From issue 75 of popular STAND here’s your indispensable guide to Milton Keynes, for anyone foolish enough to venture there for tonight’s Rovers game.
Milton Keynes
Like coloured television and sex, Milton Keynes didn’t even exist until the 1960s. It is a new town, designed to relieve the housing congestion in London. These days politicians do that just by jacking up housing and rental prices so no-one can actually afford to live in the capital, but back in the free-spirited 60s the Government actually bothered to find a more encompassing solution. The result is an idyllic city, in which roads are never congested and lives are never quite fulfilled. Apparently it’s good for shopping. Presumably because spending money helps make the tears go away.
What’s it famous for?
Very little. Some sculptures of concrete cows on major road junctions, and, er, long jumper Greg Rutherford. So if you’re looking for a way out of Milton Keynes it appears that hurling yourself into sand repeatedly like an acrophobic lemming is as good as it gets, otherwise everyone just continues along in their weird grid-based Stepford Wives existence.
How to blend in
Two options; firstly paint yourself black and white and remain resolutely still whilst crouching on all fours on a roundabout. Or alternatively do whatever the hell you like, because no-one has ever actually met or known anyone from Milton Keynes in their life.
What’s the stadium like?
You know what, it’s probably a nice stadium. It’s probably got nice seats and leg-room and unobstructed vantage points and all that bollocks, but truthfully what does that matter? It shouldn’t be there; it is the Tesco Metro where your corner shop used to be, it is the luxury flats that now occupy the pub you met your first girlfriend in, it is the expensive organic delicatessen that bought out the old market café. It is simply the expensive playhouse of a self-aggrandising twat, a whacking great summer-house built by that prickish nextdoor neighbour purely out of spite, and solely to block out the light which used to shine on your rockery. Ultimately, taking so much as a step inside Stadium MK is the same as accepting the radio controlled car off the smarmy regional marketing director your mum left your dad for after that sales conference at The Campanile in Swindon. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, the Aldi-value Bond villain Winkleman hasn’t even had the decency to put a proper set of floodlights on it either. What a prick.
So yeah, anyway, adult tickets £20. You can impulsively sell your soul on the day as well as in advance.
by Glen Wilson
popular STAND fanzine 