I didn't say in that column how, for Canberrans, the thought of an angry explanation-demanding Greta (or more probably one of her similarly forceful young envoys, for Australia is a long way for her to come given her principled refusal to fly in aeroplanes) may be especially hair-raising.

How many of us who have lived here for a longish time (your columnist has been ensconced here on this comfortable sofa of a city since 1973) have been aware enough to wake up to ourselves and to our planet's plight? I am deeply ashamed of my inertia (the kind of inertia the wonderful Swedish damsel raged against in her speech at the UN Climate Summit) and, confronted by Greta on my Canberra doorstep, would not know what to say her.

And what if, as a long-time citizen of Canberra, one's climate inertia is in part explained (but not the slightest bit excused) by the green privilege of this very city, this city in a bubble?

We've all heard of the "Canberra Bubble" but ours is a city of many bubbles within which we, the enbubbled, live lucky lives insulated from the bad luck suffered and endured by people and places of the real, less lucky world. Is there a fortuitous "Canberra (Climate) Bubble"? What if, within it, this city kept so blissfully habitable by its inspired location and by classy feats of planning and engineering (our chosen bushy habitat teeming with healthy wildlife, the sub-Alpine air we breathe kept perfect by the planned absence of smoke-making heavy industry, the sweet abundance of the best-in-the-world water that sparkles through our taps, etc. etc) is an impossible place from which to feel empathy with the climate-based agonies of the wider world?

What if in recent times there has been nowhere else on earth, nowhere but this enbubbled city, where everyday climate change denial (for there is little or nothing of it for Canberrans' senses to notice) has been so effortless?

But that explanation is no excuse, and when Ms Thunberg hammers on my door I shall pretend, blushing with shame, that there is no one home.

There are fairies at the bottom of my garden, and, sensitive and kindly folk, they were concerned about me when on Tuesday morning they found me out in the garden quietly crying.

"What's the matter Ian?" the fairy-in-chief wondered, fluttering down from among the Sweet Peas, alighting on the arm of my garden chair and producing from nowhere (for fairies can do magic) a box of Kleenex tissues.

I explained to her that just a few minutes earlier I had heard through my device's headphones a dismayed ABC Classic FM presenter give the terrible news that the great American soprano Jessye Norman was dead. Now ABC Classic FM was playing, in tribute, her legendary recording of Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs.

Strauss's four songs and Jessye Norman's interpretation of them were poignant and heartbreaking at the best of times, I explained to Her Fairyness, but the ABC's playing of them on top of the news of dear Jessye's death was especially distressing. Lots of Jessye for her indescribably fine voice and for being such a fine human being.

In her magical sensitivity the fairy said she perfectly understood and chided me, gently, for having apologised for my tears being "unmanly". She thought they were nothing of the sort. And it turned out that for ABC Classic FM listeners galore the sad news and then the playing of Jessye so inimitably warbling the Songs was a very emotional double whammy. Listeners sent the station a flurry of woebegone texts, owning up to tearfulness. It struck me later how the whole experience had seen ABC Classic FM enabling a kind of nationwide support group, a therapeutic grieving opportunity for those of us who, knowing and adoring Jessye but probably not surrounded by people who shared our esoteric, tragic love of classic warbling, might have had to stay privately bottled up. As it was, the ABC presenters' dismay and sadness so palpable, one did not feel so alone and so weird. I felt grateful to and proud of my ABC.

Later that day, driving into the city and noticing flags fluttering gaily atop our city's important flagpoles I thought what a fine thing it would be if nations and their governments were sensitive enough to perform a little public grieving (perhaps involving flags at half-mast on important flagpoles) whenever mankind (not just the nation) loses someone pivotal.

Nations like ours are rather parochial about such things. In my dreamy naivety I imagine a better world, a better Australia, in which an Australian prime minister is sufficiently cultured to notice and to care when a great performing artist (of whatever nationality) leaves us and to issue on behalf of the nation a brief statement of grief and appreciation.

But alas, Scott Morrison will have never even heard of Jessye Norman. Neither, probably, will his chum and fellow philistine Donald Trump have heard of her although Trump's cultured predecessor loved and admired and feted Jessye. Donald Trump is his vulgar and unhappy nation's Philistine-in-Chief.