The shops' enlightened supermarket and the supermarket's enlightened manager Manuel Xyrakis have become our city's first hosts of a bin/box into which dog lovers can place donations of things essential to dogs. Especially welcome are non-perishable dog foods, treats, snacks, bowls, collars, poo bags, leashes and toys. The donations will go to the splendid ARF (ACT Rescue and Foster) organisation, its praises much sung in this column (it has rescued and rehomed over 2600 dogs since 2001 and does much more). The blue bin is smallish and portable, and at every day's close of supermarket business it will be rolled indoors.

Monday's congregation on the pavement included some terrific brutes. There was everything from two statuesque ex-racing greyhounds retrieved from the accursed greyhound racing industry to a tiny terrier the size and shape of a silky tuft of grass. In coming to grips with these dear beasts a hands-on reporter does get a little drooled over.

Some humans, too, were very pleased to see The Canberra Times represented there on Monday, but, more inhibited than dogs, they successfully fought the impulsive desire to lick my face.

Social climbing, I went and sat on a low wall between Mindy (a small terrier of indeterminate breed) and Leroy, a Brittany gun dog, to listen to the flurry of informal speeches. At first Leroy paid little attention to the speeches, attention spans not being the strength of spanielesque breeds.

Carolyn Kidd of Dogs On The Run (a dog-walking business) is a prime mover and shaker of the idea. She explained how in January this year and in an enlightened corner of New Zealand she had come across a supermarket with its doors decorated with a bin accepting donations for humans on one side and donations for pets (on behalf of the NZ equivalent of our RSPCA) on the other.

The store's manager explained to her that shoppers were in the habit, now, of buying little treats for dogs in the store and then dropping them in the bin as they, the shoppers, left. Ms Kidd dared to dream that the latter might be introduced to Canberra and once home was quick to waylay manager Manuel Xyrakis in one of his supermarket's aisles to put the idea to him. She rejoiced that this supermarket had always been "progressive ... so far ahead of its time" (for example stocking gluten-free wares long before this was a commonplace thing to do), and so she beetled along to this store "and just grabbed him [Manuel Xyrakis] in an aisle".

"And he just without even thinking or blinking or hesitating just gave us a huge 'Yes'."

"When Carolyn approached me in the aisle," manager Xyrakis reminisced with a chortle, "I thought 'Oh no. What's this?' But straightaway I liked the idea. I have two dogs myself a field spaniel and a spoodle. Dogs have always been in our family all our lives. It was something different but after a little brainstorming we thought 'Why not. It's a great idea'. We're proud to be part of this. I hope it multiplies and multiplies."

Leroy was listening by now but was clearly struggling with a long word like "brainstorming" and struggling even more (for dogs are not intellectuals) with the concept the word describes.

The blueness of the pioneering bin at Ainslie is not just a random choice. It is not that any colour bin, even a tartan one, would have done. No, as reported here at the time, in April 2015, Telopea High School student and ARF supporter Shen Morincombeundertook in collaboration with ARF a science project. He took ARF donation boxes of various colours into public places.

His idea, he explained to us, was to find out what colour people are more attracted to when asked to donate money and put it in a collection box. He thought the findings might prove useful for struggling not-for-profit organisations, helping them to know which colour people are most attracted to when asked to be philanthropic. On one of his vigils he was accompanied by some real, live ARF "poster dogs". One of them, Xena, a cattle dog cross (she was at Ainslie on Monday) was in need of a good foster home and lo and behold a passerby was utterly beguiled by her and went on to adopt her.

Shen Morincombe's researches revealed that blue boxes were the best (black ones were the worst) at separating passersby from their shekels. And so it is be hoped that the blue box at Ainslie will prove to be the best possible Schmacko magnet.

We had dry weather for Monday's occasion but there was an eerie passage of events the previous Saturday evening during the Llewellyn Choir and Sinfonia's soul-vibrating performance of Mendelssohn's Elijah. Part One of the mighty work deals with how the land is baking in a drought but ends with Elijah's prayers for rain that result in the miracle of "the heavens ... black with clouds" as God relents.

Moments later we mortals filed out into the foyers and balconies to find that sure enough, after so long a dry spell that has seen even big shrubs in gardens giving up the ghost, that it was raining!

The credulous among us gave thanks (not only to God but also to the drought-breaking Llewellyn performers) and vowed to go to church next morning.