I seldom come across them now (while always setting my dog on them when I do see them in public places) but used to see a lot of them while covering election campaigns.

At big Liberal Party rallies they were always the cheerleaders and factotums, usually wriggling their plump young bodies (Young Liberals are always plump, presumably from a surfeit of upper-class foods) into T-shirts decorated with the face of the leader of the day. I'm old enough to remember an election where for one jamboree in a Melbourne town hall they wriggled their plump young bodies into T-shirts decorated with the ugly, shifty face of Liberal leader Billy Snedden, and remember struggling to understand a fanaticism so fanatical as that.

I remember too as if yesterday how one young Liberal woman's pneumatic bosom, hidden beneath and wrapped by her hero's head, made the already odd Snedden head bulge in surreal ways.

It is one of those memories one would like to dispense with but which the brain won't let go of.

But why do Young Liberals make the flesh creep?

It's partly that they're always so neat and tidy and smooth and coiffed and cosmetically painted (one never sees a rumpled Young Liberal or one with any facial hair) and smelling of expensive perfumes and after shaves.

But then there's the way that anyone who chooses to be a Liberal when they are young is illustrating the famous idea that youth is wasted on the young.

To be socially and politically Jones-admiringly conservative when young is an ugly thing.

Someone who is not attracted, when young, to radical, exciting, idealistic, wrong-righting, justice-making, let's-change-the-world ideas is displaying great intellectual and emotional dullness. He or she needs counselling. One should only join the Liberal Party, if one must join it at all, when one is about 52 and, embittered by life and with one's sex life withered away to nothing, one has given up all hope of ever feeling exuberant again about anything.

The Jones imbroglio, involving that gangrenous broadcaster, has coincided with my radical experiment on myself, mentioned in two recent columns, of forsaking my favourite radio station ABC Radio National so as to listen instead to FM104.7.

Just to recap, the most recent findings for radio listenership in Canberra showed FM104.7 trouncing every other station yet again. Meanwhile, my fancy that half of Canberra (allegedly the best-educated, most clever city in Australia and perhaps the world) must surely be joining me in listening to ABC Radio National, was dashed by Nielsen's latest figures.

They seemed to show that so few Canberrans listen to radio National that Nielsen can't find a sufficient trace of them to mention in its Canberra listener statistics.

ABC Radio National is all about ideas while FM104.7, whenever I've trespassed into it, has always sounded like loud Americanised gibberings, condom ads and pounding US music in which youngsters shrill about lust.

And yet, to properly understand his city, I reasoned, one should step out of comfort zones and share what the masses enjoy. Shockingly, I've not found my FM104.7 fortnight shocking at all, although it's good, now, to be back in the Ideas World of Radio National. There were no ideas at all on FM104.7 but this became rather seductive.

What I've learned, and suspect this is true for lots of people of my age and generation (67 looms for me), is that my pre-TV childhood had such a reliance on the radio (without TV as an alternative) that there's an instinct for listening attentively, even politely to it.

We expect radio to inform, educate and stimulate, and we use it, like university lectures, to improve our minds. This is probably a very, very old-fashioned use and expectation of a radio.

But FM104.7 isn't designed to be listened to with one's ears pricked up. Nothing ever said or played on it is ever so important or interesting that we give it undivided attention. It is a kind of background burble and jangle of sound (somehow preferable to silence, especially in this quiet city where the silence is sometimes the silence of the grave) to be a background while we get ready for work and school, while we commute, while we get on with life's essentials. It is mindless but mindlessness has its place.

For a tertiary-educated oldie like me even the radio I listen to while I'm commuting needs to be saying and teaching something, tweaking the mind and the imagination.

But I do forgive and understand younger people who don't want anything of the sort, and over my fortnight have really rather enjoyed commuting to FM104.7's generally bouncy, optimistic and sexy music.

One arrives at work or at home really rather invigorated by it while commuting to Radio National can be to arrive at one's destination in a melancholy, intellectual mess, often angry at the world, having been given too much to worry about.

Commuting to FM104.7 one bounds across the threshhold at work or at home with the exuberance (and alas, till the influence wears off, the attention span too) of an English springer spaniel puppy.