This column's unhealthy preoccupation with sex goes on and on (the columnist looking more haggard and hollow-cheeked by the day). And here we go again, this time with a suggestion that Yarralumla Nursery, celebrating its centenary at the moment, has played a part in the erotic life of the city.
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Nick Horn, of the Walking the Dog recorder ensemble (yes, I know how even the word ''recorder'' makes some of us wince, but Walking the Dog doesn't play the little, shrieking, milk-curdling ones, but great big husky ones, such as the contrabassoon pictured), draws our attention to this Sunday's Love In the Woods concert at Albert Hall.
He advises that women's vocal ensemble Polifemy and Walking the Dog have been invited by the National Trust (ACT) to present this concert to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Yarralumla Nursery.
''They will present a program of Renaissance polyphony exploring the intertwined themes of the pastoral tradition - the love of nature - and Eros - the nature of love,'' Horn says.
''Audiences will delight in the interplay between the sweet mingling of human voices and the harmonious traces of breath passing over wood, in a tribute to the pastoral and erotic strains of the Western musical tradition. Yarralumla Nursery owes its success to just such an arboreal romance over the past century.''
Horn promises that one of the 16th-century works to be played and trilled will be ''William Byrd's own personal homage to the Yarralumla Nursery, The Leaves be Green.''
This requires us to believe that the great English composer (1540-1623) anticipated the discovery and colonisation of the antipodes and then the creation and the importance of the Yarralumla Nursery. But fine music makes everything possible and this columnist does believe it.
Horn promises that lots of the concert's madrigals and motets will express ''unmistakably erotic feelings'', albeit sometimes, alas, for the unattainable Virgin Mary.
There will, thank goodness, be some relief from all this steaminess in Clement Janequin's wholesome but whimsical Song of the Birds (1520), in which the singers don't so much sing as make bird calls to one another.
The concert, in the sensual surroundings of Albert Hall, is on Sunday, April 13 at 2pm. Tickets, at the door, are $10.
Meanwhile, even those of us who are half disposed to believe that William Byrd wrote a homage to the Yarralumla Nursery will have a slightly greater struggle with the idea that Canberrans may, using their ''psychic powers'', be able to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper.
Are you sitting sceptically? Then I'll begin to explain that Canberra magician and paranormal monger Michael Dooley, of Dark & Mysterious Productions, is about to present at the Belconnen Arts Centre the hour-long odyssey Murder in Whitechapel. His audiences (a maximum of 12, he insists, because once you have more than that, you begin to lose the intimate, seance-in-a-drawing-room ambience) will be led by him (in the role of investigator Geoffrey Darkholme) to try to solve the enduring Jack the Ripper mysteries.
What, we wondered, are the mysteries left by the 1888 butcherings of whores in Whitechapel? ''They're who was Jack the Ripper? Did he [or she?] have an accomplice? Were there more than five victims? Why did the killings abruptly stop?'' Dooley/Darkholme explains.
Like all Sagittarians, Gang-gang is a sceptic who doesn't really believe in superstition and the supernatural, but one of the attractive things about Dooley's Whitechapel events is that they, Dooley fancies, make him a kind of Australian pioneer (and Canberra a pioneering metropolis) in this field of ''bizarre magic'' entertainment. He says it is already huge in North America and Europe.
He reports that there is popular ''bizarre magic'' entertainment in the US based on murderess Lizzie Borden (the famous verse relates ''Lizzie Borden took an axe/And gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done/She gave her father 41'').
Then there's essentially a seance that connects everyone in the theatre with Harry Houdini, the great escapologist.
That seems especially inappropriate, we mused to ourselves while, with another part of our mind, we chatted with Dooley, because the admirable Houdini (did you know he was the first person to make a successful flight in a plane in Australia?) was an earnest campaigner against the balderdash of anything related to the occult.
I wondered whether in those places where ''bizarre magic'' is popular, its clients are overwhelmingly female? In our experience of attending psychic fairs (for like all Sagittarians, I like to have my aura photographed and analysed at least twice a year), it is women who flock to these jamborees. Dooley says that, yes, he won't be surprised if his two upcoming Murder In Whitechapel sessions are more popular with women.
He reports that there is a fabulously popular fiction genre catering to women called ''paranormal romance'', in which famous Mills and Boon-esque romances are spiced up with ''vampires, werewolves and ghosts''.
We mention these two utterly contrasting types of entertainment - Love In the Woods and Murder In Whitechapel (details about the latter are available at the Dark & Mysterious Productions website) - in one breath in one column as part of our continuing policy to rejoice at the diversity offered in our increasingly metro-sexy city.
