Canberra! City of unexpected thrills and delights!
One morning last week, idly driving (with no particular place to go, and lonely as a cloud) around the shores of windswept Lake Burley Griffin, I pulled into a lakeside car park at the imaginatively signposted Yarralumla Beach.
To call Yarralumla's mean little artificially-installed strip of sand beside an artificial lake a "beach" stretches the notion of what a beach is but perhaps touchingly expresses landlocked Canberrans' wistful hankerings for the true seaside.
But I digress. Driving and parking on that morning I was in just the kind of melancholy mood (for we are living in melancholy, Trump-poisoning, Hanson-nagging times) that often enveloped sensitive, tormented Wordsworth on his long walks beside the windswept lakes of his Lake District.
But of course on the most famous of those long walks Wordsworth was lifted out of his miserabilism when "all at once" (his words) he saw "a host of golden daffodils". His masterpiece poem Daffodils, aka I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, describes the unexpected delight the spectacle of the breeze-jostled dancing daffodils gave him.
And lo, on this Canberra morning I was treated to an identical Wordsworthian lifting of my spirits, when, looking out through my car's windscreen at the wide panorama of the grey and gale-tossed lake, I saw daring men swathed in rubber costumes hurtling to and fro across the waters beneath the colourful kites of their kitefoiling boards.
I had never seen kitefoilers kitefoiling before (you can learn all about this relatively new sport online at The Comprehensive Guide to Kitefoiling) and was captivated by the whooshing, skimming, death-defying, sometimes-becoming-airborne spectacle of it.
The ferocious gale was making conditions ultra-ideal and exhilarating for the five or six obviously highly skilled kitefoilers. As an entertainment, the feats of the kitefoilers were amazing in the ways the superhuman feats of daring young men on a circus flying trapeze are amazing.
I was as transfixed by the kitefoilers as Wordsworth was by the spectacle of the 10,000-strong dancing "host of golden daffodils".
Wordsworth's great poem describes how long after his face-to-face interview with the daffodils, his happy memory of the event continues to do him a power of psychotherapeutic good. Me too, with my kitefoilers. As I look back and think about the spectacle, I realise what a joy it was to see the lake being used to give some actual pleasure to Canberrans.
It is an occasional grumpy theme of this column that Lake Burley Griffin is a vast, stagnant, dreary waste of space, its dreary wastefulness caused and enforced by anal-retentive, fun-throttling rules and regulations (especially applying to any craft powered by a motor, however inoffensively putt-putt) that prohibit almost every human activity that might happen in and on that poor, unfulfilled oversized billabong.
But I love my city and love to see its all-too-rare loosening of its civic corsets and so it did my heart immense Wordsworthian psychotherapeutic good to see it, this rare spectacle of some Canberrans making exuberant uses of their usually moribund lake's usually merely ornamental waters.
Everywhere where I attentively follow Australian political news and commentary, I find expressions of experts' bewilderment at the appeal that Pauline Hanson somehow has for those Australians (23 per cent of us, in the most recent poll to hand) for whom she is even the preferred prime minister.
It is a complex and many-faceted phenomenon but methinks (for I own up, blushing, that Hanson even has a perverse and limited appeal for educated, thinking, left-wing me) I catch a glimpse of one of those facets.
It is that Hanson and the reporting of her depraved utterances and shenanigans, entertains.
I pricked up my ears a few days ago (listening to ABC Radio National's always admirable Saturday Extra) when a cluey British commentator did his best to explain the otherwise inexplicable loathing of now-deposed UK prime minister Sir Keir Starmer. All polling showed him to be, in spite of him having no visible personality whatsoever and never doing or saying anything obviously offensive, the most despised UK prime minister ever.
And perhaps that's why he's been so despised, the commentator mused, because we have now become so shallow and entertainment-hungry (with social media at least partly to blame) that we can't forgive a dull celebrity (always in the news and so always radiating his or her dullness at us) for being dull. His or her failure to tickle us with jokes and with figurative conjuring tricks seems to us, in our shallow, fun-hungry state, a kind of crime against us.
If I pay special attention to this theory it is because I worry that my oft-expressed hostility towards that poor cabbage, our own painfully dull, cautious, waste-of-prime-ministerial-space prime minister (whose name escapes me for the moment) may say as much about my entertainment-hungry shallowness as it says about the worth of that prime minister (whose name still escapes me, I'm sorry).
We all need some colour in our lives. Wild colonial incautious Pauline Hanson's relative colourfulness (relative to the subdued, 50 shades of cabbage grey-green of our prime minister - even though Pauline's colours of opinion are lurid and vulgar) is somehow very welcome for those of us tragically sentenced to pay rapt attention to the hues of the Australian national public conversation.
