Mist makes Canberra's most mundane features marvellously magical

How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets.

How much better to command the simple precinct of home

than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica ...

- Billy Collins' poem 'Consolations'

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How agreeable it is going to be (to echo Billy Collins' famous poem about the joy of not doing something) to not attend the Lunch With Tucker Carlson event at the Hyatt Hotel being serially advertised on the front page of The Canberra Times.

How agreeable it is going to be not to pay $190 to listen to the racist, conspiracy-theorist, misogynist, Trump-mongering US media clown-figure (his most recent achievement his much-ridiculed obsequious interview with Vladimir Putin) gibbering to a conference choreographed by the disagreeable Clive Palmer.

What rapture it will give to be somewhere else in Canberra at 1pm on that Tuesday, doing something else.

For my part, I am quite likely to instead be playing agreeable petanque with agreeable companions in idyllically agreeable Weston Park. It is what I usually do on Tuesday afternoons. And on this particular Tuesday I dare say I will take a moment, perhaps as I pause in my match to polish my boules, to dwell on the delight being given me by not being at lunch with Tucker Carlson and Clive Palmer.

Billy Collins' wise poem and the rapture one is looking forward to on Tuesday June 25 (the rapture of not lunching with Tucker Carlson and Palmer disciples) moves one to think of so many things it is agreeable not to do.

How agreeable it is to have never read and to have no intention of reading John Howard's memoir, A Sense of Balance, or Scott Morrison's memoir/Christian self-help book, Plans For Your Good: A Prime Minister's Testimony of God's Faithfulness (hardcover $44.99).

How agreeable it will be not to vote for the Canberra Liberals at October's ACT elections, and how especially agreeable it will be too not to vote for the Independents for Canberra star candidate. He is a sturdy policeman, whose only qualification for office seems to be that he has called youthful hoon drivers "a subspecies", thereby making himself agreeable to law-and-order septuagenarian curmudgeon fossils who hate the young for being young.

How agreeable it always is not to go to Floriade and to never sign the petitions of NIMBYs.

Mention, above, of Canberra and rapture in the same breath, in the same paragraph, moves me to report a very recent (in fact last Monday) soul-stoking unique-to-Canberra experience.

Bear with me while I line up that report with the thought that although the site chosen for the federal capital city (winning the famous 'battle of the sites' of which I am a much-published historical authority) was not chosen for its fogs, those fogs have turned out to be a great beautifier and (no pun intended) mystifier of the city.

Canberra, with an average of 47 fogs a year, is by far the most fog-blessed of Australian cities. Brisbane and Sydney are lucky if they manage 20 and 15 fogs a year respectively, with Sydney's fogs not only so feebly few in number but also famously ephemeral (now you see them, now you don't) while Canberra's fogs can have a glamorous stamina that enables them to palely loiter for quite some time.

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And one has to be a philistine, blind to beauty, not to appreciate fog's and mist's beautifying powers. The sensitive observer agrees with Evan Firestone when he rhapsodises in his mighty coffee-table book Mist and Fog in British and European Painting about how "Mist and fog engender fascination and mystery, enticing with their wispy veils and vaporous moods. They are the stuff of dreams and visions."

"Mist and fog obscure, conceal and when they dissipate, reveal," Firestone marvels.

"Vaporous atmosphere in art and life ... can convey the splendours of the spiritual world and the terrors of the supernatural..."

And sure enough on Monday morning, on elevated places in the National Arboretum, first atop Dairy Farmers Hill and then atop the hill decorated with the Wide Brown Land sculpture, one beheld mist and fog engendering fascination and mystery, dreams and visions in usually unremarkable Canberra vistas.

So for example the usually unremarkable, unlovely, bald new suburbs of Molonglo, with mist and fog obscuring and then transforming, revealing and enhancing them, were turned into places of fascination and mystery, into a suburban Promised Land.

From atop the Wide Brown Land hill and with fog decorating and half-concealing it with wispy veils, the normally grotesque Black Mountain Tower became a feature of an ornate fairytale palace-castle. It looked not unlike the palace-castle set designs presented in the Bolshoi Ballet's sumptuous productions of Swan Lake.

For a moment the first time I saw the tower on Monday morning, the fog's wispy veils drawn aside for a moment to half-reveal it, I didn't recognise it and didn't know what it was and gave an involuntary "Gosh!" of awed delight.

Just like John Howard in his autobiographical A Sense of Balance, the columnist who writes about the federal capital city must strive for a sense of balance. And so in this column you have seen mention of Canberra at its mediocre worst (in the Independents' choice of a made-famous-by-one-remark policeman as a candidate) and then, transformed by fog, at its splendid and spiritual and supernatural best.