The Domestic Terrorist - Milton Keynes

MILTON KEYNES - "come, come, nuclear bombs..."

They say travel broadens the mind. They say the further you travel, the more you see, the more you experience. Not for me. Travel doesn�t broaden this mind. Travel teaches me that the further away you go, the weirder it gets, the stranger it is.

For most people where we are now, is normal, ordinary, correct. But where I am now is crazy and fucked up. It�s in fact, probably the most frightening place I�ve ever been.

But where is this? Let me give you a clue. All you see, no matter what direction you travel in, no matter how far, is grass, tarmac, and an island. Each island has four choices, each at 90 degree angles to each other. Each island is distingushable only by its name - "Highfields", "Northfields", "Eastfields", "Lowfields", "Eastfields". For example. Each road contains a grid reference for a name. "H6", "H7", "H8", for example.

Imagine you�re stuck for hours in a computer game you can�t leave, and can�t find the way out of. The precision of these roads, squares upon squares, is clinical, cold, and it scares the living shit out of me. There�s no sense of progression on the roads. We feel as if we�ve been travelling for hours in a circle. Everything looks, not must the same, but absolutely identical.

Eventually all cars in this place turn to grey, all CD�s turn to Queen (and more of them later), and every house becomes uniform faux-brick in identical, characterless McEstates.

Its as if the entire city was flatpacked and built by robots in a production line. Even the tarmac has that bizarre shade of grey you only see in computer games and bad Hollywood films. It feels like we�re trapped in "Driver2" or "Crazy Taxi". For hours.

Eventually though we find something which looks slightly different. Instead of endless rows of uniform houses and industrial estates that resemble nothing so much as silver painted cardboard boxes with carparks, we enter the "Shopping" Centre.

The shopping centre looks like money crossbred with a serious lack of imagination. I understand now the statement in Generation X, whereby someone enters as shopping mall in Denver and comes out to find himself in Detroit. Everything looks the same. Everyone wears the same clothes. Shopping malls will soon becomes subtle teleportation devices, the devices by which we move from place to place. Unlike Star Trek, teleporters will not be silver rooms, they will be McDonalds Seats and Gap clothing stores.

But how do we know it�s a shopping centre? Well, the uniform buildings becomes large cardboard boxes made of concrete filled with flash logos for "Fatty Arbuckles", and "St*rbucks". There�s uniform rows of cars, all slowly transforming into the same grey as the concrete, much like the T-1000. This is the future, and I don�t like it one bit.

The only way you can tell that the shopping centre (food court) becomes the shopping centre (electronics court) is by the small division of a road, which resembles some kind of last minute afterthought. In the distance silver corporate torture gardens glisten in the sunlight. Each one of the row of faceless mirrored ampitheatres of business is identical, and contains the headquarters, no doubt, of some IT company. To match the lack of personality, these buildings have noi appearance, merely mirroring whatever you put in front of them.

By the fast food store, a congregation of Disco Kids sit and stand, waiting for their weekly trip to some no-doubt equally anonymous nightclub, called, erm, "Glitzy" or "Ritzy" or "Mitzy" or something like that, where the DJ is Paul Oakenfold, but the music comes from a purchased-at-Our-Price-mix-CD. There�s 30 of them, dressed in the uniform black casual but formal shoes, light brown slacks, and black shirts with tiny pictures of crocodiles stitched into them, whilst the girls loiter around in the wind wearing high hells and shiny black jumpers. Except the youngest of these disco kids looks at least 30. Only two years older than me, and each one of them wearing more make up than Gary Oldman in Hannibal. To hide the monster inside, I suppose you have to build a new face.

And inside the KFC not one member of staff speaks English as a first language. Not a good or a bad thing that, just, I�d like to not spend 20 minutes ordering my pre-processed food.

I�m frightened. There�s something about this City of The Living Dead that just does not sit comfortably with things like say, personality, taste, or thinking for yourself. The whole city looks designed by executives with the sole purpose of extracting profit from the public. Anything like individuality was stamped out at the production line stage.

This is my first hour in Milton Keynes. I have three more to go. By this stage I�ve already agreed that I am never coming here again. Even if Joy Division reform and are supported by Elvis Presley, Jane�s Addiction, and The Smiths.

Except we turn right to find even more identical rows of trees, roundabouts, and giant industrial estates that resemble 60 foot high x 600 foot long corrugated iron slugs. The only way we can tell we are even vaguely near our destination (to see Robbie Williams) is by the mass accumulation of slowly greying cars, yellow suited middle aged men asking for a �7 parking fee, people telling men in yellow suits that that�s a f*cking disgrace, and policemen telling us "You can�t park here".

So instead, the only way to park, and avoid an enormous queue is simple. Follow loads of other cars that are being directed, free of charge, by the Police onto the grass verges. And into Milton Keynes Bowl itself, which can only be described as a big park with some architectural shapage occuring at the corner. There�s a concrete ramp which is at a remarkably steep incline for me, and I�m only 28. There�s not even steps, just a sheer verge. If you were trying to come down that on wheels, you�d fall over for sure. Its like a stunt ramp for Evel Knievel - I half expect a row of buses to leap over when I hit the peak.

At the top of the verge I look back, it looks massive, but it isn�t. There�s large pockets of space where there isn�t anyone standing. In fact, someone could drop my block of flats brick by brick about 100 yards from the stage in the audience section and it�d sit very comfortably there without even touching a single human being. It�s all very very civilised. Families on day trips. Mummy and Daddy in rain macs and little kids seeing Wobbie. Beerish lads on a Friday night out dressed in nothing but shorts and beer. Disco girls dancing around with their fag packets in hand. Welcome to England.

The New America.

Hosted by www.Geocities.ws