Why do I bother even checking my Myspace messages, when most of them are either along the lines of this:

“Hey, I noticed in your profile that your [sic] into interesting music,
you may like to check out ours…”

Or:

“Do you want to track who is visiting your MySpace page? Sign up here.”

Or:

“This user has had their profile deleted before you’ve even read their message. A waste of time all round, really, isn’t it?”

I have a perfectly serviceable email address. Quite why this has to be eschewed in favour of a message system that’s saturated with ads and doesn’t even work properly is beyond me. My MySpace profile even tells people I only regularly check my direct email, not my MS page. And yet, I get streams of pointless advertising and bored souls suddenly popping out of the ether to tell me they quite like my funny name, or my funny look, or that they quite like one of my favourite films. Direct email has more consideration, in every sense. Which surely makes it more attractive. Consideration and deliberation.

I would delete the page, but feel I should hang onto it for the same reason I hang onto a mobile phone. It’s not so much going with the crowd – which is the very reverse of my philosophy – but knowing that you must never turn your back on the crowd’s preferred methods of communication. You have to be contactable on others’ terms, in order to exist on yours.

My three DJ gigs last week were all very enjoyable. I’m not exactly one of those DJs who show off their mixing and matching of tempos and the like – I just play records.

I suppose I’m a DJ who doesn’t like DJ culture (which is also the name of a rather tuneless single by the Pet Shop Boys). I can barely bring myself to even type the phrase ‘mash up’, let alone attempt such a thing on the ‘decks’. My aloofness helps – I like to think I’m playing to the one person in the room who feels the most alone. It’s all too easy to feel alone in a crowded room, far more so than when you’re at home by yourself.

At How Does It Feel on Sat, I manage to play Judy Garland, Ute Lemper, Bugsy Malone selections and so on alongside the Chills ‘Heavenly Pop Hit’ and Dressy Bessy’s fantastically sassy two-chord delight, ‘Girl, You Shout’, with HDIF host Ian Watson’s specific encouragement. He pointed out that the whole idea of being a guest DJ is that you play the sort of thing a club doesn’t normally hear. That said, I was torn between playing what I wanted to hear, and what I thought people would get up and dance to. Still found myself reaching lazily for ‘Roadrunner’ when I should have gone with Dory Previn’s ‘Yada Yada La Scala’ or the Shock Headed Peters’ ‘I Bloodbrother Be’. Next time, I’ll be more assertive. This Thursday is Beautiful & Damned, and if I can’t be assertive in my own club, where can I be?

The aloofness also helps bat off people requesting something you haven’t got. I’m getting quite good at maintaining an expression evincing something along the lines of “I suspect you’re going to ask me to play something I haven’t got. Don’t even think it. I am not of your world. Not with those shoes.”

Taylor Parkes tells me of his newly born son. For the name, I suggested Dickon. It was worth a shot. He’s toying with ‘Mohammed’, if only to make life more interesting; the boy is Caucasian. He was joking.

I’m happy for Mr P, though I wonder if this means he’ll gradually revise his social circle to increase the parent to childless wastrel ratio among his friends, as many parents naturally do. Most of my acquaintances are childless, even the ones over 35. It’s not that I find the childless more interesting, it’s that people with children rarely seek to know me. Babies are narcissists by default, and I’m a narcissist by admission. There may be a conflict of self-interest.

Actual children I tend to get on with, having baby sat for years, though never for actual babies. It’s the under 3s I can’t deal with. All that lying in bed and screaming for undeserved attention: I get enough of that at home.

What does fascinate me is the business of naming. If you don’t name your child within six weeks of its birth, the Government fines you. And then, I wonder, does it allocate a name itself, like orphans and foundlings, going through the alphabet? “We’re up to C. We haven’t had a Carruthers in this parish for a while, so…”