We want our vote

Even without Trump's Wag the Dog moment, the BBC would probably have ignored this story, so here's a shout out to all the under-appreciated folk who turned out today to take back control of our democracy:

Thousands of activists will take to the streets on Saturday as part of a national day of action to demonstrate public support for a vote on the final Brexit deal.

Several pro-EU organisations have joined forces to mount an attack on the government’s Brexit plans with more than 350 events across the country, ahead of the launch of a £1m campaign demanding the opportunity to stay in the EU if the people want to...

...As well as flagship events in 12 cities, ranging from Weston-super-Mare to Edinburgh, there will also be thousands of supporters setting up stalls and leafleting in both Remain and Leave areas.

The European Movement stall outside Milton Keynes Central station today

No fish were harmed.

A spotter's guide to Caucasian wingnuts

"From pollination to the Caucasian wingnut's first released seed you could have taken 28,478,544 steps." Message set into a paving stone outside the Network Rail building, Milton Keynes.

The Caucasian wingnut (AKA the Caucasian walnut), Pterocarya fraxinifolia, is a deciduous tree, native to the Caucasus/Iran region. Apparently, it can grow up to 20m high, bears small green winged nutlets and its dark wood is often used in veneers, so it can't, unlike certain other Caucasian wingnuts I could mention, be accused of being neither use nor ornament.

Football League shows Dons how to lecture Wombles

"AFC Wimbledon have been charged by the Football League for failing to use MK Dons’ full name during September’s League One clash between the side[s].

Wimbledon called the visitors Milton Keynes or MK, using the latter on the scoreboard, and did not use the team’s badge in the programme."

James Benge

I'm just waiting for the Association of University Teachers to get in on the act and point out that members of the MK team have no business calling themsleves Dons when not one single member of their squad has ever taught at a higher education institution. Guys, you either need to go back to Wimbledon, or break into academia (and that last point goes for you, too, Hamilton Academical FC).

I, for one, look forward to the day when the Dons will be known, not only for their fancy footwork, but for their esoteric, meticulously-researched lectures on number theory, or tax administration in the late Byzantine Empire.

Whose priorities?

Council housing in Milton Keynes is to undergo a £1bn makeover - half a century since it was established as a new town.

Priority has been given to seven housing estates across the borough deemed in urgent need of repair - and potentially - demolition....

...Milton Keynes was a pioneering housing development when it was was officially designated a town in January 1967.

But many of its early housing estates are now considered tired, run-down and in need of maintenance and structural repair.

Seven council estates have been given priority - Netherfield, Coffee Hall, Tinkers Bridge, North Bradville, Fullers Slade, the Lakes and Beanhill.

A timetable for the regeneration was announced on Wednesday, with the first letters sent out to people living in Fullers Slade.

BBC News, 26th of April 2017

The Fullers Slade estate was put up in something of a hurry in late 1971:

Milton Keynes, was badly suffering from shortage of skilled labour and contractors due to its huge building programme and distances from existing conurbations. There were attempts to design housing by using simplified and if possible use factory built or repetitive elements of construction where possible.

The first housing scheme near Stony Stratford, Galley Hill, was nearing completion and DOE’s granted permission for the same contractor to continue working on Fullers Slade provided the work continued from first site to the second. This imposed a much reduced design period (almost two months) and resulted in a simpler layout and quick decision making.  Long delivery periods for bricks made it necessary to use diagonal cedar boarding as external cladding and a concrete system using a box system of shutters was used  on a standardised 3.60m module for all dwellings.

Iqbal Aalam
 
Assuming the current plans are on schedule, any long-term residents of these hastily-constructed estates will have been waiting over four and a half decades for their first regeneration. In the same period, Doctor Who has regenerated nine times. I leave you to work out what this says about our society's hierarchy of needs.

Obscure anniversary of the day

Only in Milton Keynes...

Elf and safety

Spotted by my wife, earlier today at Stadium MK. A fire drill in progress, featuring a multitude of trainee Christmas elves, in full dress, flooding out of the building, under the watchful eyes of designated hi-viz-wearing persons. Good to see the elvish hordes working to keep the magic alive.

Unlike, say, the Coca Cola company which has SNUBBED Milton Keynes by not including it on the itinerary for a seasonal visit from its iconic red Coke truck, it says here. Because Christmas just won't be Christmas if you can't take a seasonal selfie with a truck covered with fizzy drink branding outside the Asda superstore in  Milton Keynes.

Funnel vision

Milton Keynes Chamber of Commerce has told me me that it is proud to present a series of FREE business seminars at the Milton Keynes Novotel and has kindly invited me to come along. I can tell you're already impressed and maybe just a little jealous.

Anyhow, I took a look at the blub for the first seminar, being hosted by a 'lead generation, automated telephone marketing and telephone coaching' company that goes by the name of Lenahan Ltd. 'Lead generation is the life blood of any business without a steady flow of potential customers entering in to the sales funnel the business will not only stop growing it will stagnate [sic]', it says here.

Excuse me, did you really type the words 'sales funnel?' With a straight face?

Is your sales funnel a bit like the social media engagement funnel? Or more like the horizontal process funnel? Can I 'Multiple My Income By 2x, Even 3x Times With My Own Highly Profitable Lead Generating Cash-Sucking Sales Funnel!? [sic]' Or just relentlessly jam it into anything that smells like money? Do tell.

It's very nice of the Chamber to ask me along, but this does sound like the sort of seminar that's less likely to answer punters' questions than to generate a bunch of new ones, like 'Why can't a firm of marketing and communications professionals punctuate?' and  'Why do business people speak like idiots?'

I could rock up at the Novotel, just for the craic, but I reckon that actually listening to these people in the flesh would make me involuntarily spray the complimentary coffee out of my nose and, as any fule kno, the rapid outflow of caffeinated beverages exiting from the customer-facing nasal funnels can lead to a catastrophic stagnation of lead generation and to the diversion of cash-flow in the direction of a large dry cleaning bill.

Are we nearly there yet?

Back in 2010, I spotted a hybrid human/electric-powered vehicle called the "Twike" in the wild and was intrigued enough to look up the specs. I concluded that it wasn't a practical or economic proposition for budget motorists like me and suggested that it made more sense for cash-squeezed road-users to use an actual bike for local journeys and a fuel-efficient car/public transport for journeys that were longer, or involved moving family, friends, or useful amounts of stuff around.

I had an irritated response from a Twike enthusiast, who said:

Once you study the impact of what the true cost of oil is, you quickly realize that NOT driving electric is simply unaffordable and unsustainable...

 I have commuted to work and all about town in Chamapaign-Urbana for the past 3 years in a 11-year-old Twike Active. I rarely take dead-dino conveyance, whether public or private... going to the hardware store, picking up groceries, picking up the kiddos...

I once heard a quote that summarizes fuel cell cars quite nicely: "Fuel cell cars were the car of the future 20 years ago, they're the car of the future today, and they'll be the car of the future tomorrow"

IF fuel cells do arrive, and WHEN new and better battery technology arrives, it will be a fairly easy retrofit for a well-designed 11-year-old Twike to upgrade, as it's just a different form of storing electricity!

There is no reason to wait once you know the true costs.

Unfortunately there is a reason to wait, namely that the true, global costs to planet, fuel stocks and society aren't necessarily related to the individual costs borne by the cash-strapped people/families trying to haul themselves + stuff around on a tight budget. It's these sort of privatised costs that drive a lot of us to some combination of bangernomics, bike and buses, not brainwashing by the petrocracy, or some self-destructive compulsion to keep on breathing in great bracing lungfuls of particulates.

2014 update; the car in front isn't a Twike; in fact I've not spotted a second example of the species since my first encounter in 2010.

That's not to say that electric transport isn't gradually getting there. I'm not seeing any Twikes, but I am seeing Milton Keynes' new electric buses on the roads, local electric car charging points (first introduced in 2011, with more to come, although still nowhere near enough to support a noticeable proportion of 'leccy vehicles for conurbation that's home to most of the quarter of a million people in the Milton Keynes unitary authority) and the pre-publicity for a trial of driverless electric pods for (slowly) shuttling people around the city centre, scheduled for the near future (I know, by the way, that Milton Keyenes still isn't a city to the pedants who point out that only the Queen can officially make it so - and she hasn't - but I don't need to wait for some archaic feudal convention to tell me what I can already see; that the place is a city by any reasonable definition of the term).

And, according to former petrolhead Robert Llewellyn, who keeps an eye on electrical vehicle developments, the batteries are the key and they're getting better all the time:

Batteries are getting smaller, lighter, more energy dense, longer lasting and above all, cheaper.

These increases are constant and low level at present. Battery energy density is, according to companies like Panasonic, Samsung and Tesla increasing by roughly 8% a year. No great shakes but in the 5 years I’ve been keeping an eye on this sector, energy density has increased by roughly 40%.

But if they still cost a fortune, so what?

Well, they are also getting cheaper, the cost per kWh of storage a few years ago was around $500 per kWh. It’s now around $400.

So engineers might get us there on the storage front - if their corporate bosses don't sabotage their good work by creating a problem that has nothing to do with the practical constraints of physics, chemistry and engineering, namely, the human-imposed cost of rents extracted via Digital Rights Management.

I'm sure there has to be a better way (for the many end users, rather than the few DRM owners). For example, in theory, you could get over the battery charging time/cost issue by treating electric car batteries in the same way that we now treat camping gas canisters. In this scenario, rather than tethering the car to a charging station for a tediously long period of time, your future motorist gets a low charge warning, pulls into the nearest battery station and has the depleted battery taken out from its quick-change slot and replaced with a fully-charged one from the stack of batteries the station keeps on its charging racks. The motorist gets debited for the price of the leccy + something towards infrastructure/costs/profit and drives off into the pollution-free sunset.

I can see plenty of objections to this scenario - for a start, batteries aren't fungible, like gas, so this would depend on manufacturers agreeing to standardise to a few battery designs, to make battery stations usable for all motorists who pull up (good luck with getting, say, Renault, on board with that). Also, do you give people some credit for changing batteries with some charge left (as opposed to giving them a perverse incentive to obstruct the highway because they want to squeeze every last electron out of their old battery before pulling over and having it replaced, then accidentally run out of juice a few klicks short of the nearest battery station) and what about scammers and blaggers finding ways to nick batteries and sell them on, rather than just having them on hire to exchange for a charged unit when they need to "fill up"?  More seriously, in the longer term, having one, standardised, interchangeable design would tend to slow, or even halt progress towards, and uptake of, the subsequent improvements in energy storage technology, in much the same way that the widespread adoption and dominance of the QWERTY keyboard standard strangled more efficient alternatives at birth.

The battery stations aren't a serious suggestion, but I just mention the idea to point out that there are more ways of killing a cat than hanging it, to use a charming old expression of my dad's.*

Fuel cells, running on fungible hydrogen might be another alternative but, on this one, Twike guy might be right, at least according to Robert Llewellyn, who echoes his scepticism:

Since 1972 when I first heard the term hydrogen is the future I have been waiting. I'm not even mentioning things like infrastructure, the various methods of producing hydrogen, the energy costs associated with splitting water etc etc.

According to  Llewellyn, the great thing about better batteries is that they're not just for cars, but might form part of distributed power networks, like the ones I heard Jeremy Rifkin talking about in a radio talk show plug for The Zero Marginal Cost Society:

However when I talk about batteries I’m not even thinking about them in relation to cars, I’m thinking about our houses, about the grid, about cities, dammit, I’m thinking of the whole country.

The effect that millions of widely distributed batteries would have on the way we generate and distribute power is immense.

Imagine a 100 kWh battery pack built into your house, you have solar panels on the roof which trickle charge them day after day.

Before I explain the difference this could make, let’s look at the cost. Your battery pack is made from ‘depleted’ car batteries and the cost is a great deal lower than buying new ones. It’s not impossible to imagine something the size of a small fridge that could store 100 kWh with no maintenance and 10-15 years of trouble free use.

Talking of decentralised power networks, it would be ironic, but not entirely irrational if progress was driven by that most centralised and statist of institutions, the military. Fewer strategically important power stations to defend, and greater resilience for every remotely defence-related asset - it wouldn't be the first time the military have been distributed network pioneers.

With the prospects for solar generation getting dramatically better, some version of a world with (realtively) cheap, efficient batteries eventually becoming ubiquitous in buildings and electric vehicles is sounding more plausible.

We're not there yet, but we're getting nearer. I still don't think we'll get all the way there in a Twike, though.


*No animals were harmed in the making of my childhood.

Toxic horsemeat and Trekkies

I've nothing in particular against Liberal Democrat councillors. They didn't sign the coalition agreement and they may well be lovely people, doing good things in local communities. According to our latest local Lib Dem flyer, our lot have successfully 'fought the Conservative run Council's proposals to scrap grit bins', had a pedestrian crossing built at a sensible place in our road (check - I can see it from where I'm writing) and, following complaints from residents in one of the roads coming off ours, they've had a new "no through road" sign put up. Maybe councillors with different affiliations would have done similar things, but I'm happy to give them the credit for actually having got them done.

And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like 'I love you':

It's a 2 horse race on 22nd May. The local election on 22nd May is between the local Lib Dem Focus Team candidates and the Conservatives. Labour has come third in this area for many years. A vote for any candidate other than the Lib Dems could let the Conservatives in.

This may be true in terms of the local electoral arithmetic and tactical voting, but if you actually wanted to toxify your own brand in one short message, then that message would be 'why not vote Lib Dem to keep the Tories out?' [long pause to let the bitter laughter subside]:
Apologies for including another party political broadcast, especially a negative attack ad, but this one does hit the nail on the head (even if it doesn't seem to be doing Labour much good - maybe they should have saved it up for the general election).

It must be terribly depressing to be a progressive Lib Dem at the moment, whether you're looking down at the grit bins, or up at the stars:

In order to be certain, we then ran an analysis of the 100 TV programmes that are most particularly favoured by supporters of each of the three main parties. Sure enough, while only 2 of Conservative voters’ and 6 of Labour voters’ top 100 TV shows are related to science, science fiction or the supernatural, it is 17 of the Lib Dem top 100. The full results will be published next week, but in case you’re wondering the list includes Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, Futurama, Being Human, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Tomorrow’s World.

Is this evidence of the Liberal Democrat ability to think big, and imagine a better world in the future? Is it true that “Science Fiction is a crutch for people who can’t handle reality”? Or is it the other way round...

Freddie Sayers of YouGov

My take on this is that a preference for science, SF and fantasy is evidence of an enquiring mind and a welcome ability to imagine alternatives to the tyranny of the zeitgeist (even if a lot of science fiction and fantasy is really about current issues, rather than distant planets and dragons, it's still an analysis or critique of the present, rather than mere dumb acceptance of the status quo). Of course, not all Sci Fi and fantasy has a progressive agenda, but Freddie Sayers has evidence that Lib Dems like the stuff that does:

It all started in May last year, when we ran a survey on Star Wars and Star Trek. Asked which series they prefer, the country as a whole narrowly prefers Star Wars (29% to 27%). But Liberal Democrat supporters buck the trend, with 36% preferring Star Trek and 20% preferring Star Wars.

As commentator Martin points out:

That Star Wars and Star Trek poll is interesting. Star Trek is basically a manifesto of progressivism. It is an idealistic world of diversity, open borders and no religion where money and capitalism are bad while government and science is good. I would have thought the conservatives would absolutely adore Star Wars, which is basically a gang of old school heroes (Han Solo the cowboy, Leia the Princess, and our hero, the quite Jesus-like Luke) going up against big government with nothing but spiritual faith and a great sense of missing the good old days of the Old Republic. It seems to me like Star Trek is explores the same world John Lennon dreamed about in 'Imagine', while there is really no wonder Reagan embraced Star Wars imagery and mythology in combatting the evil Soviet Empire.
But yeah, this basically is no surprise when you consider that much of sci-fi fits in with the Lib Dem attitude and psyche.

It must be an enormous bummer to be a progressive in a party with leaders who have abandoned the dream of boldly going where no one has gone before by joining the Dark Side and propping up a party for people who'd rather live a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

 ________________________

Update - if you didn't like the two party political broadcasts I've embedded, I suggest you feast your eyes and ears on the Worst Party Political Broadcast Ever. It's by the English Democrats, (a sort of cut-price, Celt-free version of UKIP) and looks like something slapped together by the English Tourist Board on an off day, intercut with shots of a bloke in a field holding up cards with various xenophobic slogans and statues of  the great and good from the Michael Gove list of approved English heroes, all set to an acoustic dirge, apparently performed by Billy Bragg's evil right-wing twin that goes:

Build a pride,
Hear the call,
From Land's End to Hadrian's Wall,
This is England,
The land of Saint George 

Hat tip to Tom Pride, who embeds the whole atrocity here.

Update 2 -Interestingly, the local Conservatives have just delivered their leaflet, in which they also claim credit for the local grit bin/pedestrian crossing triumph. I might be tempted to try and find out which of the twio parties is lying to me,* if there was a snowball in hell's chance of me voting for either of the above. Which there isn't.

*Of course, there's a third possibility, namely that both parties had a hand in delivering these things, in which case, they're both telling half-truths (or half-lies, if you're a glass half empty person), by claiming all the credit. If this is the true scenario, then the Lib Dems come out as slightly bigger liars than the Conservatives, by virtue of not only claiming all the credit for the grit bins, but claiming that the nasty Conservatives would have taken them away. But I'm way too swiched off by both parties to care which one is telling the biggest fibs in this case.

To infinity and beyond, via Milton Keynes

So this guy in Milton Keynes has a project to turn the spaceships from the Sci-Fi paperback covers of my youth into impressively detailed models, an artform guaranteed to bring joy to members of generation Thunderbirds. His first model is based on Colin Hay's artwork for a James Blish novel, Star Dwellers.

Colin Hay's style of illustration irresistibly calls to mind the insanely detailed, brightly-coloured craft created by that giant of Sci-Fi book cover art, Chris Foss, so a lot of us would be delighted to see Foss's designs getting the Grant Louden treatment, too (come to think of it, Chris Foss also did the original illustrations for The Joy of Sex, so ... no, let's not go there).

And apparently, Chris Foss is up for it, although he might have reason be wary about artworks "inspired by Chris Foss", given what happened when one Glenn Brown, A Serious Artist, made a bigger hyper realist reinterpretation copy of a Foss original and declared the copy to be 'serious art', (it must be 'serious art' because it's been made by A Serious Artist, who must be A Serious Artist, because he says he's A Serious Artist...). The hyper realist reinterpretation copy sold for £3.1 million at Christie's.

Grayson Perry said 'In art, seriousness is the most important currency' and, at an exchange rate of £3.1 million for one great big knock-off with added artybollocks, I wouldn't argue. I hope Grant Louden, who seems to have Chris Foss and the other artists who've inspired him fully on board, makes a decent fraction of that sort of money, although I expect he's not quite Serious enough.

Images © Colin Hay and Grant Louden, I guess, (unless you're A Serious Artist).

via

Unquiet flow the Dons

... we need to find the stars to wear the cow-suits. Chairman Pete Winkelman said: "These are key members of the team... It will be hard work, but a lot of fun."

Candidates should be around 5ft 10ins - 6ft 2ins tall and be fit. They will need to entertain the crowd and be available for home matches and other club events... Auditions will be held, and you can apply in writing to The National Hockey Stadium, Silbury Boulevard, Milton Keynes. MK9 1FA, marking your correspondence as 'MK Dons Mascot'.

From the pre-launch publicity for the MK Dons' official mascots, Donny and Mooie, back in 2004  More than seven years and a shiny new stadium later, some disgruntled Wimbledonians are still resisting the relentless progress of the MK Dons' branding juggernaut:

The Wimbledon Guardian is calling on MK Dons FC, which was Wimbledon FC until it was relocated to Milton Keynes and rebranded, to drop the Dons nickname to respect fans of AFC Wimbledon, which returned to the Football League this season.

Hours earlier, Mitcham and Morden MP Siobhain McDonagh, had raised the issue in the House of Commons, calling on the Government to support our campaign and take steps to prevent similar franchise deals in which football teams leave their communities. 

The Wimbledon Guardian, on their "Drop the Dons" campaign (now endorsed by Ken Livingstone). Karl Robinson, the Manager of MK Dons is not amused:

We're MK Dons and we always will be, and they need to shut up.

It's left to a journalist at the Milton Keynes Citizen to try to develop Robinson's belligerent grunting into something approaching a coherent defence of the "MK Dons" brand:

The ‘Drop the Dons’ calls come despite:

• Wimbledon having left the Borough of Merton to play at Plough Lane 12 years before the move to MK
• Previous statements by high profile WISA [Wimbledon Independent Supporters' Association, a fans' campaigning organisation, opposing the move to Milton Keynes] members referring to the club as MK Dons
• Dons season ticket holders still travelling from Wimbledon to watch the club at stadium:mk
• Pete Winkelman having spent considerable money maintaining the Wimbledon youth sides and employing staff members from that club
• AFC Wimbledon playing in Kingston Upon Thames: outside the Borough of Merton

The Citizen's first point is, like Bill Clinton's assertion that he'd never had sex with Monica Lewinsky, true only if you take a ridiculously narrow view of what happened, ignoring obvious questions, like what those affected (Hilary and Chelsea, or your average Wimbledon fan) would have called the goings-on in question.

What did the club's previous move involve? Plough Lane, in Wimbledon was the home of Wimbeldon FC from September 1912 to May 1991, when the club moved and started sharing Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park stadium. The Wimbeldon FC board decided to move to Selhurst Park after the Football League's post-Taylor Report decision that all clubs in the top two divisions must have all-seater stadiums. The board had decided that it would have been too difficult and expensive to bring Plough Lane up to the necessary standard (the local council had also approved plans for a new 20,000 seat stadium in the London Borough of Merton in 1988, but these never went ahead, presumably due to cost considerations). The move to Selhurst Park was only intended to be temporary.

Having to travel about nine miles to Selhurst Park to attend home matches that used to be just round the corner might have inconvenienced local fans, but it wan't the end of the world. It's another thing altogether to see your local club moved to a location sixty-odd miles away by road or a four hour round trip away by public transport (once you've factored in local transport links to and .from the main train / coach station at either end of the journey).

As for the second point, WISE spokespeople may well have referred to MK Dons by their brand name. So what? Using the words hardly constitutes something akin to formal diplomatic recognition. They call the re-branded club "Franchise FC", too, but I don't see The Milton Keynes Citizen making anything of that.

Yes, some season ticket holders still travel from Wimbledon to MK. Now imagine that the local football team that you've supposed all your life is suddenly re-branded with the name of a town you've no connection with and moved to a ground sixty miles away. What you gonna do? If your club means so much to you that you're not prepared to give up your season ticket, or switch allegiance, you might decide to suck it up and make the journey to MK. All that means is that you've got no alternative. It doesn't mean you like it.

If the Milton Keynes Citizen is so confident that former Wimbledon-based MK Dons fans are just fine with the move, maybe they should commission an independent polling organisation to ask them how they feel about their team's relocation and squash, once and for all, any baseless rumours that they're not entirely delighted with the move.

Pete Winkelman may have spent money maintaining the Wimbledon youth sides and employing staff members from that club. Maybe that's what they call a "sweetener", or maybe it's just because he's a nice bloke. Who knows?

Wimbledon AFC, Wimbledon's recently-formed local club do have their ground in Kingston Upon Thames. Which is less than five miles from the centre of Wimbledon. Five miles. Not sixty. See my rebuttal of the Citizen's first point. With knobs on.

It's the corporate pretence that fans have somehow bought into a move that was driven by commercial imperatives that they had no knowledge of, and no control over, that makes the MK Dons saga so interesting and so dispiriting. It's all part of the modern ideology of "free choice" which, when you look more closely, turns out to be an incredibly narrow range of unpalatable options on offer from powerful vested interests, who will spin the most grudging acquiescence to look like enthusiastic endorsement of their self-interested plans. Ignore the PR and follow the money if you want a clearer idea of what's going on:

The stadium would not exist without the enabling powers of Wal-Mart, the monolithic American retailer and now the parent company of Asda, famed for denying its staff union rights and killing off small family businesses wherever it sets up shop. The deal for 73 acres of land was done between the owners – the council and regeneration agency English Partnerships – and prospective tenants Asda and Inter MK, the holding company that took Wimbledon FC out of administration three years ago.

Asda/Wal-Mart wanted a foothold in Milton Keynes but needed the Trojan horse of a football stadium to dodge planning laws restricting out-of-town retail development. A third tenant, IKEA, was soon on board to complete a holy trinity worthy of our consumerist age...

Cynics might suggest that the ideal core business for Inter MK is events and concerts, which is certainly a business Winkelman knows. He made his money in music, some of it promoting 1980s cartoon girl punks We’ve Got A Fuzzbox & We’re Gonna Use It, and now hangs out at his manor-house recording studio and his football club. It is easy to sneer at Winkelman. For starters, there are his many style crimes and gushing platitudes. Yet if he was a slick corporate clone he would be loathed for who he is, rather than simply for what he has done. It is not necessarily his fault that he cannot convince genuine fans of football who trust their own eyes that the whole Milton Keynes Dons project is actually about the club.

When Saturday Comes

At this point I'll have to declare a lack of interest. I represent one of the UK's quietest minority groups - straight blokes who aren't really that interested in football. But I live in the MK area and I'd like to feel, if not pride, at least a lack of shame, about my local team. Heck, I might even summon up enough interest to go along to a game, if only the "local" team wasn't such an outrageous manufactured monstrosity (even MK-based fans who feel that Wimbledon should get over it and move on, feel more than a bit defensive). As things are, I have to agree with Ken Livingstone that the "Dons" tag is a bit of a joke.

Without getting too thin-skinned and parochial about it, I would take issue with one of Ken's comments, though. 'Who in their right minds would leave London to go to Milton Keynes?' I've lived in London and I've lived in Milton Keynes. There's more of a buzz about London, more to do, but there's more access to space and peace and quiet in MK. Both places have things going for them.

I lived in London up to the late 1980's (when it was still a vaguely affordable place to live on a modest salary) and gradually moved further away, via Watford, Leighton Buzzard and Milton Keynes, ending up in Newport Pagnell, on the outskirts of the MK conurbation. This isn't entirely unconnected with the boom in property prices that's underpinned much of the economic havoc blighting the economy here in the UK and elsewhere. London, at the epicentre of the UK's property bubble, is now an insanely expensive place to buy or rent a place to live.

'Who in their right minds would leave London to go to Milton Keynes?' A lot of ordinary people who can't or won't pay a fortune to live in a shoebox, Ken.

Milton Keynes is OK. Hardly the planned earthly paradise promised by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation but it still a reasonable place to live. Nowhere's exactly thriving at the moment, but MK is weathering the current economic downturn better than many places and, on the whole, it's a lot nicer than most outsiders imagine. It would be improved by having a football team that wasn't such a total embarrassment, though.

Mock the weak

A lot of people make fun of Milton Keynes, which is fine by me. I think it's a better place to live than most outsiders imagine, although the reality falls short of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation's original vision of a beautifully planned, orderly, harmonious place to live with no building higher than the highest tree. If people want to make fun of concrete cows and the grid roads and all the roundabouts (which really do keep traffic congestion to a minimum), I don't have a problem with that.

In fact, I rather welcome the fact that people treat the place as a bit of a joke, because it means there's less of the thin-skinned, self-important local pride that makes other places look even sillier. I lived in Leighton Buzzard for a short while, at the time when Jeremy Clarkson made a throwaway remark about in a car review about Leighton Buzzard being 'the fifth-best town in Bedfordshire'. The Pages of the Leighton Buzzard Observer carried a furious rebuttal from the affronted council leader (or some such local dignitary), raging and spluttering as if somebody might have actually noticed this remark, or could have cared less.

I'm no Clarkson fan, but this was practically the least offensive thing he's ever said. A comment from Clarkson shouldn't have even been local-newsworthy unless he'd at least called the local council lazy, feckless and flatulent and preferably accused them of murdering prostitutes in between meetings of the planning committee.

What does rile me is comfortably-off people sneering at everybody who lives on the city's poorer estates. Take this nasty little "satirical" e-mail from earlier this year, as reproduced in the Anna Raccoon blog

An Earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit the new city of Milton Keynes on Wednesday morning.

Casualties were seen wandering aimlessly saying “bang out of order”, “mental” and “sorted”. Some are still confused that something interesting actually happened in Newport Pagnell! Some residents of Fishermead were woken before their ‘giros’ arrived and it caused quite a panic!

The earthquake decimated half of the Fullers Slade area causing in excess of £17.55 worth of damage. Several priceless collections of mementos from Ibiza, Corfu, Rhyl and Blackpool were damaged beyond repair including a cute little donkey that ‘broke wind’ when you clapped your hands. 

At a time when unemployment is soaring, the numbers of the working poor are at a record high and desperate people are killing themselves after being thrown on the employment scrapheap, isn't it good to know that there are people out there unafraid of mocking the poorest and weakest members of society? I guess, as it becomes less acceptable to taunt people for their race or sexuality, the sort of inadequates who always need somebody to look down have to find a new target to kick, (preferably somebody too weak to kick back). "Chav" is in danger of becoming the new "queer".

What I love is the irony of the thrusting, aspirational suburban golf club set sniggering at the poor for their lack of taste. It's a bit rich, coming from the class that's spent years disfiguring the countryside with a rash of unsightly mock Tudor "executive" homes. These Petit Trianon playhouses for the petit bourgeois are just the architectural equivalent of a flatulent ornamental donkey for people with more money than sense.

The poor, of course, don't get much of a say about what their accommodation looks like. In Milton Keynes this led to some very strange results on the older estates, where 1970's architects were given free rein to design radical, modernist machines for living to house the "overspill" from Greater London. Some of the designs were pretty stark and brutal. The linear, angular, gleaming, metal-clad lines of the '70s buildings in Netherfield, for example, certainly have what Kevin McCloud would call 'integrity', but it's the hard, uncompromising integrity of a housing project designed by daleks.

I hardly need to add that, being low-cost pre-fabricated social housing, they haven't worn tremendously well. The years and individual redecoration can't disguise the uncompromising geometry, but they have destroyed the pristine, chilly unity of the facades, which look patchier and shabbier by the year A lot of MK's original buildings were only supposed to be temporary, built to house the people who came to build the city, then to be torn down to make way for something better. Forty years later, we're still waiting.

I was in Netherfield the other day, when I spotted something rather extraordinary. I'm a bit conflicted about sharing it as, after all I've said about mocking the poor, it might seem like more middle-class piss-taking, but this is such an astonishing collision between the aesthetic of the suburban executive home and the stark functionalism of '70's prefabricated social housing, that you really have to see it to believe it. Sorry about the quality of the following picture, taken with a low-quality mobile phone camera with a scratchy lens - at least it saved me the job of pixellating out the car number plates:

Yes, somebody has actually looked at one of these Mies van der Rohe-inspired brutalist dwellings and decided that what it really needed was a mock-Tudor facade.

No matter whether the person responsible was rich or poor, (for all I know it might have been the landlord) this is just so wrong it's off the scale. Somebody actually took something from the Decade That Taste Forgot, hybridised it with its opposite and came up with something this unspeakably what-the-hell-were-you thinking?. It's so wrong it's almost right. 'As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table' as somebody once remarked. If you want to marvel in higher quality, somebody's posted a far better picture of the building in question here, or you could just put Farthing Grove, Milton Keynes into Google Maps and find it for yourself on Street View.

Milton Keynes - you've just gotta love the weirdness.


Update (Occupy Milton Keynes)

Having posted this, I think I belatedly get it. Seen from the point of view of a resident, maybe this isn't so mental after all. You've got the powers that be pouring people, like so much fungible human overspill, into their anonymous, generic boxes, then one day one of the residents decides to stop being the passive recipient of somebody else's aesthetic and stick two big fingers up at the people who designed these anonymous hutches. What you see before you is an act of defiance and individuality, a sane protest against an absurd world.

It still looks bloody ugly, though.

Update 2 "Civic" amended to "local", as I ended up talking about Leighton Buzzard, which isn't a city by any stretch of the imagination.

Milton Keynes as Ballardian consumerist dystopia

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been treated to a surreal sight. The roads in this area (Newport Pagnell and the North East end of Milton Keynes) have been lined by people wearing giant pizza boxes. It’s a promotional stunt by a well-known pizza outlet.

 Posted strategically on both sides of the road, by every roundabout, the shivering human billboards wave at passing motorists, some with apparent good cheer, some robotically.  Muffled up against the November chill, most of the faces are reduced to a pair of eyes looking out from between hat and scarf, although a few have taken to wearing Spiderman masks. Whether the masks are just for a laugh, or a disguise, I don’t know.

It doesn’t make me want to rush out and order a pizza, but as a faintly chilling piece of dystopian  performance art, about the commodification of human beings, it works pretty well.

Unwelcome mat

Like many people, I don't like being spammed, getting junk mail or being interrupted during dinner by somebody trying to flog double glazing. I was therefore pleased, when searching Milton Keynes Council web site for something unrelated, to find that they were giving away free window stickers to residents who didn't want to be pestered by cold callers.

When the stickers arrived, I found the wording quite, shall we say, direct. The first bit, in red, got all legal on the doorsteppers' collective asses:

The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008

---

Then, the sign told them to go away:

The Residents of this property do not want uninvited traders to visit this property.

Then, in large, unfriendly, letters it made it clear that the resident really means it:

Please leave and do not return.

If you do not leave and/or if you return, you may commit a criminal offence.

Crikey. The wording was so in your face* that I nearly had second thoughts about putting something like that in the window. But I did, and I haven't seen many cold callers since.

*not to mention the final sentence being slightly ambiguous, although in context it's pretty clear that 'you may commit a criminal offence' is a caution, not an invitation.

Barbecue of the Vanities

Senior cabinet ministers are privately discussing a plan to scrap the Government's £5bn identity cards programme as part of cuts to public spending, The Independent has learnt.

The ministers believe that some "sacred cows" will have to be sacrificed in the effort to reduce Britain's debt mountain. They are raising fresh questions over the future of the ID card programme as the Cabinet faces renewed pressure to find economies beyond a promised £9bn in "efficiency savings".

According to this article in The Independent, maybe there's a silver lining to the huge cloud of debt currently hovering over the country. I'd crack open a bottle to celebrate this particular sacred cow being tossed onto the barbie (but not before checking that the Home Office haven't simply dropped the cards and adopted Blunkett's cunning plan to retain the ID database and make us all buy compulsory biometric passports).

Meanwhile, in local news, I've reluctantly had to abandon the compellingly surreal idea that Milton Keynes might really acquire a 50 metre long cow-based transgender sphinx. My - admittedly cursory - googling of Alex Wells has failed to come up with any hint that she's produced any previous sculptural works and I'm having to face the probability that I've been April fooled (even though the article was datelined April 16th). D'oh! And I so wanted it to be true...

Like a late snowfall

Here are some pictures of blossom lying on the steps leading to North Willen Lake and the Peace Pagoda, Milton Keynes, yesterday.

Revelation

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in Roundabout City
A shape with cow body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Grow shadows of the trees in Campbell Park.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Milton Keynes to be born?

Alex Wells is planning to build a sphinx in Milton Keynes, according to an article published in the Milton Keynes Citizen (not on the first of April). A 50 metre long, 18 metre high sphinx. With the head of Jock Campbell and the body of a concrete cow. What can this rough beast portend but the coming of the End Times?