And so we blushed for shame and had to murmur a shamefaced "No" when Kate Hickey wondered if we'd noticed that "the latest art fad seems to be colouring-in books for adults".

"I have just bought my third one, and am surprised to find that various friends have surreptitiously bought them too ..."

"I was told by the assistants at Eckersley's at Belconnen as I was purchasing that their first orders sold out and they had to restock. Similar stories at Dymocks and probably other bookshops on the popularity of these books. I am beavering away at [two of them]. The books cover just about everything from fantasy gardens and animalia to a hipsters colouring-in book.

"I understand the books are being recommended by psychologists to help people calm down. So no wonder they are popular in Canberra."

Probing and investigating we find that Kate Hickey is right and that we are in the midst of a colouring-in-for adults craze. A spokesbookseller with Paperchain of Manuka enthused to us that books of this genre have been selling "very quickly".

He told us that the books are partaking of a widespread interest in the relaxation properties of the meditative "mindfulness" we achieve in these scatterbrained times when we are totally absorbed in just one something, like colouring-in.

He told us that the absolute best-selling publishing star of the genre is Johanna Basford's Secret Garden. It is a book of pen-and-ink illustrations of flowers, insects, birds and small animals. Readers of whatever age are invited to bring these illustrations to life by investing in them some spare time and some coloured pens or pencils.

Inadvertently, and not realising what I'd done until Ms Hickey alerted me, I invested 99 kroner in this trend on a recent sojourn in Norway. We made a pilgrimage to Oslo's National Gallery to see its collection of the harrowing, worrying works of tormented Norwegian Edvard Munch. His autobiographical The Scream (in which Munch recreates an experience of existential horror on one luridly sunsetting evening in Oslo) is said to be, with the Mona Lisa, almost the most recognisable image known to mankind. His paintings are famously, brilliantly, preoccupied with human anguish.

And so we were amused, arriving a little ashen-faced in the gallery's gift shop, to find there on sale a kiddies' Munch Colouring Book (pictured).

By Kontur Publishing it contains black and white outlines of some of his most nightmarish works including Puberty (1895) in which a naked teenage girl stares out at us, tormented by whatever fiendish things are happening to her body and her mind. We've all been there, haven't we readers!

We thought it such a weird and novel (and probably quirkily Norwegian) thing to make a kiddies' book out of such things, and so bought it as a present for a grown-up who appreciates the weird and the novel.

But silly us! Looking at the book again we find a note on the back cover advising "The Munch Colouring Book is a playful and amusing guide to Munch's masterpieces and great fun for [our italics] both children and adults."

Anyone can now colour Munch's famous works and recreate some of Munch's most famous paintings on their own."

It might be playful and amusing to colour in a black and white outline of our picture of yet another strange new planet just photographed by the New Horizons space probe, but for the moment here it is showing off its true colours.

But we're teasing! In spite of meteorite-pocked look it's not a planet at all!

The Australian National Botanic Gardens alert us, proudly, to how the judges of the Eureka National Science Awards have highly commended the ANBG's Seedy Volunteers for their photography.

The awards recognised their photo, Another Planet, as outstanding science photography "capturing the essence of scientific discovery".

The ANBG advises that though Another Planet looks like another planet it is in fact an image of a tiny seed – 0.53 millimetres in length and not much wider than a human eyelash – of an Alpine heath plant Epacris paludosa.

The ANBG volunteers, known as the 'Seedy Volunteers', took the image using a high-powered scanning electron microscope at the Australian National University.

Seedy Volunteer Dr Fanny Karouta-Manasse says that "Much like discovering another planet, imaging can reveal the intricate form of tiny seeds, and this idea inspired our name for our image."

The gardens' seed conservation biologist Dr Lydia Guja says that some Seedy Volunteers undertake seed imaging and that the images provide vital information such as the size, shape, and surface structure.

"This valuable information is used by taxonomists, conservationists and researchers to identify, study and safeguard biodiversity ... a valuable contribution to our effort to store living seeds for tens of thousands of years for the conservation and research of Australia's native plants."

And while on colouring and colouring-in ... some readers who would never dream of addressing any of the column's actual ideas have gone to the gotcha! trouble of tsk tsking us for writing that the French national colours are red, white and blue. No they're not, the tsk tskers tsk tsk, they're blue white and red.

Oh, Canberrans! Nit-pickers are attracted to this column, like moths to a flame, like parliamentarians to deep troughs of expenses.