In an eerie coincidence I was already studying Shelley’s Ode To The West Wind when, beginning last weekend, extraordinarily wild west winds arose and buffeted our dear city for three days.

What’s more the “wild West Wind” of Shelley’s turbulent masterpiece is an autumn wind, just like this exciting one of a few days ago that had the ACT all shook up. Saturday’s late afternoon clouds, plump with rain and dust, were strangely-sulphur-coloured and magnificently menacing as they bore down on the city.

Had I been someone God-fearing and Bible-doting, someone like the controversial Israel ‘Izzy’ Folau who says homosexuals are going to hell, I might have imagined that the ominous clouds were evidence of God’s wrath.

“Perhaps,” I might have gasped to my superstitious self, “Almighty God is about to destroy sinful Canberra and Queanbeyan just as (see Genesis 19) He quite rightly destroys Sodom and Gomorrah with sulphurous fire. For Canberra and Queanbeyan are, really, (all those brothels, poker machines, drunken behaviour outside nightspots at 3am, citizen’s sinful resistance to Heaven-sent initiatives like light rail. etc) the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Limestone Plains.”

And one consequence of the Canberra winds was to whip up the waters of Lake Burley Griffin and, for once, make them choppy and frothy and interesting. Eerily, in his Ode To The West Wind, Shelley points to the ways in which the wild wind transforms, for the better, the usually dull Mediterranean.

And the ways in which last weekend’s winds cheered the lake up, made it more sea-like and gave it some drama, some personality, have given me a brainwave. I urge the government, perhaps beginning by making it a feature of the waters of the West Basin where the government is making such visionary developments, to investigate the creation of artificial waves on our already artificial lake.

For just a little Googling reveals that wavemaking is now a well-developed and ever-developing phenomenon. Humans have been having a go at it since the 19th century when, Wikipedia advises, “famous fantasy castle builder King Ludwig of Bavaria electrified a lake to create breaking waves”.

Today artificial wavemaking is under way everywhere. The Wavegarden company (at its thrilling website it boasts about being “innovators of man-made waves”) seems to be a leader in this. It is coming to Australia with a Wavegarden Cove project that, it boasts, will deliver “up to 1000 ocean-like waves per hour of any height and length” when it opens in Melbourne next year. If something happens in Melbourne, can Canberra be far behind?

What do you think, progressive chief minister Barr? What a sparkling Labor election promise it would seem to Canberra’s unnaturally beach and surf deprived citizens.

What a vision! One thousand ocean-like waves rolling in to a West Basin beach, and thousands of Canberrans frolicking, laughing for joy in this playground, for Wavegarden promises “an authentic surf experience, fun, safe and accessible for all ages and abilities”.

Mention above of ‘Izzy’ Folau prompts me to ask: Fellow atheists of Australia, am I alone in finding something strangely refreshing about the much-reported Christian opinions of the God-fearing Israel (how wonderfully biblical his name!) Folau?

The great and codehopping footballer-athlete is in the news for sticking to his insistence that homosexuals are going to hell. He says they must repent, now, and embrace the one true sexuality, the one that galvanised Adam and Eve into forming the first ever two-backed beast.

Of course atheists know that there is no God and no hell for him to send homosexuals to. And yet it does make a change to hear of a Christian who takes the Bible literally and doesn’t just cherry-pick its cherries, the most plump of which is of course its promise of the survival of death, a promise of the everlasting junket of eternal life.

So many of the worst, the most hypocritical of professing Christians (the federal government has an abundance of this species, people whose chilly and bitter attitude to the poor, the needy, the refugees never seems to reflect anything Our Redeemer taught) live lives never tinted by very much that the Bible says.

How much better, how much more compassionately they might behave if only the fear of Hell, a punishment for their sins of commission and omission, was a presence in their shifty little lives. The Bible is as explicit about Hell as it is about Heaven so it is only by living a life of self-deception that the genuine “Christian” can ignore the first while rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of the eternal holiday of the second.

Meanwhile, for those of us who are atheists, heaven and hell are with us here on earth all the time. How heavenly we would find Donald Trump’s early impeachment. How hellish the thought that this artificially-suntanned menace to mankind will complete his term, then, perhaps, be given yet another by the simple-minded, Bible-believing people of the USA. Of those people, according to the Pew Research Centre, 72 per cent believe in heaven and 58 per cent believe in hell.