As this website has been updated, in April 2025, I’m now making accessible literally ALL the raw cassettes I recorded first as BBC World Service Central Europe Correspondent based in Vienna (1981-84), then as BBC Radio China Correspondent (1984-1987), and on to BBC World Service Diplomatic Correspondent (1988-1992) as I covered the end of the … Read more …
A very (very) long break since our last post, so here’s just a glimpse of a big moment looming in our life, as Daisy2 our tandem prepares to be collected tomorrow, Monday July 11 2022, for delivery to Robin Thorn in Bridgwater to be, yes, electrified. I guess we’re feeling a bit like Bob Dylan … Read more …
We’re very grateful to one of Audrey’s former students and summer visitors from Heilbronn, Petra Mueller, for the following memories of Mum, penned for readers in Germany and translated here with the help of Google Translate. Original article in German here – Petra has captured Mum to a T. 1985-86 I was staying at the … Read more …
In honour and memory of our inspirational, hugely talented – and complex – mother Audrey, her ashes now safely stored under our Sheringham stairs awaiting Lifeboat dispersal at sea next month, here’s posting a scanned and carefully edited copy of possibly the most influential book I have ever read, or had read to me. Conceived, … Read more …
Death isn’t a subject I’ve written all that much about on this blog. But even if it took her a very long time (best part of a decade since her diagnosis with dementia) to get there, as these things go Mum had, and continues to have, a good one. The funeral is this Friday, May … Read more …
Audrey Diana Brayne, a six-decade-long Sheringham community stalwart, died in the early hours of Wednesday 21st April, a few days before her 94th birthday. In the dark of that night, a truly unique light was extinguished, of a forward-thinking internationalist who championed issues, movements and protests long before they were fashionable. Audrey entered the world in 1927 … Read more …
Dear friends, family and colleagues, I’m sure I’m breaching copyright something rotten, but for our (much-later-than-usual) 2020 Christmas/New Year letter, the Telegraph’s Matt pretty much nailed it. So not having left our home in Sheringham since March except for a couple of dashes to London to grandson Leo and his parents Chris and Lena (now … Read more …
Click the button below to be taken to 600 hours of raw cassette recordings from Mark’s work as BBC China and then WS Diplomatic Correspondent, 1984-1992. I’ve renamed them with year and country, and given the substantial size of the archive, they’re hosted online on OneDrive rather than here on the WordPress blog. If you … Read more …
I probably don’t need to write this follow-up to my blog of March this year on being diagnosed, at 70, at last and rather late in life, with Aspergers aka High-Functioning Autism. Indeed, just thinking about starting this piece reminds me just how difficult I’ve always found writing to be, whether agonising over a poem or short … Read more …
It was tremendous fun discussing with Ian Sanders of Cold War Conversations my years first as student in East Germany and the Soviet Union in 1971/72, and then covering the communist world for the next 20 years for Reuters and the BBC. Click the screenshots below for the recordings – first covering my student days … Read more …