Little more than a month till departure, and – as winter begins to fade and (as in the photo on the right) Cotswolds snows thaw – the visas and jabs are beginning to come together. Preparing to take a bike through Russia to China and on to Vietnam isn’t working out cheap. Best part of … Read more …
Blog Posts
Cycle Trip Preparations – 2 months to go
With less than eight weeks to go until I set off on April 3 from the front door of our Wychcroft home in Cirencester (Sue, as a writer of books on the Old Ways, wanted to call our new home Witchcraft, but that really was a step too far), it’s time to start blogging more … Read more …
Xinjiang Features, Spring 1986
In reviewing and posting radio pieces from my time as BBC Correspondent in Beijing, I am realising/being reminded just how much of my feature reporting was about ordinary Chinese life – not the heavy politics and economics and social issues of my straight despatches, but more personal, perhaps a touch naive too. For these were … Read more …
Tibet Spring 1985
In 1985, I was one of a small number of Beijing/Peking-based Western journalists to travel to Tibet in one of the first such groups in many years to be allowed into the province to report. This was at the height of China’s pre-Tiananmen Square opening up – and it was an extraordinary trip. (For a … Read more …
Yugoslavia Autumn 1988
I have no photos of my own from my 1988 visits to Kosovo and the then-wider-Yugoslavia, but this is one BBC radio feature, recorded for Radio Four’s International Assignment with the eccentrically wonderful Adam Raphael, of which I am perhaps most proud. It’s nearly 30 minutes long, and a challenging listen. Feature starts at 2’10”, … Read more …
Wham! in Peking 1985
I didn’t take any photos of the concert myself, but Wham!’s concert in Beijing in 1985 was one of the controversial and confusing highpoints of the cautious mid-1980s liberalisation and opening up of China under the reforming leadership of Party Secretary Hu Yaobang and Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang. Four years later in the spring of … Read more …
Birding in Peking 1985
This is a feature whose background is largely lost to me 27 years on. But Beijing’s bird market was an amazing place – I wonder if it’s still in largely the same shape as it was then. Click on the link below to be taken to the Today Programme feature. Note that the recording is … Read more …
Biking in Peking 1984
This is a first experiment with posting some of my old radio features from Beijing where I worked as BBC Radio News correspondent in the mid-1980s. Click on the file above to access an MP3 recording of one of my earlier, rather naive although cheerfully observant, features for Radio 4’s Today Programme. When I arrived … Read more …
Old BBC Radio Features
As discussed with a marvellously responsive lecture-theatre-full of Cardiff University MA students in international journalism in November 2011, I’m posting here some of my old BBC Radio News features from Beijing, recorded and broadcast between 1984 and 1987 when I was working there as BBC China correspondent. Note that several of these are in kit … Read more …
Early MLB setting out in life
Continuing my journey back to the images of childhood, before setting out for six months on the road at 62, I can’t resist posting a couple of evocative pictures from the very early years, at Duckshole Farm near Holt in North Norfolk – causing my brother Hugh early grief, but already displaying the instincts of … Read more …