Milton Keynes first came to prominence in my life when I ordered tickets for David Bowie at Wembley in ’84(?). These were Bowie’s first concerts for a few years and so ticket demand was high. So high in fact that the three Wembley shows were sold out. However, the Thin White Duke, under the careful mentoring of Harvey Goldsmith, added a further three dates to be performed at the Milton Keynes Bowl to cater for the ticket demand for the Wembley shows.* As is often the way with my luck, I was unable to attend the concerts because I was away on holiday and I wasn’t yet at the age when my parents would allow me to stay at home while they had their annual two weeks.

This is a rather long introduction to the main body of the post. My daughter has a very good taste in music. By which I mean she likes a lot of what I like. She will often borrow the Smiths CDs, or I’ll find the bulk of my Cure selection missing. Anyhow, I decided it was time to give her a thorough grounding in Mr Bowie. I pulled out Ziggy and Hunky and put them on the player and let the music permeate her ears.

However, I was shocked that she had never heard the wonders of ‘Life on Mars’, ‘Oh you pretty things’ and ‘The Jean Genie’ and many others of the, as I believed, common knowledge catalogue. On discovering this I exclaimed that ‘she hadn’t lived!’ To which she replied that another of her friends had said the same to her, about not having been to the new Ikea in MK.

It seems what qualifies as quality of life is very subjective in MK.

*Notice how over twenty years later MK is still helping out when Wembley can’t manage to host some gigs – Robbie