When I left Milton Keynes

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I stopped writing this blog in late 2010 when I got a job. Not long after that, I left Milton Keynes for the blinding lights of London in early 2012. I had no friends to say goodbye to. To be honest I hadn't really made much effort to make friends when I arrived in the UK. That would be admitting I was staying.


My first year in London was brutal. I hated it. Work consumed me and I lost my way. What's worse, I was felt a failure for hating London. It was supposed to be every New Zealander's dream.
Little by little I adjusted, and soon came to tolerate, and even like the place.


I'm a Londoner now.

I don't even know how that happened.


I travel for work often. And no matter how early in the morning, or late at night, and no matter how awake or conscious I am, I am always roused in time to spot Milton Keynes whenever I am on that line. Just in time to see the Brickhills coming from the south, and Wolverton from the south.

It has been seven years since I wrote this blog and I am an older person now, in a different setting, and in what I feel like, a different country to the one I arrived in in 2010.

Yet still the Milton Keynes story of place making plays out here in the heart of London. 

I will always remember the words of Ray Akins:

"To me the sun was always shining on Bletchley because I met my wife Gwen there. I go there now and I feel feelings I don't get anywhere else."

(from Bletchley Voices, compiled by Robin Cook)


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