This ACT election! Surely it can't be four years since the last ACT election (with its pleasing outcome)? Feels more like just 18 (fun-filled) months.

It's a well-known truism that as one ages time appears to speed up. But what creates this illusion?

Now there are satisfying explanations of the phenomenon, at last, in Joseph Mazur's new book The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time.

Reviewing it, an impressed Christopher Bray noted: "The conventional explanation for this telescoping of temporal experience - one learns from Joseph Mazur's dumbfoundingly good The Clock Mirage - is arithmetical. To a 10-year-old child a year is a tenth of her existence, and thus feels like something of a stretch. For someone who's twice her age a year is only a twentieth of the time they've already had, and by the time you get to 60, well ..."

"But hold on a minute, says Mazur, who is a mathematician by training, but knows his way around physics and philosophy. Things are rather more complicated than that. To be sure, life in general does seem to speed up as you age. But particular moments [especially tragic ones] like the passing of a partner or a parent ... will put the brakes on time no matter how old you are.

"That's because, Mazur argues, these are - with luck - one-off events and the longer you've been around, the fewer one-offs come your way. Your first fall, your first car, your first kiss - these are, as Mazur says, 'landmarks' on your life. But the older you get, the rarer such landmarks are. Life becomes more mundane, more samey. The days seem to roll into one another, simply because there's very little to demarcate them from one another."

Mazur's diagnosis explains, at last, while time seems to dash along like a lubricated cheetah as one lives one's uneventful life in Canberra's uneventful suburbia, where life is mundane and samey, where the days seem to roll into one another, simply because there's very little to demarcate a Monday from a Tuesday, a Wednesday, from tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

My suburban side-street in Australia's federal capital city is so very uneventful and quiet (one can hear the garden gnomes sigh) that I have been thrilled to suddenly find an anonymous corner of my anonymous street decorated with an ACT election corflute/poster.

The biggest thing to happen in my street in yonks, it is a portrait poster for a female Labor candidate. The fact it is not a Canberra Liberals' poster mildly disappoints (for then I might have had the 'landmark' of the day I vandalised it).

The lonely poster's presence where almost no one is going to see it and feel the slightest political nudge from it seems to poetically capture the shy, elusive quality of the way in which ACT elections barely touch us.

Yes, one half-knows there is an election campaign under way, but there are only the slightest hints of it, rather like the faint sounds of a piano being shyly played (and a wistful melody at that, perhaps Beethoven's Fur Elise) in another room somewhere far away in a remote wing of one's McMansion.

And so with an elegant segue today's column moves on to the topic of Beethoven and to how, in his Vienna years, he lived in 60 different apartments, the noise of his music-making upsetting neighbours. Yes, warping time a little one shudders to think how a contemporary Beethoven would get on living in this city, Canberra, where the citizens insist on a sepulchral silence and where even the distant sounds of Summernats, for just three days of the year, knot burghers' knickers.

One of the consolations of this otherwise ghastly year, with so much of its news being about an especially awful tangerine-complexioned human being in the White House, has been its deepening of our appreciation of an especially wonderful human being, Ludwig van Beethoven.

This year of our discontent has brought the 250th anniversary of his birth, with a general jamboree of renewed interest in him, in the minutiae of his life and work.

Keeping up with all of this some of us who have always admired his music have found out for the first time that as well as being an indescribably brilliant genius (how excellent to have him as a totem of what our species is creatively capable of) and a plucky struggler increasingly handicapped by his deafness, he was a busy, practical, can-do, striving human role model for us all.

In her Beethoven: A Life in Nine Pieces Laura Tunbridge puts his genius at the heart of a hard-working, always-apartment-hopping life, with Beethoven himself (always financially battling he was never able to afford career-assisting staff) engaged in the eternal grind of the nitty-gritty of finding venues, dealing with score publishers, worrying about ticket prices, agonising over how many rehearsals could be afforded (never enough, so that sometimes first performances were awful and badly received), and generally doing all the things a battling artist has to do today to find some performance/exhibition limelight, pay the rent and put food on the table.

Reading about this admirable, sleeves-rolled-up Beethoven he is somehow suggestive of the best of today's small business battlers, making the composer of those mighty, moody symphonies somehow as approachable and commendable as the self-employed tradie who comes (whistling tunelessly while he works, for he lacks Beethoven's perfect pitch) to impart harmony to our discordant plumbing.