I was a little amused to watch people battling the wind and rain as they passed this sign in the window of the Northumberland Street’s branch of the Newcastle Building Society today.

I read the other day that early June is the European monsoon season. The warmth of April and May causes the air to rise, and windy wet winds from the Atlantic sweep back across Europe to fill the vacuum. Apparently, this effect was first identified in the 1950s. Climatology couldn’t be further from my specialty, but let’s hope this theory is right: after all, it suggests that summer’s on the way!

Newcastle’s quayside seaside, a temporary beach on the iconic quayside, has returned for a second summer. It seemed very successful last year – there were kids playing and adults sunbathing every time I passed.

The monument is to Charles Wesley, and the beach occupies the Square named in his honour. I do wonder quite whether he’d approve of his monument being surrounded by relatively scantily clad sunbathers… but I guess, given that he’s been dead for 224 years, he’s unlikely to register any complaint.

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!

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!

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.