In 1953, the distinguished and brilliant physicist complained to The Canberra Times that these nasty wooden "hutments" down on the plain spoiled his view from his £17,000 hill-side mansion.

Reader Linda Anchell says "Lovely to read all the articles about the Tocumwals."

"I have been dining out on a story about Sir Marc that I heard in 1967. Professor Andrew Learmonth gleefully regaled his first year geography students with a story from O'Connor.

"When the ANU was enticing Marcus Oliphant to the new university one of his requests was for a big house. It was built in the "upper heights" of O'Connor affording such an excellent view of the new suburb below."

"He demanded a large picture window be situated on the south of the building to catch the winter sun. Just like the one in the house he had in England. This so intelligent physicist had forgotten that Canberra is situated in the southern hemisphere.

"This was a source of much merriment for the geography professor and his students."

From his eyrie high up in a well-wooded corner of O'Connor, the professor will have seen an abundance of wildlife. Today we resume our controversial occasional series of Canberrans' pictures of nature being its true self and exhibiting lots of sex and violence.

Federal Labor only has an occasional killing season (an allusion there to the ABC's recent series) but for the ACT's magnificent black-shouldered kites the killing of its staple food, mice, is a year-round thing. Geoffrey Dabb saw this grisly scene at the Jerrabomberra Wetlands, the kite posing in a leafless willow.

One day our keenly-anticipated light rail network will snake out to Fyshwick, with, perhaps, a Jerrabomberra Wetlands tram stop for the many twitchers who go there. Meanwhile, as reported by The Canberra Times on Monday, the University of Canberra's Canberra Urban and Region Futures research unit has found that light rail has been a boon for a suite of cities. One of the cities is the Canberra-sized city of Bergen in western Norway.

By coincidence, this columnist has just been in Bergen, eating whaleburgers and travelling by light rail.

Begun in 2010, there is so far only 13 kilometres of light rail in Bergen, almost exactly the same as Canberra's proposed first Gungahlin-Civic stretch of 12 kilometres. Bergen's stretch attracts 31,000 travellers a day.

The UC researchers found that at Bergen, dense development has been attracted to the tram route. Perhaps it has made the swish suburb of Paradis (where there is a stop along the light rail route) even more of a paradise. Is there a Paradis Residents Association like the whingeing local residents associations we have here? Can there be anything to whinge about in Paradis?

Perhaps one's pleasant journeys on a foreign city's light rail facilities tell one nothing about light rail's suitability for our dear little metropolis. But what is more interesting for students of Canberrans is that progressive Bergen's proposed adoption of light rail seems to have knotted far fewer local knickers than are being knotted in miserabilist Canberra by a similar proposition. Bergen's adoption of it was opposed at the time by something called the Pensioners Party, but Nordic oldies were major patrons of the service on the occasions we used it.

Perhaps the Pensioners Party's initial opposition reflects the way in which people of mature years are easily disgruntled by the prospect of the new and the new-fangled. If only all those writing animated letters to this paper's editor on the subject were required to give, for publication, their age. This would often help to explain the writers' fossilised points of view.

My dear travelling companion and I avoid tourists and in spacious Norway we were only once trapped with typical tourists. The horror!

We were on a famous train that plunges steeply down to a resort village on the shores of a fiord. Everyone on the train had a busy, virile camera and needed to photograph every waterfall, vista, ruin, snowdrift, rock, troll cave, troll footprint, troll turd there was to be glimpsed. They jostled and shoulder-charged one another for places at the right windows that gave the best photo opportunities.

All politeness was abandoned. No one, as is the way with today's camera-wielding tourists, ever seemed to take a nice long look at anything with their actual eyes and actual minds. What of the poor victims back home these tourists later inflict their 10,000 mediocre snaps on?

But then, after this horror, it was on to beatific Bergen where some of our gliding to and fro on the city's light rail was done to and from the closest station to the tourist magnet of the home of Norway's national composer Edvard Grieg.

At the museum there one makes the endearing discovery that Grieg had a troll soft toy, a kind of Norwegian teddy bear. It is on display with the heartwarming information that Grieg kept it nearby for all of his life, never ever going to sleep without wishing it a fond "good night".

Whenever one encounters in public life a cold and callous man (today's Australian public life and especially federal parliament abounds with them) one feels sure he is someone who has never known from childhood the personality-shaping love of a soft teddy, a soft troll.