Welcome to Mark and Jutta Brayne’s Psych-lotherapists blog – yes, with an L – covering tandem and solo bicycle trips to crazy places like New Zealand and the Baltics, and pulling together a LOT of old foreign-correspondent-related archives.

With help from Michael Griffiths, we’ve had a go this summer (2022) at clustering posts in a more accessible and user-friendly manner, and while the navigation is still a work in progress, we hope you enjoy what’s here.

This blog has posts going back several years now, to when Mark – at that time not yet remarried to Jutta, which came to pass in 2013 after a break of 14 years – cycled to Budapest and back in 2008, and then the length of New Zealand’s South Island in 2012.

There are extensive recordings from Mark’s time as BBC radio correspondent in Beijing and elsewhere in the 1980s, some in full feature form, some as packages ready to assemble.

I’ve also uploaded every single raw cassette recording made between 1984 and 1992 when foreign corresponding came to end end – some 600 of them in all, each between 60 and 90 minutes. Treasure Trove??

For some crazier fun, enjoy our Barbershop quartet The Four Tones singing in Beijing in 1986, in which Mark was joined by American then-businessman Bill Zarrit, US Embassy then-charge Darryl Johnson and the British Council’s Jasper Utley.

Unrepeatable.

For a list of all the blogs in chronological backward order, click here.

All bilateral best, Mark and Jutta.