Belsize Park, 1971. ‘Get a job or we’re through,’ she said. So I fetched up at Bletchley station. High street – drab, monochrome, austere. A Wimpy bar, Woolworths; a record booth playing Grace – Slick not Amazing, though AG’s birthplace not far from here, in pancake-race Olney, and Marshall Amps just round the corner. Now that was amazing!

Got the job. Somehow stayed for fifty years while the new city sneaked up around me. Synthetic, no heart (they sneered). Bletchley, Newport Pagnell, Wolverton, Stony Stratford – all now locked together in a Lego frame of grid roads, roundabouts and cheap and cheerful housing estates somehow award-winning. First, a room in a frugal, pin-drop-quiet Soulbury vicarage. Then a flat above a greengrocers in Woburn Sands. Friday nights in the Royal Oak with young pre-Raphaelite types and me a boozy, would-be Kerouac. The deep pine Brickhills up the hill, brooding over the flat North Bucks plain.  Clambering up my outside metal staircase after closing time to listen to the Allmans, Little Feat and Zappa in that weed-choked room – our minds spiralling away over the burgeoning city.

Milton Keynes took shape. The concrete cows a perfect metaphor: gauche at first but soon hipster cool. Orphaned roads and roundabouts joined hands. Suddenly, a new shopping mall with vast pedestrianised freeways of glass fronted facades and then – ‘hey presto!’ – an indoor ski slope. Superman once seen flying past John Lewis (Batman failed the audition). And then, of course, ‘The Point.’ Avant-garde. Jaw dropping. Saw Back to the Future there with my mouth-gaping young son. Alas now a sprawling charity shop. As George once observed, ‘All things must pass’. But not this city. Not yet. We even pinched a football club from London. ‘MK Dons’ – clever eh? Connotations of London, the Wombles and the OU? Cryptic crossword clue, perhaps?

And then I met my wife and tried growing up. First, Simpson village (walks to mother OU across fields hugging the winding Ouzel). Ending up in Stony Stratford. Here among the water meadows, leafy lanes and gentrified high street, we made a home and, in that home, a family. Bike rides with my toddler son strapped to the back seat, giggling as I sang silly songs. Wolverton Mill where one summer we discovered a coiled adder basking on the river bank. Christmas given new meaning. My toddler daughter, tinsel-tousled, misreading ‘the trees are getting winter’ from a Peter Rabbit story. Heart smitten. Always. And the London Road allotment – a refuge from life’s worries. So prolific, friends quickly closed their curtains when I sauntered down the hill with my wheelbarrow looking to give away a surfeit of rhubarb. In my heart an outsider, but thrillingly once invited to join the Masons (I politely declined).

And now she’s gone and I’m suddenly old but the city goes on. Not so much a tale this, but a clutch of memories from one life. There are 275,000 of them in this city. Each different. Each worth telling.