It must be, methought, that as a football fanatic, footy and footy crowd noises are so sentimentally inseparable for me (going together like love and marriage) my imagination must somehow be supplying the usual happy cacophonies.

But now of course we all know that the crowd sounds are recordings of crowds past. The NRL is using them to impart "atmosphere". This wheeze is deeply dividing the rugby league nation. Bamboozled, I am of two minds.

I am a huge fan of the use of theatrical special effects to enhance the make-believe of operas and plays. The arrival of the terrifying Queen of the Night in Mozart's The Magic Flute is always made more fabulous by the booming of fake supernatural thunder, and Lear's ordeal on the gale-blasted heath in Shakespeare's King Lear is enriched by fake howling gale noises.

But the use of theatrical effects to enhance sporting fixtures seems, somehow, a different kettle of yabbies.

While I agonise over this I turn, still on sonic themes, to how unnerving some of the citizens of the world are finding the pandemic-dictated silence of their cities.

For the internet magazine Spiked, devoted Londoner Sheila Lewis asks Where Has London Gone?

"Often when working outside London," Ms Lewis reports, "I am asked if I like living in London. How can I bear all the crowds and hustle?

"My answer is always that I love London because of the crowds, hustle and bustle. At night, lying in bed listening to the noises of the city around me, there is something wonderfully life-affirming about the sounds of human life going on. ... [Now] the city is virtually silent, not a city at all. Under lockdown, the city is a shadow of itself."

Meanwhile here in Canberra, under lockdown the city has looked and sounded its usual, acoustically unchanged self. As always, one has still heard a pin drop, a butterfly sneeze, autumnal leaves hitting the ground with a shy clatter.

I have a history of celebrating this city's qualities, but have never gotten used to its eerie quiet, a function of its smallish (but exquisite) population being so thinly sprinkled over a vast, ruthlessly planned space.

Is a city a true city if it makes no sounds?

Perhaps the genius of the NRL's fake crowd brainwave lies in its breakthrough use of a make-believe theatrical effect to enhance the real world outside theatres.

So what if, to impart a true city atmosphere to this sadly uncity-like federal capital city the recorded sounds of a real city (perhaps the usually "life-affirming" sounds of bustling London) could be played throughout Canberra?

Yes, there would be some playful metro-fakery about this, but then, today, there is fakery everywhere. Now The Greatest Game of All (rugby league) is embracing it while The Leader of the Free World is someone who sports fake hair above a fakely tanned, attractively tangerine-tinted face.

A sonically tweaked federal capital city would only be getting with the fake flow of our times.

Readers, do you share my experience that almost any appearance in the news of NZ Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is strangely buoying and uplifting? If so, why do you think she is having that effect on us?

I had feared that as well as the obvious fact of her political beliefs being close to mine there may be something of just a schoolboyish crush about my feelings. Could I possibly be so shallow?

No, of course not.

And now a fuller explanation of the deeper political appeal of her and of substantial political women like her is served in a thought-kindling piece, Without Women There Is No Democracy, that has just bustled up in the online Boston Review.

The piece is not about her but does begin with this hymn to her political womanliness.

"When COVID-19 paralysed the globe in April 2020, Donald Trump swaggered about the White House telling falsehoods while New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, held a special press conference to reassure the nation's children."

Without Women There Is No Democracy is (to its great credit) a robustly feminist piece but is also laced with some political science findings and informed impressions. And they add up to the truth that even when one is male and conservative there is a strong sense that democracy is working better, is more fair, decent, and with a healthily lustrous coat when it is very woman-enriched.

Reading the piece it emerges that Jacinda Ardern is surely a testament to those largely subconscious feelings, her appearances on our news doing our democratic hearts a power of good.