It’s nothing to worry about.

Really. I’m sure it’s not.

Only… it is odd. It’s slightly disconcerting. It’s… a sort of digital haunting. Or an artifact of the system. Or perhaps just something I don’t properly understand.

I use Twitter. I’ve been using it since slightly before everyone suddenly discovered it. I incline to the belief that it is not a broadcast medium, nor a miniblog. I think the most exciting thing about it is the ease of making friends and meeting people. It is to Facebook what speed-dating is to going to a tea-dance.

Anyway. One of the features of Twitter is the Direct Message. You can only send a direct message to someone who is following your Twitter updates. In other words, you can only communicate privately and directly with someone who wants to hear from you. You can bellow at them in a crowded room all you like, of course, but they don’t have to listen.

Anyway, I have fifty Direct Messages in my inbox right now. Or fifty one. It changes. I never delete any. I haven’t received any for a few days. But I’ve never been able to find that 51st message. And now it’s eating at me.

What if the message is important? What if, somehow or other, it’s really important?

I’ve gone through the list. I’ve read all the messages I have. I’ve counted them. It doesn’t help. I just assume I’ve miscounted.

What if that 51st message is a secret? A warning? A message from another self, from a friend in trouble, from some part of Twitter which is alive and desperate to communicate?

When I look for it, it’s gone. When I’m convinced it’s a figment, it comes back.

Everything’s fine.

No cause for alarm.

I’m being silly.

I just wish I could read that 51st message.

Dear Mr Straw,

            I was delighted to read your splendid piece in the Guardian (Comment Is Free/”Our Record Isn’t Perfect…” 27th February 2009). You really are an amazing man! I haven’t laughed so much in years. No doubt those blighters at Bremner, Bird & Fortune will be stealing your jokes any day now. I think my favourite bit was where you said, with an absolutely straight face, that our democratic system was a guard against an intrusive state because a heavy-handed party could be voted out. And the way you said it really sounded as if you thought that wasn’t going to happen to you at the next election. Honestly, Jack Dee couldn’t have done it better.

            Like every good comic, you kept some of your best stuff for the last few lines. I love that little mention of the Freedom of Information Act, which was hilarious on so many levels – the fact that you have personally refused to comply with an FoI ruling in the last week, for example, or your colleague David Miliband’s recent and somewhat shaming encounters with the courts over possible British complicity in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, which appears to have taken place while you were Foreign Secretary.

            I think my favourite thing is what you don’t say: that it’s now an offence to take a picture of a bobby or possess information “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”. A lot of tourists will be in breach of that one, I fear. And of course, police officers regularly cite anti-terror laws in mundane situations and use them to harrass your legitimate opponents (at your own party conference, no less). Then, too, in a time of asymmetric warfare, almost any information of any kind could fall into that latter category – the location of a school; a bus timetable; a chemistry textbook. At least we’re all equal now – everyone’s guilty of something.

            There are one or two other details which really spice the pot – for example:

            42 Day Detention (you, of course, have recently expressed doubts over that, but voted in favour of 90 days, so one knows where your heart is);

            that brief attempt in 2005 to deploy evidence obtained by torture in British courts, which went all the way to the Law Lords; 

            those extremely expensive I.D. cards whose precise purpose – beyond monitoring our movements and controlling us more effectively – is hard to ascertain;

            and of course that DNA database which contains the samples of a large number of innocent people and children which the European Court of Human Rights has ordered you to dispose of, but which you propose, by sleight of hand, to retain.

            And then, to cap it all, that final, ringing line, delivered without a whiff of irony. I honestly don’t know how you do it, Mr Straw. I would have been unable to finish the gag – because you have not ‘extended liberties’ or ‘constrained government’ during your time in power. You have transformed a system which was arbitrary, unfair and bigoted into one which is universal, oppressive, and arrogant. And yet, with that glorious, Blairish disregard for reality which marks the best political comedy these days, you proclaim yourself a champion of civil liberties.

            You are a riot.

            Yours Sincerely,

            Nick Harkaway

[Edit: since I posted this, it's been reported that various government departments and similar routinely abuse anti-terror powers, and the Home Secretary has, apparently with absolute impunity, gone over the head of the court to order the arrest of five men in spite of a ruling that their bail should not be withdrawn. Whatever else, we live under a government which absolutely believes that executive power trumps law.]

Let’s talk about Slim Gaillard for a second…

Through no virtue of my own, I met this guy in about 1988. He played a gig in a theatre I worked in, and he was… brain bending. Which is obvious when you realise that that is twenty years ago and more and I actually remember it. I am not one of those people who can do that. I can barely remember last week.

I remember Gaillard playing the whole gig and then, at the end, turning his hands over and crossing them, and playing the last of the songs at the piano using his knuckles. Yeah. Not that thing where you lie on your back and play with your hands over your head. With his knuckles, which is a whole ‘nother level of impossible – consider, your hands are mirrored in that position – you have to use your little finger for the notes your thumb should play.

Gaillard was a master – a stream of consciousness improv artist and a very special kind of musician, the kind who can play with music and take it into a place which involves a live audience and makes them shout out loud with admiration, who also makes them feel part of the music.

Wikipedia talks about his broad appeal, and well, okay, yes, he absolutely had that. He appears in On The Road, which is cool. You can find him on YouTube. But the guys who worked with him told me, as we cleaned up after the gig, that his best stuff was the stuff he did for non-white audiences in places whites would, at that time, not go. He did shows in a mix of English and the various language of the black US population at the time, and he did it as jazz in its real sense, a music of revolution and cultural self-definition. Just a whisper of that here, maybe.

And here he is playing with his knuckles, in case you didn’t believe me – although by the time I saw it, he was much older, and played whole songs that way.

So, I don’t know what all that’s important on a Wednesday morning. It just is. Go buy some Gaillard, if you can find it, and see what I’m talking about.