Sarah's TravelBlog - Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes is a "New Town" situated approximately 50 miles north of London. The idea of Milton Keynes came into being after WWII, when it was decided that new homes were needed for those who had become too terminally boring to remain in London after the ravages of the Blitz. Upper middle-class town planners then set to work designing a town that no one in their right mind would even want to live in, secure in the knowledge that they themselves would always be able to afford to live somewhere much nicer.

Milton Keynes is based on a nearly incomprehensible system of grid-roads and roundabouts, which link bland anonymous housing estates with names as inspiring and original as "Bleak Hall" and "Blue Bridge". Each estate is blessed with a "distressed" shopping centre, with windswept, featureless and indistinguishable shops, many of which have never progressed from being boarded up, presumably to make all those relocated bombed-out Londoners feel right at home.

In a bizarre social experiment, housing types in each estate were mixed, thereby ensuring that even if you bought a lovely four-bedroomed detached house somewhere in Milton Keynes, there would always be a really chavvy family living right down the road in a grim council flat whose kids would be only too happy to trade drugs on a nearby corner, decorate the shopping centre with graffiti, and set fire to the post-box.

The actual centre of Milton Keynes is one enormous shopping mall, designed in a flash of true 1960s brilliance in the shape of a rectangle. It is proud to boast the dirtiest and most miserable McDonald's in Europe, if not the world, and a railway station which is inexplicably a full mile away from everywhere else down an empty concrete boulevard.

The massive master plan of Milton Keynes originally included the idea of demolishing the charming surrounding Victorian Market Towns of Stony Stratford, Wolverton and New Bradwell and replacing them with more drab and hopeless post-war blight. Amazingly though the planners mostly died of the tedium before this was achieved, thereby saving these gems for those with the misfortune to have to bear the shame of a Milton Keynes postcode, but with the initiative and will to desire to live somewhere with a bit of character and "oomph".

Of the many friends of mine from our Milton Keynes days (and by the way, we lived in New Bradwell, gritty but great, not MK proper) two families emigrated to New Zealand, one to Australia, one to France, and us to the USA. I can't imagine why.

OMG

Oh my goodness what a fiasco it is coming to the UK in December. It's so hard to accept that after travelling 3000 miles (not sure of the actual distance, it's something like that) I couldn't make it to a night out with my girlies (5 miles away) and a family reunion (30 miles away) because of the snow. Apparently the UK only bought one bag of grit from Tesco's and it's all used up now. Thus airports are closed, cars are abandoned, and old people (aka my Mum, Aunt and Uncle - combined age 255) are driving about the country with their mobile phones switched off worrying their children witless.

Somebody needs to draw a line (double thickness) under the Dunkirk spirit and the Blitz Mentality, because just like the grit it's all used up. With the exception of my Uncle Ray (see above) who could probably take on all comers after surviving a two day journey in the ice and snow with my Auntie Celia (very confused) and my Mother (sometimes a bit confused). Uncle Ray was in the Navy in the Second World War, and I think he's still got what it takes even though he refuses to own a cell phone.

Meanwhile Andy's in Paris doing whatever it is he does, and failed to notice until he had it pointed out by me (in Milton Keynes) that it was snowing. That must have been a really nice bottle of wine he had last night in that restaurant IN PARIS. Hopefully he will be able to book another hotel room IN PARIS until the airports reopen. And I guess he can go out and have another bottle of wine in that restaurant IN PARIS until that happens.

Heigh ho my glass should be half full but it keeps being half empty, pass the bottle Grandad and let's watch another weather forecast.