A world picnic where everyone is nice to each other

See? Milton Keynes can organise the equivalent of the Notting Hill Carnival anytime it likes. This particular carnival day was set up by a lady who went off to be a primary school teacher.

She thought the world would be alright if all we people - with our different ideas, faiths, beliefs, attitudes, and opinions - would just decide to be nice to each other; if we sat down for a day together on the grass in the park, brought our picnics, and listened to all the bands play different music.

That's what we do, more or less. We all manage ourselves very well. We sit around, probably like they do on the first day at primary school, ignoring each other, watching the strange ones behave oddly over by the giant speakers, sharing our sweeties with our friends, and suffering the occasional opportunistic exhortations to find Jesus with a curious patience and without resorting to kick boxing.

So there are no punch ups, no effing and blinding round the teapot, and no offence taken. Well, Squirrel tried, but it just wasn't enough to cause a riot.

Where is Milton Keynes?

Um, can't help you.


It's around here somewhere.


Maybe we're close to it now.


If I find it I'll let you know.


Wherever it is,


It has some cracking playgrounds.

A relaxing day watching pole dancers and a giant tea service

Thank you, Milton Keynes, for the World Picnic and the IF festival. Bravo!

How beautiful is this?

Architects of Air at the Milton Keynes festival of the senses, IF.

These people, they drop from the sky

We had a visitor today. The best sort of visitor to have at The Pile. Big Kate. All the way from California, USA.

Here is Big Kate.


She has that name on account of weighing in about six stone.

Bronzed, athletic, lean, all sunny state, fresh breath air, white teeth, CA. Standing next to her, I look like repairs are needed on the Hoover Dam. Remember that ancient watery pit straddled somewhere between heavy cow state and miserable dry desert?

Big Kate is the perfect visitor. Mostly because she has that happy, laid-back, easy going, West Coast air. She's unfazed and cool, no matter what indignities are served up to her.

Like lunch. The only thing I muster looks suspiciously like breakfast was swept up from the floor and deposited on a plate. Shark saves me, by making three or four varieties of sweet biscuits, whereupon we hold a biscuit-eating competition and see who's first to get a sugar high. I bet you don't get sugary thighs like ours in LA, I tell Big Kate. I bet over in CA they see fatball beauties like these as moral turpitude. She's so good, she just smiles and nibbles away and declares those butter biscuits delicious.

After lunch I drive the amiable Big Kate to Milton Keynes, where there's an art festival. I'm proud of this. It doesn't involve wicker, dead cats, plates of bologna or anything like that. It is a fantastic festival of light, sound, movement and sensory experience. It is IF. You should all know about it. It's just another reason why thousands of people think Milton Keynes is a vibrant and innovative place to live.

Anyway, Big Kate doesn't complain once. Not once! Even though I bet she's tempted. And, let's face it, there's plenty to complain about. Like the six foot piles of trash inside the car; the ride with triplets lined up on the back seat like a deadly assault weapon; the chaotic way Grit drives over pavements.

But there's Big Kate, so good and cool a visitor, she never mentions it. Nor declares how Milton Keynes does not for one moment compare to places like Los Angeles.

If she did, I would say Milton Keynes is pretty hot competition to LA. We have crime, shopping, fake tans, prostitution, disease, wannabe starlets, and gutter dressers. You just go out on a Saturday night down the back of the Point! Big Kate takes it all in her stride, even though she's probably starting to miss the civilizing comforts of CA. She even says, she kindalikes MK.

And why not? MK has the marvellous Manège Carré Sénart. All ours, for two weeks! Yeah, beat that, LA. All the little grits go on that magic carousel, and one even cries, sniffing it was scary and they thought they were going to get stuck. Howabout that for life on the cutting edge in a shit-hot town somewhere in Bucks?


To bring us down to earth, I take Big Kate and the little grits to an abandoned Sainsbury's supermarket building.

Janek Schaefer, sound artist, has installed a load of cars here, and called it Asleep at the Wheel. To Grit, it's amazing, and she nearly resolves to clean out the car, remove the two-year old desiccated banana skins from the glove box, and sell it to Janek for art. It shows MK is a cultural hub, right?

Big Kate agrees. She says it's amazing too. And Milton Keynes is truly like California. She might be working hard to be nice there. I don't know.


But all too soon, it's time to drop Shark at the lake for her sailing club, while the remaining grits fall out in the playground. We have to say good bye to our lovely visitor. Big Kate has to climb on a train for London. Next week's stop is home and back to work in California.

Big Kate, we'll miss you once again. Bring your California glow and come to see us next year. I bet if you think about it, you'd agree, that life in CA is not a patch on life at The Pile and the empty Sainsbury's in downtown MK.

Thank you, Milton Keynes

Thank you for envisioning a town built around parkland.

Thank you for bringing here the types of outspoken, committed people we like.

Thank you for creating and maintaining inspiring playgrounds, which we discover on our journey, and never knew about before today.






And thank you, Milton Keynes, for nicking Ed Balls. Driving while talking on his mobile phone.

You just gave me one more reason why I love you.

Day out with the rozzers, fuzz, blue meanies

Gawdhelpus here we are dahn the copshop with the ole ducks and geese farkinghell.


Can you believe that? Here I am at the Police Station in Milton Keynes! I'm not even frogmarched down there with my arm twisted round my back!

And why? It's not the day that Grit has to turn up shifty-looking and shamefaced to show her driving licence. Nor collect her Notice of Intended Prosecution. Nor deal with any summons of any kind, give a statement, or receive a ticking off. None of those. Keep guessing.

You give in, don't you? We went entirely voluntarily. And it's called educational visit.

Howabout that! Here's one in the eye for all the arsefaces that claim home educators live on the fringes of society. How many times have they visited the cop shop on an educational outing then eh? How many? Na-na-na-na-nana!

Ha! Well, now she has done a spot of righteous gloating, delighted to prove home education is nothing about being excluded from society, but all about being smackbangrightinthemiddleofit, here's a photograph of a police horse.


And after the talk down the stables about horses being police officers we were shown the riot van.

Don't look shifty, Tiger. Last time it was different. In you go.


Do you recognise it Tiger? This is probably the same one we sat in while mama was having to fess up all her criminal ways that day we'd just visited the psychologist and had the car smash. Ah! Those were the days!


Then we toured the identification suites, but I'm not allowed to photograph those, obviously. There might be crims alooking at my blog and I cannot blow the gaff on the sneaky ways the coppers have of nabbing the miscreants.

All doing, the little grits declare the visit first class, and mama says the PR was excellent. So very good in fact that it has turned me away from a life of crime guvnor that's for sure. Now we recommend you all take your kids down the cop shop as soon as you get your educational group together and have those essential life discussions about the role of the police in British society. *

It was so exciting indeed, that Grit ran red lights all the way home.

* And if you home ed, we're following last year's Mad Science workshop on forensic analysis, last month's vidi on the history of the British Police Force, and now Grit is all set to dip into a spot of Sherlock Holmes and Wilkie Collins The Moonstone.

Hard to beat

Here's Shark, looking shifty at the edge of a freezing cold field in Milton Keynes.

Because when this photograph was taken, everyone has glumly come to the conclusion that mama has outdone herself. Late by one year. The Parks Walk we turn up for at 10am this morning was 1st January 2009 and not 2010.

So with no-one at the meeting point, except us and five red pinched noses, things are looking bad.

And mama suggests we all go for a lovely walk as a family, since we turned up for that purpose, shame to waste it, and the day is shockingly blue and sparkly iced. Let's have fun!

Hmm. I am failing to detect enthusiasm for that suggestion, especially since the gritlets were wrapped up toasty warm like slugs in blankets at 9.35 before Mummy Grit jackbooted in and whipped off the covers.

But I'm not giving up. This home education life travels outdoors in 2010, unless you cling onto the door frames again. Now come down here and see where it leads.

To ice! Fantastic! Told you so. Now I get to wear the Hat of Righteousness. Because if you are aged nine, ice is fun! Especially if you smash great lumps of it with the heel of your foot and see with satisfaction the ripple of breakage you can cause six metres away.



But then! Just as we are engaged in destroying what nature has so kindly provided, past us struggle a raggedy cold walking group. Guess what? Mama gets to don the Double Hat of Righteousness and it's not even midday! Because here is the walking group! We were at the meeting point EARLY. Now we join that 2-hour walk round lake and field.



And if that is not my best, most satisfying and righteous moment so far of 2010, it is shortly overtaken by another ...

Can you see that? Shark, Tiger and Squirrel ARE STROKING A DOG.

Now any reader of grit's day knows that the fear of dogs for Tiger and Squirrel is so overpowering, they would rather never leave the house than meet one of these slobbering demon creatures that lick their own arses and then come and sniff your ankles, like you might be next on the menu.

My dearest Shark, Squirrel and Tiger. I have used strategy after strategy. I have held hands, offered dark glasses, talked fear management techniques, stood between you and demon dog, let you hang round my shoulders until you just about broke my neck. But look here! We never had to feed the dog rohypnol or sedate the kids with Tixylix.

Here is dog. Here are kids. It all just is. This could be the breakthrough we have sought. And this moment, combined with a bright shining blue day and, for once in my life, turning up somewhere early, makes this the best day yet of 2010.

If you're coming to this blog looking for evidence against home educators, add this

Here is Shark, outside BHS in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre.


You can say Evidence! This home educator humiliated her poor daughter by forcing her to face the wall in a public place to complete her homework!

Proof. Home ed should be banned, to protect the vulnerable.

My fantastic list of crimes, misdeeds and madnesses is coming along nicely, isn't it? I might do unicorn horn chopping next, or driving round Leicester, naked.

Well, it's a better line than saying this is a geology lesson.

This BHS wall is faced with marble, which you all know is a building material also used for gravestones, ornaments and worksurfaces. And it's a metamorphic rock, which is mainly why we're here, looking at the patterns and talking about heat and pressure under the earth and what that does to all the minerals and chemicals and fantastic bits that make up rock.

Not as exciting a story as driving round Leicester, naked, huh?

For me, the most wonderful rock is Travertine. Here it is.


Imagine a huge bubbling bath that you're going to leave for thousands of years. Every so often the water is just the lovely right temperature for lots of algae to grow, and they're joined by great gloopy lumps of bacteria and little creatures, having a fantastic time swimming about in that lovely warm bath.

Then someone turns on the tap, and out pours a load more water, mud, silt, and tiny carbonate particles like bits of melted pearl or crushed up snail shell.

That tapload bashes the surface, ripping up and killing off the algae, and lays down a new top layer of mud and silt.

But don't worry, after a few more thousand years the algae's grown back. Then you can turn on the tap again.

Give it long enough, and the whole lot solidifies. And now you can see it in Milton Keynes Shopping Centre. It's called Travertine. It's a sedimentary rock, and here it's all over the floors and walls. Can you see those layers? The darker lines are mud and the lighter lines are algae. It's fantastic. I love it.


When we've done with Travertine, we go off and look at Gabbro, and a pretty pink granite and a blood-red granite.


It's all thanks to one of those experts we know from this education world, fantastically filled with opportunity, should you take it. So a public thanks to Jill Eyers for one of her walking guides, Rocks Afoot.

But I know a geology lesson is not a crime. And if you've come here looking for that evidence of our sordid lifestyle, then this is bound to be a disappointment. Sorry. I promise to do better with the madness and naked driving thing.

But look on the bright side. You can always accuse me of being a smugbastard highhorsed granolaeating homeeducator who definitely lives on the fringes of society because we went all that way to CMK and never even bought an acrylic jumper.