I mentioned the Royal Victoria Docks Bridge – and since I’m in London today, I thought I’d share a picture of it. As I said, it was built with the capability of running as a transporter bridge like the one in Middlesbrough, but this facility hasn’t been used.

Just a little way from that bridge is the new Emirates Airline. The consensus amongst Londoners that I know is that this is far more a tourist attraction than a serious transport proposal. As a tourist of sorts, I didn’t want to buck the trend, so I hopped on here, at the station on the North bank:

And here’s a pretty picture of the venue formerly known as The O2, but which the IOC now insists on us all referring to as the North Greenwich Arena:

But the most pressing question I had after my brief “flight” was: what’s in the box?

I assume it’s some sort of emergency equipment, but it’s a pretty small box. Do any of my well-informed readers know what’s in it? I’m intrigued…

This is a bit of Newcastle’s ancient town wall – specifically, the Durham Tower bit. The wall was built in the 13th and 14th centuries, and was once 2 miles long, 2m thick, and over 7m high. There were 17 towers like this one, all within shooting distance of each other to repel attackers. The construction of the wall was funded through a special tax – a murage – which was levied for a hundred years.

The wall kept the town reasonably well protected from invaders, seeing off attacks from David II of Scotland and the Earl of Douglas among others. By the 18th century, the wall had fallen into disrepair, and Scottish armies were able to invade Newcastle a couple of times. By the late 18th century bits of it started to be knocked down, because it started to get in the way.

These days, it’s a scheduled ancient monument which is also the home to a notable literary landmark: Morden Tower, where many great 20th century poets came – and still come – to read their work. Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, and Seamus Heaney are just four of the hundreds of previous poetic visitors! It’s also the place where the band Whitehouse once gave a performance in which the entire audience walked out. I don’t think that’s ever happened to any of the poets!

As I’m coming to the end of my time working on Teesside, I think it would be impossible to leave without featuring one of the most iconic sights of the area: the Tees Transporter Bridge. The photo below might give a more familiar view, but it’s very difficult to fit the bridge into a single frame when this close up!

The bridge was built 101 years ago, and remains in perfect working order. It is the world’s largest operational transporter bridge, and it carries people and vehicles along the A178, connecting Middlesbrough to Port Clarence. It remains the furthest downstream crossing of the River Tees.

There are only eleven transporter bridges left in the world, and still fewer that actually work. In the United Kingdom, only Newport boasts another working transporter bridge; there’s another bridge in Warrington that’s been out of use since 1964, while London’s Royal Victoria Dock Bridge was designed with (as yet unused) transporter bridge capabilities.

As with all transporter bridges, it works through loading people and vehicles onto a gondola, suspended from the main structure. This then moves back and forth – in less than two minutes each way – allowing traffic to cross. Here’s the gondola in action:

The current tolls are surprisingly small: just £1.30 for a car, or 70p for a pedestrian or cyclist. For a smaller fee, it used to be possible to climb the steps at either end and walk across the top of the bridge. A restoration project going on at the moment will install glass elevators to transport visitors to the top, making the reportedly extraordinary views accessible to everyday visitors once again.

Today’s photo shows another bit of the Ouseburn, on its meandering path from somewhere near Newcastle Airport to the Tyne.

I’ve featured various bits of the Ouseburn in the last 190 days, and Wendy reckons it’s now become boring and repetitive. She suggested I photograph and feature this foxglove:

So two for the price of one today: the Ouseburn and a foxglove!

Wendy went to her first ever cake decorating class today, and this is what she brought home (along with a huge smile!). I wouldn’t have guessed it was her first class from this alone! It looks pretty incredible to me, although the greenhouse had melted a little by the time I got the picture!

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the seemingly unstoppable spread of Costa Express machines. Today, I thought I’d throw caution to the wind, and – against my better judgement – try a hot chocolate produced by one of these machines.

My previous experience of machine-produced hot beverages has been dominated by overpriced and undrinkable rubbish from hospital vending machines. I’m not quite sure what I expected from this Costa machine: Something resembling coffee shop hot chocolate? Something undrinkable? Something inbetween?

As I pressed the button for a Costa hot chocolate, the one thing I didn’t expect was a cup of warm milk… yet that’s what I got! Not a drop of chocolate in sight! My faith in machine-crafted hot drinks isn’t exactly restored…!