Even as a TV journalist it can still seem surreal to see places you know feature in the national news.

I've had that feeling overnight with the floods that have engulfed Cumbria, and Cockermouth in particular.

I lived close to the town for more than 20 years, growing up and going to school there.

My parents and my daughter still live nearby.

So to see the town centre turned into a river was both surreal and worrying.

Luckily, my family are fine. My mum and dad live on the top of a hill, so it would have needed a Noah-like deluge to affect them.

My daughter lives away from the major rivers but some of her school friends could well be at one of the emergency reception centres in Keswick.

Of course if you live in Cumbria, you get used to it being wet.

Every time I return there I'm reminded that the default autumn and winter weather is driving horizontal rain.

But although I saw some localised flooding over the years I lived there, there was never anything that resembled the scenes overnight.

The local MP Tony Cunningham and the Prime Minister have called it a one-in-a-thousand-year event.

Perhaps, but it seems some part of our region has suffered one of these incredibly rare floods every year.

Morpeth and other parts of Northumberland last year, Carlisle in 2005 being the most serious.

There's no question the Government is now spending more on flood defences than it used to - even William Hague acknowledged that when I interviewed him today.

But the question is, does climate change mean that more must be spent to prevent floods rather than just improving defences after the deluge?

Or will it always prove impossible to predict which community will be hit next, and therefore simply unaffordable to protect them all?

We're looking to take the Politics Show to Cumbria on Sunday to reflect the seriousness of this story and the debate that is inevitably starting.

But of course first and foremost, this is about making sure the people that are affected are safe.

With more rain forecast in Cumbria this weekend, this crisis is far from over.

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Since the weekend. I've been mulling over the departure of two of our North East New Labour architects

The likes of Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers have had grave doubts about the direction and leadership of the party since Tony Blair left Number 10, and Gordon Brown arrived.

For a while it looked like they would fight their corner.

In public, they pushed for more evidence of Labour renewal from Gordon Brown.

Privately, they were rumoured to be plotting his overthrow.

But now it appears they've thrown in the towel.

The failure of Blairite plotters to remove Gordon Brown before the summer seems to have knocked the fight out of them.

They distanced themselves from the plot; it even happened when they were both out of the country.

They hoped it could then avoid being seen as a coup masterminded by the usual embittered Brown enemies.

But with the new Blairites bungling the Brown assassination, they seem to have decided that's that.

An interesting blog by Nick Robinson highlights the different camps he now sees within the Labour party.

He divides the factions into plotters, quitters and fighters.

For a long time Byers and Milburn were seen as plotters. They now seem to have joined the ranks of quitters.

Yet I can't imagine them giving up on politics completely. It's certainly in Alan Miburn's DNA.

I remember talking to him even before Blair's departure about his ideas for renewal, which were very much focused on how to deal with an ageing society.

And since then he's also been keen to talk about the need for more social mobility (he of course came from humble beginnings in Newcastle to become a Cabinet minister).

Perhaps the fate of the Brown government will have to become clear before we know whether the likes of Milburn and Byers have any part to pay in the future direction of Labour - albeit outside the Commons.

In the meantime of course they are free to pursue the kind of offers that prominent ex-ministers always get.

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Selection news from Newcastle North.

Labour's all-women shortlist has been announced.

It is Adenike Rachel Abimbola-Akindele from London, Catherine McKinnell, a solicitor from Newcastle who already has her own campaign website, local ward councillor Sharon Pattison and Tracey Paul, the local branch secretary from Gosforth who works for the National Labour Party at their Head Office in Newcastle.

Some chatter about it here.

Selection is November 28.

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On the face of it there doesn't seem much connection between the Blyth MP Ronnie Campbell and multi-award winning recording artist Kanye West.

But they did gain something in common this week in rather macabre circumstances.

Ronnie's joined the growing list of public figures (including the aforementioned Kanye) who've been the subject of an internet death scare.

It seems reports of Ronnie's death began circulating on the web on Sunday.

His colleagues and family members began turning up on his doorstep in various states of distress - only to discover the door being opened by a hale and hearty Mr Campbell.

A political veteran he may be (he's 66), but Ronnie insists there's plenty of life left in him yet, with his last medical check giving him a clean bill of health.

And he is committed to fighting the Blyth seat at least one more time.

I fear the Politics Show may bear some measure of responsibility for the scare though.

It seems the rumours may have been spread via Facebook.

As an experiment earlier in the series, we put Ronnie in touch with some local members of the Youth Parliament, who set up a Facebook page for him.

He's now updated his status to assure people that he's very much alive.

But he also told BBC Newcastle this morning that the experience hasn't put him off social networking.

And the scare might just bring his Facebook page more attention. So far he's gathered just 17 friends.

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