That artificial lake, a vast, fake millpond, constitutes the "ornamental waters" that ornament Canberra, the federal capital city of Australia.

The particular irrationality on my mind was our dear species' tragic difficulty with heeding and observing social distancing advice. Those difficulties (bewildering for someone as rational as this columnist) are alarmingly prevalent in the United States and are now thought to be a factor in Victoria's outbreak.

"How can people be so irrational?" I marvelled aloud to Voss my dog, as, with my binoculars I scanned the lake's glassy expanses for any hint of a glimpse of a scintilla of a ripple of something monstrous.

"There's nothing out there, you poor deluded fool!" the mongrel sighed.

But readers who keep abreast of the news will know that a new photograph of the Loch Ness monster taken by an English tourist is exciting the credulous world.

Back to lakes and monsters in a moment. But first to our species' defiance of social distancing and mask-donning. It is so bewildering that one was pleased when suddenly up pops Nautilus magazine's timely attempt to have experts explain it.

"The images are everywhere," the piece's author, biology professor Robert Bazell, laments.

"People crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in indoor bars, cheering without masks at a rally held by President Trump ... Many, still practising social distancing, look at their fellow Americans and ask, 'What are they [those ignoring distancing] thinking?'

"We turned to Steven Pinker for help with an answer. The professor of psychology at Harvard, author of widely discussed books ... sees the deep-seated mindset, tribalism, at work in people's defiance of health recommendations."

We have no room here to quote Pinker fully (do read the Nautilus piece for yourselves) but he is saying that with "this kind of tribalism" we're seeing the innate, evolved tribalism of wanting to be with your crowd.

As well, Pinker, always stimulating, sees often "a moralistic component" to this kind of public tribalism. So for example, he looks at the Black Lives Matter rallies that in the USA, and here, had "tribes" of the political left gathering in crowds, shouting and chanting and often not wearing masks but understandably feeling morally driven by their noble cause to go against oppressive social distancing guidelines that forbid protest.

Bazell's piece also looks at the oodles of research (for example by Yale's imperious-sounding Cultural Cognition Project) that shows how agile we are at allowing our cultural values and/or our appetites to shape our risk perceptions. Our felt needs to gambol with our groups (social, political, religious) will often effortlessly override the warning facts of science.

Bazell invokes, too ,psychologist Leon Festinger's coining in the 1950s of the famous notion of "cognitive dissonance".

"Over many years and in many experiments," Bazell reminds us, "Festinger proved that when faced with an inconvenient truth about an action they wish to take, people will inevitably devise a rationalisation to support their action."

But back to another (this time harmless) area of newsworthy human irrationality, belief in/fondness for the myth of the Loch Ness Monster.

Canberra's Australian national lake suffers from a tragic mythlessness. My position, my face etched with envy of Scotland's legendary amphibious behemoth, is that whether or not there IS something out there in Canberra's lake there SHOULD be something out there.

Canberrans must ask themselves some serious questions about how they've lacked the imagination, the talent for make-believe required to furnish our lake with something supranatural.

It is not only that a more poetic, spiritual people should have invented something by now but also that the lake as it is, unenriched by any myths, must surely be the most tedious city-side lake anywhere in the world.

How has this happened?

Canberrans are famously the most-educated citizenry in the Commonwealth and an excess of education leaves people tragically sceptical, rational and agnostic.

In my decades as a news reporter in this city no Canberran ever even approached The Canberra Times to breathlessly report having a vision of the Virgin Mary or having been abducted by aliens, commonplace occurrences elsewhere. The supernatural is unCanberran. Magic struggles to happen here. Our lake's tragic mythlessness and monsterlessness testifies to the quiet, academic misery of our city's sterile, sensible scepticism.

What if in this we are letting down the nation and the world?

Interviewed by The Daily Beast about the exciting new Loch Ness sighting, local monster scholar Adrian Shine rejoices that whether or not his neighbourhood behemoth exists, speculation about the new picture, fake or not, has cheered everyone up a bit in this tense, dour time.

"Yes, it has added to the gaiety of nations, and long may it go on!" Shine trills.

Canberrans, Australians, isn't it time to do something folkloric about our national lake (presently a sombre, underemployed waste of space) to enable it to impart some gaiety to the federal capital city, to this nation, to nations everywhere?