The startled readers (displaying their usual ignorance of the world of ideas): "What's 'human-extinction porn' beloved columnist? We've never heard of it before."

The columnist: Yes, I've only recently stumbled across the notion myself. But it refers to materials, especially doom-laden TV documentaries about climate change and nuclear war, that give a masturbatory pleasure to some.

In a challenging new piece Mow Your Own Lawn in the online National Review Graham Hillard accuses that "the secret heart of the Left yearns for a planet that is rid of mankind altogether". He says that this yearning is catered for "by the human-extinction porn of programs such as the History Channel's Life after People".

Hillard would probably also characterise as this kind of porn Sir David Attenborough's just-screened-in-Australia Climate Change: The Facts, with its dire warnings of extinctions. My ears have pricked up at Hillard's notion of human-extinction porn because, examining myself (and it is the credo of this column that the unexamined life is not worth living) I admit I have sometimes taken a fleeting delight in the thought of the planet cleansed of our species.

There are moments when, weary of our species' destructive awfulness, one thinks how liberating it would be for the planet to be rid of us, for more admirable species (giraffes, say, cabbages, otters and ocelots, wildflowers, unicorns and hippogriffs) to inherit the Earth and to thrive and frolic here without us spoiling things for them.

Once upon a time I indulged this fantasy by writing of an imagined Canberra suddenly liberated in this way. I interviewed various experts on the way in which the bush of this bush capital would quite quickly swarm back across this man-made metropolitan pimple in the immensity of the Limestone Plains. In my piece snakes and goannas happily wriggled and strutted in the decaying chambers of Parliament House. Blithe wombats bustled through Civic. Rejoicing platypuses frolicked in a now vibrantly healthy and musically trickling Molonglo River rescued, by the welcome collapse of Scrivener Dam, from its long, long imprisonment as an artificial ornamental lake. And so on.

Was I, in writing this, subconsciously being a (human-extinction) pornographer? Was the unusual and hitherto inexplicable popularity of the piece due to the unintended titillations it gave so many yearning readers?

News of some exciting new research into the life and times of William Shakespeare has given this columnist (a Shakespeare enthusiast) a brilliant idea.

Historian Geoff Marsh believes he has found Shakespeare's "lost London home". Marsh's sleuthing has enabled him, he says, to show how in the late 16th century young Shakespeare (in his early 30s) almost certainly lodged in St Helen's Place, Bishopsgate, just south of today's Liverpool Street station and distinctive "Gherkin" tower.

This may be important, Marsh says because Bishopsgate was a swish, desirable, trendy, stimulating place to live.

"It was one of the City's more affluent parishes, and he would have been living among well-travelled physicians, merchants, lawyers, musicians and writers," Marsh thinks. "Undoubtedly, the most intriguing aspect of Marsh's research," The Stage fancies, interviewing Marsh, "is the conclusion he reached about the possible influence of Shakespeare's neighbours on the plays he was writing at the time, which included Romeo and Juliet and The Merchant of Venice.

Although Shakespeare seems never to have gone overseas so many of his plays are set, seemingly knowledgably, in Europe, especially in Italy. But we know that some of his merchant and physician neighbours were always beetling abroad. What if they, well-travelled, nattered to Shakespeare so much travel-gossip-info he was able to weave into his works?

Shakespeare's stimulating parish of movers and shakers and creators (Marsh says it was a bit like today's effervescent, trendy London district of Notting Hill) may have done him a power of creative career good.

And so to my brilliant idea. It is that planning minister Mick Gentleman, presently being urged to create business parks, might instead think of what might be done to turn a corner, a parish, an existing suburb of Canberra into a Bishopsgatesesque bailiwick where writers and artists of promise, lodged there (expenses massively subsidised by the government) would be enabled to flourish.

In many of the world's older cities these sorts of districts evolve by themselves over time (think of Montmartre in Paris, of Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen) but in Canberra we could give such a place a wriggle on by socially engineering things.

Here, people of proven creativity could be given all sorts of encouragements (peppercorn rates, peppercorn rentals, etc) to live there, while the sorts of people (especially NIMBYs, Liberal voters, those who are not well-travelled, etc.) who might dampen the district's stimulating ambience would not be allowed to live there.

At the moment, should a young Canberra writer of exceptional promise (let us call her Wilhelmina Shakespeare) arise, where can she go to live to have her promise boosted by the ambience of an effervescent everyday life? Why, it is only by a miracle that, twice a week, I somehow rise above the tyranny of my anaesthetising, NIMBY-infested suburb to compose my sparkling columns.

Quickly, Mr Gentleman! The city doesn't need more business parks. Instead it needs Bishopsgates galore if our city's suppressed Wilhelminas are to blossom as they should.