MK Today - Friday 10th March 2023

A bit of a rant and a rave today if I may.

When I was a kid it was considered bad manners to eat or drink as you walked along the street. Yes it was, the last thing you would have seen was somebody on the pavement clutching a cup of coffee !  If you did see such a happening it would have been your duty to call for an ambulance and have the unfortunate person taken off to the looney bin ! (A bit of out-dated and now politically incorrect language !)

Do you remember when there were notices in shops asking people not to use mobile phones while standing line waiting to be served ? That was around thirty years ago.

Dropping litter was once considered unacceptable. But back in those days in

contrast if your dog did a poo on the pavement you simply left it there. The edges of the pavement adjacent to the road was there ntr to delineate where motor vehicles and pedestrians belonged but to scrape dog poo off the sole of your shoes after you had accidentally stepped in it.

Speaking of dogs, call your vet and ask for an appointment. The receptionist is likely to say something like: Can you come along this afternoon or would tomorrow morning be better for you ?  Do the same for your doctor and providing your phone battery can  last long enough the response could well be: Do you by any chance have your diary for the year 2029 handy ?

I don’t wear glasses and certainly not rose tinted spectacles. I was born in the nineteen fifties, grew up and swung my way through the sixties, disco danced through the seventies, I was a yuppie (Do you know what one of those was) then gingerly stepped my way into older age. Now I am striding my way into Old, with a capital O - age. I do not by the way use a walking aid, in my day known as a walking stick !  In my opinion I am now living, you are living in a society where disrespect is the norm. We live in a society of ignorance and bad manners.

Milton Keynes is a filthy, scruffy city, something we all should be thoroughly and utterly ashamed of. At the beginning of last month I devoted an entire edition of MK Today to debating this situation. It is also a chapter in my book MILTON KEYNES THE CITY OF LEGEND. Litter is a legend we can do without. I tried to engage both my ward councillor and MP on the subject, both ignored my communications. Litter and the dropping of such = bad manners. Being a politician and ignoring communications from a real person = ignorance. (Ignoring being the verb and ignorance the noun.)

We have some truly beautiful parkland in Milton Keynes, my favourite and my Doggie Barnaby’s favourite place to walk is Ouzel Valley Park with Walton Lake and trees framing our unique centre of learning, the Open University. You do not need a degree from this world famous centre of academia to know that dropping litter is disrespectful. Actually it is more than that, it is harmful to wildlife. Some idiot after finishing a ridiculous cup of costa fortune coffee (small case letters) thought the right and proper thing to do was to throw the cup into the shrubbery adjacent to the path.

Dog poo is biodegradable but not so the brain cells of the semi-intelligent owners who think it acceptable to leave the poo where their canine left it. We have moved on from dog shit alley of the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. If your dog does a poo today you pick it up and take said substance to the nearest poo bin. They are everywhere so no excuse for leaving it on the floor. I live in West Bletchley where the parish council provides free poo bags. Free or purchased from the local pet shop why do so many people walking through Ouzel Valley Park scoop up then poo, tie off the top of the bag then throw it on the floor !

Could someone please invent a phone app to track and trace such offenders ?

If Boris Johnson or Matt Handcock were to let their dogs poo and leave such where it fell no doubt the dog-poo-media would blaze such on its front pages.

Parkland in Milton Keynes is beautifully maintained by the Milton Keynes Parks Trust, it is disrespected by the Milton Keynes Dog Poo and Litter Mistrust.

Looney bin !  Let me be a little less twenty-first century political incorrect and dip into my nineteen sixties thesaurus: Funny Farm !

My generation’s colloquial for a telephone was to call it the blower. Blowers were provided by the GPO – General Post Office which had its regional training centre in Bletchley Park occupying the mansion which during the war had been the home of the codebreakers. Nowhere within such was there anyone who could have predicted the enigmatic folly of a mobile blower later to become the smart blower. Can a person blow smart ?

It is no secret that I hate, I despise, I totally loathe smart phone. If you were to gather together all the litter to be found in our city and pile it high on top of all the dog poo needing to be picked up across our parkland such would not equal the disrespect and ignorance of a single smart phone user.

In the Swinging Sixties if a kid wanted to ride a bicycle it was required, not by law but by society, to pass the Cycling Proficiency Test. Is there such a thing as the Cycling Proficiency Test today or is it now simply nothing more than an ap on a phone !  It is illegal to drive a motorised vehicle while using a phone, it is NOT illegal to ride a bicycle while using a phone.

Are you old enough to remember the Green Cross Code – look left, look right then look left again ? Again I am obliged to ask if this is now also a phone ap, people use them to cross the road neither looking left not right let alone looking left again. All they need to do is to look at their dumbo stupid smart phone.

We live in a society of ignorance and bad manners. Make that we live in a CITY of ignorance and bad manners.

Rant over.