Mercenaries (Ready For War)

As I'm sure any regular reader will have established, I live in Milton Keynes, a new city in North Buckinghamshire generally described in disparaging terms and often to be heard in conversation alongside roundabouts and the famous concrete black and white cows created by Liz Leyh that live in a field just outside the City centre.

What happens to be one of my favourite films, the über-sentimental Brit flick Love Actually includes a scene where Colin Firth is learning Portuguese in a language school. He and his colleagues are reciting various sentences whilst wearing headphones, whereupon one student says 'Milton Keynes has lots of roundabouts'. At first you laugh, and then you feel embarrassed. Despite some incredible facilities, Milton Keynes is something of a laughing stock. 'Someone's got to,' is the usual response when you say you live in Milton Keynes.

The butt of jokes it may well be, but I'm laughing after seeing my house price rise over 25% in just over three years, for despite being looked down-upon, Milton Keynes is a property hot spot that appears to make a nonsense of the notions of supply and demand that were drummed into me while studying economics. Under John Prescott's chubby direction, Milton Keynes is expanding rapidly, new houses are being crammed into hitherto undeveloped areas of the City, and yet despite this huge creation of supply, demand remains unmet and prices continue to storm ahead.

We only came to live here because we couldn't afford to move farther south, even though that would make much more sense for my commute into London. I'm glad we did move here though, not least because when I say I live in Buckinghamshire it sounds quite posh, but most importantly because the facilities in Milton Keynes are top notch. You want shops? You have a massive shopping centre with all you major names plus higher end outlets from Jaegar, Boss, Karen Millen and now Austin Reed. Shops that you'd normally associate with London (such as Krispy Kreme or Pret) tend to branch out in MK after other major cities. You want leisure? You have gyms a plenty and the huge Xscape area with its indoor ski slope. You want to eat? Xscape again has loads of smart eateries, the Centre:MK has the likes of Wagamama and out of town there are two noted gastro pubs. You want culture? You've got a fantastic modern theatre and an art gallery specialising in offbeat contemporary and often installation-based art. You want somewhere peaceful to walk? You've got the Grand Union Canal toepath and three man-made but beautifully-landscaped lakes. You want good transport links? You've got the M1 about 5 minutes from the City centre and a train service into London that could be as quick as 30 minutes, and you can get to London Luton or Birmingham International in next to no time. You want a spirit of modern enterprise? You've got businesses like Easy Group or Domino's that will try new products and ideas in Milton Keynes before rolling them out elsewhere. You want offices? You've got modern office space with good light and facilities at a fraction of the rent per square foot of London.

In short, you've got everything you could possibly need in Milton Keynes, plus you can get to the villages or countryside, or historic towns like Buckingham and Woburn in no time.

However, I think the people in Milton Keynes are among the most mercenary individuals I've ever come across. Much more so than London, much more so in fact than the Spanish guys who've come over to work at Abbey's HQ since Santander took them over. People are always in a hurry, everyone's rude, no-one will hold a door open for you (even with a buggy), people spend their money like it's going out of fashion (especially on cars – the drivers of those Porsches and Maseratis think it must be Chelsea, I swear) and no-one gives two hoots about anyone else.

I think I may know the reason. Notwithstanding the fact that lots of people have made a lot of money from their houses, which has given residents huge spending power, the main reason lies in the construction of the City itself.

To illustrate this, I shall use an example. Terry Pratchett (of Discworld fame) and Neil Gaiman (of comic book fame) once collaborated on a book together in which a theory of why the M25 was so hellish was proposed - if I remember correctly, one of the Devil's staff moved the markings for the London Orbital so that it was formed in the shape of an occult symbol, thus ensuring users would be subjected to nightmarish journeys because of the powerful black energy coursing around the motorway.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the planners of Milton Keynes' visionary new town project were working in legion with the underworld, because the basic premise of Milton Keynes - built as it is as a series of interconnected grids - is sublime. Take New York as the best example of a city built as grid. So long as you know your east from west, so long as you know that your avenues run from north to south and your streets run east to west; so long as you know this you can't get lost. Now it's hard, I admit, to compare a small City in Buckinghamshire with NYC, but in many respects the premise should be easier in MK - east to west roads are marked by Hs, north to south roads are marked by Vs - horizontal and vertical. Non-residents find it so confusing, but it's so easy. I maintain that if you were tasked with building a new city today, you'd do it in a grid. It makes so much sense.

However, it does have a downside, which is where the mercenary spirit has evolved from. Milton Keynes was built for car users first and foremost. Public transport is worse here than anywhere I've ever lived before and if you don't have a car your life is going to be pretty hellish here. Most of the H and V artery roads are dual carriageways, and carry a 70mph speed limit or 60 in the case of single-lane roads. This obliges people to drive fast, which has instilled an unwelcome culture of needing to get from A to B in the quickest possible time, which then spills over to create the rudeness and selfishness that is endemic in this city. The fact that signalling left or right, or parking straight in a space at a car park is beyond the grasp of these drivers is neither here nor there. This city is thus built on very 1980s Thatcherite foundations of speed, greed and wealth where all semblance of community spirit has been replaced by one of chronic individualism.

A few months ago I witnessed one of the worst acts of bloody-mindedness that I've ever seen in this city. Alighting from the train I joined the jostling throng of people climbing the steps up to street level. This is always my least favourite part of my commute, just because it reminds me of how totally self-important Milton Keynes commuters are. Amid the clamour to get up the stairs before anyone else, people push - sometimes discretely using a bag, sometimes more obviously using elbows - to get themselves ahead of their fellow commuters. Eventually you are corralled into two columns, two people abreast. But pity anyone needing to get down the stairs to the train you've just departed. My fellow commuters wouldn't dream of making it easy for them, and so I wonder how many people have had to ring a loved one from the station to explain that they would be late because no-one would let them down the stairs?On this one occasion, someone trying to get down the stairs proved himself to be every bit as mercenary as those coming up. Rather than edging his way down the steps one by one hoping that the twin columns would break slightly for him to get down a step or two more, he took it upon himself to charge down the stairs, violently knocking one woman out of the way in the process. He didn't turn around to apologise even though she had been clearly hurt and shook up by his shoving; as long as he was on that train he was fine, others’ feelings didn't matter. The clear symbolism of this self-centredness is obvious to me.

***

At the weekend Michelle and I had our first barbecue of 2006. It was a clear, still day, but as soon as the coals were lit the wind picked up and smoke billowed in random directions, including over the fence into my neighbours' garden, where the washing had just been pegged out and the windows were open. It was an accident - I couldn't control the wind, nor should I necessarily have popped around to their house to inform them in advance of my intention to cook up some burgers. But the lady of the house next door, who must be pushing fifty, was sufficiently unimpressed to mutter to herself angrily over the fence as she gathered up her washing in a huff and slammed all the windows shut and then stuck on the radio at stadium volumes, thus waking our baby and giving us an afternoon’s worth of Robbie Williams, Kaiser Chiefs and other chart-bothering acts. All for two burgers and a bit of harmless smoke. Such is the selfishness of the residents of Milton Keynes.

Gardening

It is quite remarkable how your attitudes to certain things evolve over the course of your life. My taste in music, for example, has developed over the years from my early nineties standpoint of militantly avoiding anything that featured guitars, to my eclectic later years where the majority of the music to be found on my iPod is now guitar-based. I once remarked, to the amusement of my guitar-playing girlfriend of the time, that the sonic potential within the guitar was limited to the point that the instrument was ‘linear and boring’. If she were to glance at my music collection some ten years on, she would be quite smug to see my collection includes pieces by Robert Fripp, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Wire’s Bruce Gilbert – artists that have built their career on exploiting the guitar’s limitless potential and rendering my ‘linear and boring’ argument null and void.

There are countless other examples where I have revised my view of things with the passing of time (despite being adamant that I’d never change my mind), but this one is about gardening. If you have yet to be swayed by gardening’s charms, than I don’t expect to convert you, and I won’t mind if you decide not to carry on reading.

Like cooking, gardening is something that I never partook of as a child. Deciding where to put bedding plants and shrubs was chiefly my mother’s role; hoeing the beds, cutting down trees and mowing the lawn my father’s. The garden, for much of my childhood, was simply a place to knock tennis balls about in, and in my teenage years somewhere to sit in the summer. But now, as with cooking, I consider tending for our garden among my passions.

While I never helped out in the garden, I never took the garden for granted; I never wantonly destroyed plants with footballs or sat there pulling the petals off pansies, and remember feeling justly sorry when my Spacehopper flattened one of my mum’s roses. Part of my respect for the garden at our house came from the fact that prior to moving there, we lived in flats and therefore had no garden of our own.

In the first few years of living at the house my parents still live in to this day, they set about transforming the rear garden, inserting rockeries and feature beds and cutting down trees to produce what is today a largely shrub-filled mature garden with plenty of colour in the summer, and a patio filled with exotic tropical plants which my sister’s move to Cornwall has informed. The grass is always neatly mowed, weeds are a rarity and the whole garden has a well-kept order to it.

At the time, though I loved having a garden, it was more for recreational reasons and not because I had any interest in plants, trees or nature in general. And therefore the trips to various local garden centres were about as boring as watching grass grow, and my mother’s avid studying of the Dr Hessayon guides about the most tedious activity I could comprehend at the time. I was probably a complete brat while being escorted around the local nurseries, and if I know myself half as well as I think I do I no doubt complained about it being dull and that it was too hot in the greenhouses, and all the other things that little boys who prefer Star Wars figures and Lego generally do.

Fast-forward if you will to when my wife and I bought our first house. The house was a two-bedroom modern terrace with a small garden to the rear and a lawn to the front. I’d lived there for a couple of years already before we bought from the landlord, and had barely even been into the garden during that time. The conditions of the tenancy agreement were such that I was obliged to keep the garden tidy at all times, and – being the law-abiding, good citizen that I am – I bought a strimmer on the grounds that it was cheap, and arduously hacked away at the lawn every fortnight to keep it tidy. I did take one trip to a garden centre nearby while living as a tenant, and came away with some shrubs, which forced me to also buy some tools in order to create a border into which I planted the shrubs. To my amazement, they all survived, and in so doing the seeds of my future gardening passion began to germinate.

That said, as soon as my then-future wife and I bought the house, my inner sloth was awakened, and the garden rapidly became overgrown; we were in those first throes of love and tending to the garden was not at the top of our priorities. My father-in-law-to-be gifted me an old Flymo but I never touched it. I recall letting the grass grow so long that it looked more like a field of corn than a lawn, and was so dense that we once lost our cat among it. After a while I became suitably ashamed and set about mowing it using the Flymo, only to find all too late that using a lawnmower on two foot grass is not at all advisable, resulting in the gifted Flymo spitting flames as it burned itself to an electrical grave at the centre of our garden. Before putting that house on the market, we finally tackled both the front and rear gardens and in very short order produced something that we were both justifiably proud of, but which wasn’t really for our benefit at all.

Moving to our current house gave us a much larger canvas to play with, and crucially it was already an established, if unimaginatively laid out garden. The previous owner had grouped together several different types of plants, only instead of spreading these around the garden, they were kept together. So we had camellias in a line down the right hand side, hebes grouped together in one corner, rhododendrons in another and so on. Now into our third year of living in this house, with the exception of the general shape of the beds, the garden is fundamentally changed from when we moved in.

With each passing year my interest in the garden grows, as does my confidence as an amateur gardener. I now love going to the garden centre, myself peruse those Dr Hessayon books which are reassuring unchanged from when my mother read them in the 1980s, and every year get a little bit more adventurous in what I attempt to achieve.

However, despite all this enthusiasm, I must concede that I am a terrible, awful gardener. Whether by soil type, pest, overwatering or more likely sheer ineptitude, my success rate with buying plants from a nursery is nearly zero, with plants often withering and dying within days of being introduced to our borders. Bedding plants have proven a complete waste of time unless planted into containers on the patio, and the garden is filled with lots of shrubs that provide attractive greenery all year round but hardly any colour during the summer.

This year we decided that we wanted, like so many others, to introduce a meadow-like quality into our garden, and therefore we meticulously cleared out some of the shrubbery, prepared the soil and planted some wildflower seeds that we’d bought at the Eden Project. Our vision was to have dense borders filled with colours and butterflies, swaying gently in the summer breeze. The slugs in the garden had other ideas. After leaving the seeds to grow in the beds for a few days, to my dismay I inspected the beds only to discover the tiny shoots uniformly munched away by hungry insects. Thus, once again, our borders will remain characterless this year, only in some ways more so since we cleared out many of the existing plants to make room for our desired garden.

After a few years of leaning on my father-in-law to grow plants from seed, I decided that a degree of independence was required as I approached thirty, and therefore invested in a propagator and mini-greenhouse. I started to get very enthusiastic and protective about the progress of my tiny seedlings – cosmos, Korean mint, sweet peas, sunflowers, asters, and after a degree of success, tomatoes and runner beans – and watched them get stronger in the greenhouse. As of last week, owing to two separate incidents of high winds in Milton Keynes which caused the greenhouse to collapse, I was left with nine sweat peas, seven cosmos (of the original 24), no asters, two Korean mint and some shameful-looking tomatoes. The sunflowers survived best, and one specimen reached a grand three feet before another windy day this week snapped it neatly in half. Cue a complete switch back to my pre-teenage ways, in other words a big old toys-out-of-the-pram strop and a genuine exclamation along the lines of ‘that’s it; the bloody garden can go to hell for all I care.’

Despite another largely unsuccessful bout of gardening I find my passion once again undiminished. A haphazard sowing of forget-me-nots and some unscathed wildflowers that appear to be avoiding the attention of the slugs has given my confidence something of a boost and it may be that we in fact do get some colour in the garden this year. Already my mind is filled with new plants to grow and features to weave into the garden, books on plants and flowers that I want to buy…and a growing realisation that as I get older the more motivated I become by the things that I hated as a child.

Sibling tribalry

In a couple of days, my not-so-little-anymore (but still little to me) sister will be getting married. There can be no clearer indication that you are getting older than when your sibling gets married off. While I'm clearly overjoyed for Natalie and her fiancé, it does dismay me somewhat to think that it's possible that she - and I - have grown up so incredibly fast.

While undoubtedly from the same familial stock, my sister and I are as similar as we are different. She is much less motivated by materialism and much more creative than me, and in many senses much less risk averse than I am. She is outgoing and gregarious whereas I am very introverted and prefer my own company to that of others. She prefers the comparatively sedate pace of life afforded by living in Cornwall and by being close to areas of outstanding natural beauty whereas I love the thrill of big cities and the man-made landscapes that for me can be just as breathtaking.

But we are also very similar. Both of us are very sensitive, don't handle criticism well and dwell on events far too much. We also hold family values in very high regard, coming from a small but tight family unit surrounded on either side by feuds and rifts that we have repeatedly sworn never to let come between us.

There are four and a half years between Natalie and I, but she's always been more mature than her years. Given that boys mature far slower than girls, this meant that we were the same emotional age for much of our lives. But that's not to say that we were always on the same wavelength, far from it. When we were really young we never liked each other. Perhaps I had a case of older child resentment toward a younger sibling, where I'd enjoyed a good few years getting all the attention. Whether that justifies me biting my sister when she was really small is debatable, but she more than made up for it later on when she used to lock me in the utility room every Saturday morning, jabbing me under the door with a brass toasting fork. Kids can be cruel to one another can't they?

We became friends in the summer of 1992 after meeting two sisters on a holiday. They didn't argue and always got on with each other really well, and I think that had a huge influence on our relationship with one another. We've stayed friends ever since, but as you get older and you get your own immediate family you begin to se less of each other. Living over 300 miles away from one another does rather curtail regular meet-ups, but we still see each other every six months or so.

Natalie's fiancé will be the perfect husband for her. I was in the same school year as Neil, but only really got to know him through Natalie; he is one of the calmest, most well-balanced and driven individuals I know. He has done much for my sister's confidence, and has nurtured her creative tendencies. He is a talented graphic designer, artist and photographer, which has led my sister to become more interested in these things and also has encouraged her to develop her interest in textiles from a mere hobby to a potentially successful business.

They are essentially perfectly matched, stronger together than they would be apart, and I've never once seen them argue. I also have an incredible amount of respect for them; they have pursued their own unique path through life and have never done things simply because that's what is expected of them. Two years ago they traded their comfortable jobs and house for a renovation project and significantly lower-paid jobs in Cornwall, driven predominantly by a desire for a particular lifestyle. At the time, being motivated as I am by money, wealth and advancement, I couldn't see the logic behind such a move. It felt like they were moving backwards; instead they have moved forward in leaps and bounds, taking the kind of calculated risk that only the shrewdest couples are capable of. They have an amazing, original house with a view from the rear windows that never ceases to calm, and a comparatively sedate lifestyle thanks to a better pace and quality of life. And in this positive environment they have flourished - not only is Natalie's textiles hobby rapidly proving that she could soon rely on this as her main source of income, but Neil is successfully building up his own design business after his earlier years of working for others. You could have all the money in the world and not have half as much of an enriched life as these two.

Which is why I'm so pleased that, after ten years of being a couple, they have decided to tie the knot. Fair enough it makes me feel old, makes me rue the passing of time, but I am so happy that they are furthering their commitment to one another. Their lives are not led conventionally and their wedding is shaping up to be just as contrarian. But fair play to them – they have shown that you don’t necessarily have to heed the advice that society supposedly insists you follow, therefore I’m sure it will be a great success.

* * *

My wife, Michelle, is very close to her own sister, Lisa; they too are friends as well as sisters, except that they’ve always been this way whereas Natalie and I had to have that epiphany while on holiday before we started to like one another. Because Michelle is one of two girls, she’s always wanted two daughters. Simply because of how my family was, I always thought we’d have a son, and then a daughter. Instead we were blessed with a perfect, beautiful little girl.

She now denies ever saying this, but during her epic labour, Michelle groaned to me that there was no way on earth that she would consider doing that all again to have a second child. The experience of labour, just as a mere male, was bad enough, and I found it really painful to watch as a mere observer. With the benefit of the passing of time, and of certain hormones that suppress the memory of birth pain, and despite only being twelve weeks into being parents, Michelle has retracted her earlier statement (which she insists she never would have said but I tell you categorically that she did), and now says she would like another child.

Her argument is based on the very fact that we both got on so well with our sisters and that it isn’t good for a child to grow up without a brother or sister. Moreover, she espouses something I've heard a lot lately, which is that parents will tend to spoil an only child, to the detriment of that child’s independence (and presumably the parents’ wallets).

I'm loathed to put this into print, but right now I really don’t want another child. I'm not ruling it out completely, to be clear (especially if my future son / daughter ever comes across this; you weren’t an accident, okay?), but I just don’t want to have to make any decisions about this at this precise moment in time. Within a couple of weeks of all having their babies, the new mums from our National Childbirth Trust group got together and were discussing whether any of them would have another baby. One of the mums said that she and her husband were definitely not just content with one, and wanted ‘a whole tribe’, a concept which I've just never been able to get my head around. Having one right now seems like a handful – a household filled to bursting point with kids just sounds incredibly stressful, but each to their own. One of the other mums has a friend who became pregnant just three months after having her first child; that’s either very good planning, or very careless.

Part of my reservation about making firm plans about this right now is that it feels like I'm diluting my love for Seren by starting to consider adding another child to the family. I’m sure that sounds completely ridiculous, but she’s my complete focus, and talking about having another baby sounds to me like – in some small way – we’re not completely satisfied. Which of course we are. I’m still coming to terms with my new responsibilities as a father, and whilst having another baby wouldn’t be for another couple of years I just can’t even think about it right now.

But, going back to my little sister’s wedding in the next few days, it would be a shame to see little Seren miss out on the company of a sibling, and I’m going to be so proud of my sister when she ties the knot. Just let me get used to being a parent for a bit first.