Give up?

It is that both of them may, perhaps, have the potential to frighten horses.

Everyone knows Mrs Patrick Campbell's famous observation, when the extra-marital adventures of a famous couple emerged during a divorce trial, that "My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses".

And now this week, perhaps subconsciously channelling Mrs Patrick Campbell, the ACT Equestrian Association has piped up at the ACT Assembly inquiry into delivery drones.

"The Association's submission," The Canberra Times reported, "raised alarm about drone noise frightening horses, potentially risking the recreation's future in the national capital."

It isn't that a single drone has, yet, frightened a single ACT horse. Yet, in the familiar way in which anything new always animates Canberra catastrophists here is offered the colourful nightmare of drones killing an element of civilisation as we have known it. Next we will be told that drones will destroy cricket or that they will ruin the sex lives of the people of Gungahlin.

Creatively catastrophist submissions like this horsey one made to the inquiry prompt me to repeat my brainwave that the ACT government should establish a $100,000 Chief Minister's NIMBYs Only Literary Award (opposition to the drones is of course a pulsating species of NIMBYism).

This would encourage all those Canberrans who ever find their imaginations excitingly, creatively revved up by their being in the grip of their passionate opposition to something (usually 21st-century change, in all its menacing forms), to write novels, plays and poetry while they're in such a feverish state.

So many great works of literature result from passions that well up inspirationally in the bosoms of artists. Almost all of the passionate opponents of the drones reveal, in their logically ludicrous but artistically exciting arguments, glimpses of the same passionate creativity that has enabled the giants of science fiction and fairytale to do their best work.

Surely, already, some of the written submissions to the drone inquiry have unintended literary qualities. The famous claim by some of the most imaginative Bonython residents that the drones drove all of the wildlife out of Bonython (where did it all go? did the neighbouring suburb of Isabella Plains suffer a sudden influx of thousands of fluttering, wriggling, refugee birds, snakes, lizards, gliders, butterflies, bees and echidnas?) is already reminiscent of the best work of the Brothers Grimm. An annual NIMBYs Only Literary Award would recognise and capture, using the arts, the very best fruits of the NIMBY imagination.

What does beleaguered, lacklustre Michael McCormack, leader of the National Party and deputy prime minister of Australia, have in common with Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933) the 30th president of the United States?

For a clue I give you the famous story of how Dorothy Parker, when given the news that Coolidge was dead, replied "How do they know?" Parker's unkind point was that Coolidge had been so lacklustre and lifeless in life that a dead Coolidge would be hard to tell from the living one.

Yes, Coolidge and McCormack have in common that they both somehow rose to high political office while being personally lacklustre.

"Lacklustre" is a word much in use in the media at the moment to describe McCormack as the apparently far more lustrous Barnaby Joyce threatens to wrest the Nationals' leadership from McCormack. Poor McCormack is much-accused in the media of being "near-invisible" to the voters.

Your columnist has every sympathy with drab McCormack, for although my writing sparkles (as this week's column testifies yet again) I am, like McCormack, personally colourless, lacklustre and near-invisible. Many people have told me (the most famous and discerning of them Justice Michael Kirby) that in person I come as a great disappointment after the promise of sparkle glimpsed in my writing.

This is not a source of angst for me. Near-invisibility becomes me. I find loud, highly-visible people (like Barnaby Joyce, Sir Les Patterson, the brides and grooms of Married At First Sight, radio gibberer Alan Jones, the overrated Jimmy Barnes, etc) extremely vulgar.

My near-invisibility is what I want and has been painstakingly cultivated. On those occasions when someone comes up to me and asks (having seen my picture with my newspaper columns) "Are you Ian Warden?" I not only deny being him but pretend never to have heard of him. Sometimes, for fun, I say that I am Senator Zed Seselja, whereupon the deluded stranger will exclaim "Of course! Sorry Zed. I just knew your famous face from somewhere but couldn't place you. Love your work."

This cultivated invisibility is all very well for reclusive me, but must be hell for the lacklustre leader of the Nationals. He must try and make an impression, a splash, in public life in these, the shallowest of times when 24/7 glitter is required.

But alas, like me bereft of any charisma, (and what's more he is from Wagga-Wagga, unhelpful to him in the same unfortunate way that Manuel of Fawlty Towers could never overcome coming from Barcelona) he is surely doomed to political obscurity.