MK

If I say “weekend retreat”, what do you picture?

Do you think of yoga and mediation, sitting on some kind of mountaintop in gentle contemplation? Or maybe in an open sided rainforest cabin, chanting “omm” repeatedly while ignoring the bites from mosquitoes? Maybe you think of the beach, the seaside, watching the sun rise while you perform a mindful body scan.

You’re probably not thinking of Milton Keynes.

Neither was I when I first had the idea to go away for a weekend retreat.

I had what I thought were simple criteria: a hotel with a pool and a gym, good reviews, and handy for public transport.

But it wasn’t that simple.

A number of “spa” type hotels were located “just a 15 minutes drive from junction X of the M whatever.” A quick look on google maps would show these hotels had no public transport anywhere near them. As I don’t have a car, they don’t have my reservation.

After much deliberation, I found the Holiday Inn, Milton Keynes Central. A pool (16m not 25m but I’ll take that over the tiny splishy-splashy pools most hotels have), a gym, excellent reviews, and very importantly, 15 minutes walk from the train station.

The weekend away in Milton Keynes was a retreat for me. No mountainside or chanting, just two nights in a hotel room on my own.

There was so much I wanted to do – workout in the gym, go swimming, go walking around the town, maybe some little bit of yoga or meditation in my room, some shopping… oh, and lots of writing.

It kind of went the way I wanted but also kind of not.

Milton Keynes is a planned city. It was built out of nothing (the land was previously bean fields) in the 1970s. It’s always had a bad rap – it’s the kind of place people made fun of.

It’s a city with no history – an urban equivalent of Esperanto if you like – it has no ancient buildings, no medieval town centre, no Victorian monuments to men of commerce. And that makes it strange.

I don’t mean the people are strange. Everyone I met was really, really lovely and friendly, and that is certainly something you don’t encounter in London.

What was strange was the scale and space. It was the thing of being able to see great distances because all the roads are straight, as the town was built (designed) in a grid system. The train station is in a direct line with the massive shopping centre, so I knew from arrival exactly where I was going.

Except I didn’t.

Coming out of the station I could see the road ahead I needed to be on, and I could see the major road I needed to cross. I could also see a pedestrian underpass (I still like to think of these with the Russian word “perekhod”) but I went up to the road and now down to the underpass.

At the road, I saw there was no way for me to cross. The road had no footpath, no crossing place. It was clear pedestrians were not meant to cross here so I went back down to the underpass and the reality of the place started to kick in.

This town was designed to make it easier for people and for cars. The pedestrian underpasses under every major road mean I don’t have to wait to cross the road and traffic is not held up waiting for walk/don’t walk signs.

And when I say underpass, I’m not talking about those long, dark, dank, stinking of piss pedestrian underpasses. These are small, short, well lit and well ventilated underpasses that you wouldn’t feel strange about going under even late at night.

My first question on the walk to the hotel was, “Where are all the people?”

Maybe it was because it was the middle of Friday afternoon. Maybe it’s was just coming up from London that made it feel really empty. Maybe it was the scale and the space. Instead of jamming people into small spaces, Milton Keynes was built on an almost Soviet scale – wide streets that would better be called boulevards, two lanes of traffic in each direction, with an aisle of trees down the middle, separating them. On a sunny late spring afternoon, it felt like a very green city.

I checked into my hotel and headed out to go shopping. I was getting the hang of the place now, and quickly spotted the underpass that would take me to Midsummer Place and MK One, the massive shopping centres that dominate the centre of MK (yes, I’d picked up on the local nickname for the city).

After browsing through Marks and Spencer and sticking up on underwear, I headed back to the hotel to use the pool I had checked out earlier. Time for a nice, relaxing swim.

But it wasn’t.

It seemed that everyone else who had checked into the hotel that afternoon had children with them, and had brought them down to the pool for some splishy-splashy, leaving not a lot of room for me, in my goggles and swimming cap, to do the laps I had been looking forward to.

But reader, I persisted.

I did my laps, sometimes bumping into parents or children but swerving around them when I could. What annoyed me most however was the two women who were ostensibly doing laps, but doing so very slowly, with their heads above water so they could chat while they swam. The amount of space they occupied doing this in an already crowded pool had me fuming.

After 35 minutes of not-quite-so relaxing swimming, I left to go back to my room.

I dined in the hotel restaurant that night, great food, and a cocktail (which I don’t usually have, but I thought – this weekend is about doing the things I don’t normally do, so a cocktail with dinner it was.).

Saturday I was up and out of the hotel reasonably early air I could enjoy my serious shopping time. But even on a Saturday, there seemed to be no one about. Maybe 10am was too early for the good people of MK? Even the small open air market was still unpacking and setting up.

By 11am my impressions are completely changed as now the shopping centre is full of people. People everywhere, everyone shopping. Everyone gathered here at this great temple to the god of consumption.

I hadn’t been in a busy shopping centre for a long time, so I kept bumping into people. Was it me walking too fast or them walking too slow or me swivelling my head about to look at All The Things and try and take it all in and therefore not looking where I’m going? Maybe it was all of those things.

I don’t go to big shopping centres often these days. If I need to get to a specific shop, I approach it like a military operation. I get in, get what I need, and get out as quickly as I can. The notion of browsing and looking at things with no actual purpose seems very decadent, very… leisurely.

(Have I forgotten how to relax and take things easy?)

I enjoyed the chance to watch other people, and how they were interacting. I watched mothers trying to interact with their children (with various degrees of success), the couple shopping together (I say together but there were a lot of bored men on their phones outside the change rooms of women’s clothing shops) and most endearing were the friends shopping together and doing that thing, where they hold up for the other to look at, saying, “This would look great on you,” or “Would this look good on me?” Is this what friendship looks like, I wondered.

(Have I forgotten how friends behave together?)

It turns out three hours of walking about, looking at things in the shopping centre is as much as I can take. It was getting on to lunchtime and the place was getting very busy, with all the food places filling up with people having lunch.

(Is this part of the shopping ritual? You shop and then you eat?)

I decided it was take time to go back to my hotel and move onto next phase of my retreat, doing some physical work in the health centre.

I’m pleased to report I spent an hour and a half doing weights and cardio in the health centre. Some of that time was me looking at the weights machines trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. Even though most of the machines had instructions, they weren’t all very clear. But I managed to work up a sweat and not injure myself. This felt like a good achievement, enough to warrant the next phase of my retreat.

Which was to have a long bath.

I’m always excited to get a hotel room with a bath. This is because hotel bathtubs are cleaned more often than mine at home, and to a higher standard. It’s pleasant to have a bath in a hotel because in general, I don’t sit in hotel bathtubs and think about the limescale I can see building up under the taps – or those other hard-to-clean areas I don’t normally see in the course of my every day ablutions. Having a bath at home generally makes me feel that I should spend more time cleaning my bath, and that is not relaxing.

I soaked my aching muscles in the bath (I didn’t work very hard so they were not really aching). Then I had a cup of tea with biscuits (I was pleased to see the Holiday Inn housekeeping crew replenish not just your tea and coffee tray milk but also the complementary biscuits).

The overcast morning had given way to a warm and sunny afternoon. I could have stayed sitting in my hotel until it was time for dinner but it seemed a shame to waste the sunshine, so I headed out for a walk around MK. Not the shopping centre this time, the actual outside city centre.

The hotel has a print featuring the skylines of notable buildings in Milton Keynes and I could see one of them from the front of the hotel. I headed in that direction first and quickly found myself standing outside the Church of Christ the Cornerstone. I love a church with a dome, and here it made the building look older than it is, as we know it has only been there maximum 50 years.

From the church I walked along beside the shopping centre, crossing roads, a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of car parking space in the city. The planners obviously had anticipated the rise of the car and the need for parking. (While at the same time planting plenty of trees in and around the car parks to shield them from view.)

I crossed another main road (overpass not underpass this time) and suddenly all the buildings were gone. I was in the green space of Campbell Park. But it’s not just a park – it’s a large green space that seems to stretch on to the horizon. I felt so happy to find such a large green space so close to the city centre. (Planners – they think of everything, including green space.)

This was one of the great things about MK, the evidence of thought, which then makes you see the lack of thought in other cities.

The park has some monuments / artworks in it. In fact the whole of the town centre had an abundance of sculptures dotted around. (More thought? That art is a public right?)

From the park, I saw something that looked like a hill. But I knew there were no hills here. This must be some kind of man-made structure. I walked towards it.

This tall sloping building that looked like a hill was part of the Xscape complex, where you can pursue indoors such typically outdoor experiences as skydiving and skiing, as well as rock climbing. (There was also shopping and a cinema, more typically indoor activities.)

I dined at a place called Crispy Dosa (although Husband referred to it as Burnt Offerings because he couldn’t remember the name.) It was recommended by a friend and the food was good and filling, even if it was pure veg, even with me having not had a proper lunch. My dosa came without cutlery (I was one lone white woman in a room full of Indian families) and I did a reasonable job of eating with my right hand. The plate of Samosa chaat I did need a spoon for, but I was surprisingly full, and not able to do it the full justice it deserved.

With a tummy now happy and full, I waddled back to my room. A wild Saturday night awaited me. I knew I had to start writing.

I’d been avoiding this for the most part of the weekend so far, but now was time to start making an effort. I pulled out the marked up WIP, opened the file, and started work, finally shutting down after 11 o’clock, feeling some satisfaction.

Sunday morning after breakfast I got back to my room and realised I had only a few hours of writing time left, so I sat at my desk and started. I’m editing my WIP from the back rather than the front, and I’m taking what I’m calling the XTC approach, based on their song “Senses working overtime” – I can see, hear, smell, touch, taste. How can I make my characters more in alive and in place by incorporating sensory elements?

Midday Sunday and I’m trundling my luggage back to the train station, leaving MK for the short journey back to London. It’s only been two nights away, but I feel refreshed, not so much physically but mentally.

Interested in reading more about MK? This article includes some interviews the with original planners as well as potential problems looming.