If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll know that Wendy and I were evacuated from the Handmade Burger Company at the Metrocentre tonight after our meal was rudely interrupted by the restaurant setting on fire…!

One of the downsides of the open kitchen is that the flames were quite clearly visible. Initially, we were told to ignore them, as the gas had been turned off and they’d soon subside. But we were warned that our chips might be delayed.

As the flames persisted, the chef produced a fire extinguisher, which also failed to extinguish the flames.

We were reassured that everything was fine, even as the fire alarms were blaring… it was only when the sprinklers started that the staff decided the time was right for an evacuation… of the whole centre. We didn’t even get our chips!

The picture shows the fire engine that came to the rescue. There may have been more than one, but Wendy and I walked across to the McDonalds on the nearby retail park as soon as we were out – we were hungry!

I guess you could say that our whole evening was flame-grilled, not just out burgers!

I think these are kittiwakes, but dad would be more likely to make an accurate identification than me! Either way, they were winged visitors to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art this afternoon – very cultured!

This is the “restaurant directory” outside the flagship store of the Fenwick chain on Newcastle’s Northumberland Street. Listed are the ten restaurants in the store: the Northside Diner; the Terrace Restaurant; Café 21; Johann’s Coffee Shop; the Majorca Café; Tivoli; Pret a Manger; Yo! Sushi; Caffé Nero; and the Patio Restaurant.

I reckon that ten restaurants within a single department store must be close to a record. I know that Harrods famously has 25 restaurants – not that I’ve counted and independently verified the claim – but I can’t think of any UK department store other than Harrods or Fenwick with anywhere near ten. Can anyone else think of any?

Local legend has it that this branch of Fenwick is the most profitable branch of any department store chain in the UK. The Sunday Times Rich List is often the cited source of this information, but I can’t see it under the Fenwick family’s entry in any of the Rich Lists in the Times’s archive, so I’m not absolutely convinced.

The flagship M&S virtually next door – which houses five restaurants of its own (an M&S Cafe, Kitchen, Restaurant, Deli and Food on the Go) – has a food hall which is frequently authoritatively cited as the chain’s most profitable, so the claim about Fenwick isn’t as outlandish as it might first appear.

Anyway, as interesting as all that is, I thought the picture was a bit rubbish. So here’s a bonus one of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge now that the ugly bollards have been removed.

This is Ikea in Gateshead: where better to spend a Sunday afternoon?!

As I was going about my business this afternoon in Gateshead, this extraordinarily clear rainbow appeared.

This was remarkably co-incidental, as I had already been planning to go and see Yvette Mattern’s Global Rainbow kicking off the Cultural Olympiad in North Shields this evening. It’s also visiting Preston (not far from my family home) and Newtownards (not far from Wendy’s family home) in the next few weeks, and has already visited New York, Berlin, Toulouse, Nantes, and Utrecht. It is a far more impressive sight than the photos here demonstrate, and has been spotted from 15 miles away in Sunderland.

To give a sense of scale, the white smudge on the right of both of these photographs is the famous St Mary’s Lighthouse.

Neither the real nor the Global Rainbow are especially easy to photograph using a mere iPhone, but I don’t think these turned out too disastrously!

St Mary’s on Gateshead quayside is over 900 years old. It’s over 30 years since it was last used as a church, having been an auction house, a tourist information centre, and now – appropriately – home to Gateshead Heritage.

It caught my eye because of its plain glass (rather than stained glass) windows, which give it an unusual sort of ethereal quality… which, I suppose, is appropriate for a former church. I think this photo might just be a little too light to really show it, though.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the bollards around the Gateshead Millennium Bridge (or the “Vessel Collision Protection System”, to use the proper name) were to be removed. As I walked past this evening, the Forth Sentinel was beavering away at that very task.

I made a quick detour from my usual commute to capture today’s subject, The Angel of the North. It’s not the world’s greatest photo, but I was slightly embarrassed by whipping out my iPhone while surrounded by more photographers with more equipment than seemed reasonable for something that’s already been photographed so much.

Interestingly, a car park has appeared nearby, which wasn’t there last time I visited… although that was probably some years ago! If you’re in the area, I guess it makes it considerably easier to make a quick visit – which is highly recommended!

The Gateshead Millennium Bridge has always struck me as slightly oddly named: it is named not for the river it crosses, but for the smaller of the two conurbations it connects; and opened some time into the new Millennium. Incidentally, the ugly bollards in the river beneath are due to start being removed any day now.

This is a roof detail of Norman Foster’s £70m Sage Gateshead, home to the very fine Northern Sinfonia (lead by the charismatic Austrian Thomas Zehetmair) much more besides. It is undoubtedly one of the country’s finest music venues. Hall One’s acoustics are sublime, and whilst I’m personally less keen on Hall Two, the ten-sided performance space is still architecturally impressive.

Also, the Sir Michael Straker on the concourse is a great place to sit and work in relatively quiet café surroundings with free wifi.