After a long time, I got up and carefully put back all the fertilizer bags and reweighted them with stones. I picked up my stick, surveyed my work to make sure all was in order, then turned and began the long process of hacking my way back to that strange and careless place that is the twentieth century.

 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 I WENT TO MILTON KEYNES, FEELING THAT I OUGHT TO AT LEAST HAVE a look at a new. town. Milton Keynes takes some getting to from Oxford, which is a little odd because it's only just up the road. I selected it as my destination on the basis of a quick look at a road map, assuming that I would, at worst, have to take a train to Bicester or some such place and then another from there. In fact, I had to go all the way back to London, catch an Underground train to Euston and then finally a train to Milton Keynes an overall journey of perhaps 120 miles in order to travel between two towns about thirty miles apart.

 It was costly and timeconsuming and left me feeling a tiny bit fractious, not least because the train from Euston was crowded and I ended up sitting facing a bleating woman and her tenyearold son, who kept knocking my shins with his dangling legs and irritating me by staring at me with piggy eyes while picking his nose and eating the bogies. He appeared to regard his nose as a kind of midfaced snack dispenser. I tried to absorb myself in a book, but I found my gaze repeatedly rising against my wishes to find him staring at me with a smug look and a busy finger. It was quite repellent and I was very pleased, when the train finally pulled into Milton Keynes, to get my rucksack down from the overhead rack and drag it across his head as I departed.

 I didn't hate Milton Keynes immediately, which I suppose is as much as you could hope for the place. You step out of the station and into a big open square lined on three sides with buildings of reflective glass, and have an instant sense of spaciousness such as you almost never get in English towns. The town itself stood on the slope of a small hill a good halfmile away beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by car parks and those strange newtown trees that never seem to grow. I had the distinct feeling that the next time I passed this expanse of grass and asphalt it would be covered with brick office buildings with coppery windows.

 Though I have spent much time wandering through new towns trying to imagine what their creators could possibly have been thinking, I had never been to Milton Keynes. In many ways, it was much superior to any new town I had seen before. The underpasses were faced with polished granite and were largely free of graffiti and the permanent murky puddles that seem to be a design feature of Basingstoke and Bracknell.

 The town itself was a strange amalgam of styles. The grassless, shady strips along the centres of the main boulevards gave them a vaguely French air. The landscaped light industrial parks around the fringes looked German. The grid plan and numbered street names recalled America. The buildings were of the featureless sort you find around any international airport. In short, it looked anything but English.

 The oddest thing was that there were no shops and noone about. I walked for some distance through the central core of the town, up one avenue and down another and through the shadowy streets that connected them. Every car park was full and there were signs of life behind the gaping office windows, but almost no passing traffic and never more than one or two other pedestrians along the endless vistas of road. I knew there was a vast shopping mall in the town somewhere because I had read about it in Mark Lawson's The Battle for Room Service, but I couldn't for the life of me find it, and I couldn't even find anyone to ask. The annoying thing was that nearly all the buildings looked like they might be shopping malls. I kept spotting likely looking contenders and going up to investigate only to discover that it was the headquarters for an insurance company or something.

 I ended up wandering some distance out into a residential area a kind of endless Bovisville of neat yellowbrick homes, winding streets, and pedestrian walkways lined with nevergrow trees but there was still noone about. From a hilltop I spied a sprawl of blue roofs about threequarters of a mile off and thought that might be the shopping mall and headed off for it. The pedestrian walkways,which had seemed rather agreeable to me at first, began to become irritating. They wandered lazily through submerged cuttings, nicely landscaped but with a feeling of being in no hurry to get you anywhere. Clearly they had been laid out by people who had thought of it as a twodimensional exercise. They followed circuitous, seemingly purposeless routes that must have looked pleasing on paper, but gave no consideration to the idea that people, faced with a long walk between houses and shops, would mostly like to get there in a reasonably direct way. Worse still was the sense of being lost in a semisubterranean world cut off from visible landmarks. I found myself frequently scrambling up banks just to see where I was, only to discover that it was nowhere near where I wanted to be.

 Eventually, at the end of one of these muttered scrambles, I found that I was beside a busy dual carriageway exactly opposite the blueroofed sprawl I had begun searching for an hour earlier. I could see signs for Texas Homecare and a McDonald's and other such places. But when I returned to the footway I couldn't begin to work out how to get over there. The .paths forked off in a variety of directions, disappearing round landscaped bends, none of which proved remotely rewarding when looked into. In the end I followed one sloping path back up to street level, where at least I could see where I was, and walked along it all the way back to the train station, which now seemed so absurdly remote from the residential areas that clearly only a total idiot could possibly have thought that Milton Keynes would be a paradise for walkers. It was no wonder that I hadn't passed a single pedestrian all morning.

 I reached the station far more tired than the distance walked would warrant and gasping for a cup of coffee. Outside the station there was a map of the town, which I hadn't noticed on the way in, and I studied it now, dying to know where the shopping mall was. It turned out that I had been about a hundred feet from it on my initial reconnoitre of the town centre, but had failed to recognize it.

 Sighing, and feeling an unaccountable determination to see this place, I headed back through the pedestrian subways, over the open ground and back through the lifeless core of office buildings, reflecting as I went what an extraordinary piece of work it was for a planner, confronted with a blank sheet of paper and a near infinity of possibilities for erecting a model community, to decide to put the shopping centre a mile from the railway station.

 It seems almost impossible to believe, but the shopping centre was even worse designed than the town around it. Indeed, it must be a source of mirth wherever shoppingmall designers gather. It was absolutely enormous more than a million square feet and it contained every chain store that there has ever been or will ever be. But it was dark and determinedly unlovely and built along two straight, featureless parallel avenues that must run for half a mile. Unless in my delirium I overlooked them, and I think not, there was no foodx:ourt, no central gathering place, nowhere much to sit, no design feature to encourage you to warm to this place to even the most fractional degree. It was like being in the world's largest bus station. The toilets were few and hard to find, and in consequence were as crowded with users as if it were halftime at a football match. I had always thought of the Metro Centre at Gateshead as my worst nightmare made whole, but it is a place of infinite charm and endless delight compared with the mall at Milton Keynes.