“How many times do I have to tell you Zoe? Turn it down!”

I looked up from my twin record decks at my mum, standing in the bedroom doorway and shooting her spikiest glare at me. I was monitoring the track I was lining up through one headphone, covering my left ear. The other headphone was resting behind my right ear, so I could listen to the track coming out of the speakers.

“You’re fourteen, Zoe, you know the score,” she snarled. “Some of us are trying to earn money so that people like you can be fed and clothed.”

Here we go again - the old guilt trip routine. It’s one of her favourites. I reckon she spends hours in front of the mirror perfecting it to achieve maximum impact.

It was a Tuesday – one of those bright September late afternoons. I’d only been back at school few weeks, and thankfully the teachers hadn’t started persecuting us yet. I was hoping to get a long mixing session in before supper. Mum clearly didn't share my enthusiasm for this idea.

Reaching for the ‘up fader,’ I killed the speakers. This generous act would have satisfied most people on the planet, but not Mum. She didn't show the slightest indication of budging. The tune continued to spill out of from the headphones, which were now nestling around my neck.

“I can still hear it,” she said crossly.

I sighed as loudly as I could, removed the headphones and put them down on my mixer. I carefully lifted the needles off both records and my room was suddenly silent.

“Happy now?” I enquired sulkily.

“There’s a crucial deadline tomorrow” she informed me, “and not surprisingly, I’m finding it hard to concentrate. It’s a bit difficult working with that racket thumping through the floorboards. I’ve been shouting at you for ages.”

What is it about parents? They ask you to follow an instruction and when you do what they want, instead of singing a hymn of thanks or organising a street party to celebrate, they spend the next half an hour going on about why it took you so long to do it.

Mum works for a big firm of architects. Unlike most of my friends’ parents she blurs the distinction between work and home. When she’s under any sort of pressure (which is most days) she brings a trail of architectural hassle into our house. Plus she hates commuting to town on the London Underground and is always moaning about it.

Don’t get me wrong, she can be a top mum when she wants to be, and at times she offers brilliant support/ideas/cash. And when she’s not too snowed under, I can really talk to her about important stuff. But her job drives me crazy. And as if to pay me back for this stance, she carries around an industrial-sized bee in her bonnet about my passion for music.

She hadn’t quite finished her doorway rant.

“If you put as much time into your schoolwork as the hours you spend with your records, you’d be a genius” she moaned.

I scowled at her.

“DJing isn’t a job, Zoe.”

This second statement revealed a gaping hole in her knowledge of the music world and I was happy to put her right.

“DJing is a job for certain people” I calmly explained to her. “And if you hadn't noticed, DJs are often extremely rich and famous. So, if someone’s got to be a DJ, it might as well be yours truly.”

DJ Zed. That’s me.

Of course it’s not my real name. To everyone else I’m Zoe Wynch, but if you want to make it as a top mixer you need a great stage name. In terms of my career, I’ve only actually ever done one gig. And that was my mate Becky’s little sister’s birthday party. All of the partygoers said I was great. But how seriously can you take a bunch of nine-year-olds?